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Fathoming Love	By : Camaro Category: Dragon Ball Z > Het - Male/Female Views: 8060 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own DragonballZ, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
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The radiation was extreme today, poison attacking limbs that didn�t have the strength to even fight back. I�d driven myself home, hardly recalling the long ride as the minutes ticked, knowing, just knowing I wouldn�t beat the sickness. The few steps to my front door were a winding, spiraling staircase to hell, my knees planting fucking hard on the wood beneath.

I was barfing before I even realized I needed to, trying to force my arms over the banister and hoist my body into standing position once more. I tried and tried, thin limbs flailing recklessly, their weight unimaginable as I hurled everything once more. Hot, sour vomit flooded as though it had no end, the heat sinking into my dress as I tried and tried and tried to stand up, to grab the banister, to walk the three fucking feet it might have taken to reach the kitchen. I reasoned that if I could just get inside, the crawl towards my bedroom would seem like a lesser battle.

But again, I just tried and tried.

He sat beside me in the bathroom when I woke up, my hair, or whatever sick joke was left of it, stuck to the side of my face, covered in sweat and tears. I tried to lift my arm, to brush away the filth from my cheek, the uncomfortableness of something tickling my skin as it was plastered to it. He pushed my hand back, bringing up a wet cloth as he gently, (much more gently than I was aware he could) rubbed away the offense, his eyes upon me without the pity I expected would be there.

Ah but could I love him more for being so detached? The one hero in all a millennium�s time that would never betray the possible repulsion he was facing, having to touch something so decrepit and decayed.

"No," I said, trying to smack him away, though I know the power wasn't in it. "Don't touch me. I'm not your fucking damsel in distress Vegeta."

My voice sounded crusty and cracked, like in the hours I'd spent sleeping, it had aged 30 years.

"Of course not," he answered me, letting a strange smile cross his stoic features. "You'd have to be a damsel in the first place."

I stopped fighting, stopped thinking, and just looked at him.

And then? I laughed. I laughed so hard I thought my whole body was about to break from it. Come to think of it, I don't even remember the last time I nearly killed myself with one of those priceless, gut-bending laughs that make you dizzy. But I just laughed and laughed, watching as eventually, probably against his own rock-hard will, he joined me, the sound guttural and raspy, but so beautiful.

We just laughed at the strangeness of life, at the way that only each other could make the worst situations worth laughing over, even in insults. We laughed that we could keep secrets from each other, even after having revealed so much previously.

I laughed mostly that I'd been stupid enough to think I knew him, to think I could predict him; especially to arrogantly believe that I could predict his cruelty, that I could plan for his scolding me for weakness, when he was the one person that could make me suddenly feel so strong.

And then I started crying. I just started crying so hard that I was too busy keeping myself alive to even feel ashamed of it. I curled myself into a ball and wailed until my throat felt like it was bleeding, until my stomach was quaking so hard I figured I'd start throwing up again. My nails dug into something soft and I realized it was his arm, made of materials not of this earth. And that got me thinking. Got me thinking that maybe, my biggest flaw was that I always set Vegeta up on earth standards; always thought I could predict him by earth's psychological means. But Vegeta was unlike anything I'd ever come in contact with and here I was, being held in his arms as he sat on the cold, tile floor, curling me against him.

I was so stupid to think he would be anything less than that, that he would scorn me and be ashamed of me. Maybe, I put him by my own standards, my own self critique and the only person REALLY ashamed of my so-considered "weakness" was me.

He held me to him tight, the first time HE had chosen to show me physical contact, without my somewhat "forcing him" into it. It was so tight, yet not in the painful way, in the way that you hug someone you really want to be hugging, not feeling obligated to. I was pressed against him and I had to thank whatever God looked out for me, that if I truly did die, I was probably being shown something that no one else in a very, very long time had been shown.

Like his hug suddenly answered all these questions of the universe that science and logic and all that rubbish would never be able to tell me.

I was happy for the first time in a really long time, like my sharing a secret somehow liberated me from a very dark period of my life. I wept against his neck, hugging him back as much as my feeble body would let me, my weak arm wrapped around his throat as I cried and cried. Maybe I cried for hours, or for all the hours I wouldn't let myself cry. For all the times I spent alone when I should have told him the truth.

