Since you made me number 1, this is a gift. Bonus chapter 1500 still stands.
And also, what were your thoughts about the kiss last chapter, was it too lewd? Not enough? Or good?
This is the last filler chapter if I can call it that. Things are going to move once again.
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On Earth....
"So? Going back to training?" she asked, looking a little disappointed.
"Not really. I asked for a week, but I realized I don't have much to do with it." I really didn't have much going on except training.
'Maybe I should just ditch and go back to training.' I thought.
"A week?" Tights stared at me like I'd said something offensive. "You have a week, and your plan is to sit around with nothing to do?"
"Maybe."
"No. Absolutely not." She stood up, already deciding things on my behalf. "Do you know how long I've been telling you to take a break? Months. And you want to waste it being bored?"
"I wouldn't say bored—"
"You said you have nothing to do. That's the definition." She crossed her arms. "When's the last time you did something that wasn't training, or eating to recover from training, or sleeping to recover from training?"
I opened my mouth.
"And don't count the storytelling," she added. "That's for me, not you."
I closed my mouth.
'That had been a long time ago. Two lives ago, technically.'
"I can't remember," I admitted.
Something in her face shifted at that. She'd expected a comeback. She didn't get one.
"...Right." She recovered fast, grabbing my sleeve. "That settles it. You're coming with me. We're going to do normal things, and you're going to hate the first ten minutes and then you're going to be fine."
I let her pull me up.
"Fine," I said.
—
<...>
—
"Your idea of fun is eating?" I asked, looking at Tights across from me as we stood in the queue.
"It always starts there, doesn't it? Besides—" she smiled, "—you're acting like you're not about to empty this whole place out."
I didn't respond. It was obvious.
"So while we're at it." She glanced up at me. "Why don't you tell me what you even did, before you came here?"
I looked at her. "Not good things."
I knew what I was. A