But I guess it didn't matter as he just kept saying "it's ok, it's ok", like he could read my mind. Like he could see all the self doubt and like he'd really been there with me the whole time and knew precisely what had happened. Like he'd been there, sitting right beside me when the doctor's explained (in what seemed, an entirely different language) that something was really wrong. Like Vegeta had been right beside me when they took away my ideals of immortality, when they explained over and over to a scientist, as though she were a five year old, that will alone would not sate the monster that wanted my mind.

"You're so beautiful," He whispered. "You're always so beautiful."

I sobbed most at that, wishing I could even express in a limited language how much that meant to me that he even uttered something that most people would see as superficial. But he wasn't just saying that I was beautiful on the outside, that despite what the sickness had done, I was still worthy of magazine covers and all the insecure crap that came along with all that. No, he was reassuring me, that no disease, no virus, no tumor and no chemotherapy could really steal anything from me at all. That I was the same in his eyes and more, as I always felt, and that I would work my way through this, on my own, but with him behind me every step, just in case for a brief moment, I might need him there.

It was the first time I felt wings.

I turned the page, looking for the next entry.

I'm going into surgery. Yes, they say the chemo has done whatever can be done and that surgery is no longer avoidable in this case. I'm so scared. I think I'm more scared that I AM scared as the feeling alone strikes me as completely foreboding. I'm never really afraid. I guess I never saw the logic in it. Be frightened forever but it won't change situations. God how arrogant I am, such a control freak over my emotions... until now that is.

I wonder if I would have let him in sooner, how much easier things might have been with Vegeta there. He has been my rock, though he hates when I say so, so unable to accept within himself that he is truly doing another good, despite his inability to control this sort of situation.

While we sat, together, spaces apart in the doctor's office, I saw a very rare look cross his features and I'm still unsure as to what it meant. He seemed for an instant to be overwhelmed, to be honestly confused, as though experiencing feelings and emotions he wasn't aware he still possessed nor had ever dealt with in a healthy fashion before. Like suddenly, I saw so much rage, pent up like fire, behind his mask of constant detachment, like he would destroy the world with his sudden revelation that there were things he couldn't control.

I had seen the look before, crossing the gorgeous lines of his inhuman face, only when he had suddenly sensed a great power, the monstrous energy of his former master. Like he would either implode or explode, though met with the knowledge that neither one would do any good.

His eyes moved towards me and in the strangest, most unfamiliar gesture, he reached out to me. I don't know what he wanted me to do or if he'd focused on what he was doing long enough to form an expectation, but as though he'd never accomplished this much, he touched my arm, thin and pale, his eyes suddenly making him look ten years younger. I caught a glimpse, for just an instant, of who he must have been, what a young man he still was, though a thousand years seemed to have passed before his eyes.

And he was suddenly very afraid for me and I knew it.

I wait now, my eyes trembling as they watch the ticking of the clock and I wonder what will happen. Will I wake up? Will I see him again? Even the best doctors make mistakes, should I give him my last words, tell him, as I did what seems now so long ago, that I love him?

I remember the courage it took me that day and I wondered if now, now that real fate is staring me in the face, if I have the strength to tell him once more, if only for the fact that there is truly nothing more to lose.

I love him. I love him for making me love myself, for making me feel stronger than I've ever thought I could be; for being beside me even now, his chin resting comfortably on his chest, slumbering lightly as I scribble this nonsense down. I feel like there's so much I want to leave the world, if that is truly what I'm doing. I feel the need to write equations that will spawn textbooks in my name. I feel the need to write letters to all those I have touched and all those that have altered my fate with even the simplest of deeds.

I want to thank every person that has smiled at me in the street, for no other reason but to smile, and every person who ever held the door, for no other reason but to touch the day of another human, if even in the most meager sense.

The world turns and breaks and falls all in one day. The happiest day of one man's life is the great tragedy of another. If only we knew this sooner, if only we saw the world around us as simply as precious as it is. Would we take the time to thank each other more? Would we hug tighter, say more "I love you"s and genuinely smile more if we realized those around us as mortal as they are?

If truly I have accomplished no more than this, I will say, I can be proud that (though the girl seems an entirely different person than myself now) a very brave young girl once had the courage enough to tell a young man that she loved him, and despite his answer, she kept on loving him. In all the ways I've touched the world, I think I'll go under remembering that; that in all the ways that I have conquered fear, I will fall asleep remembering my greatest triumph in life was loving him.... even if I think now, I'll never truly know him at all.

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Fathoming Love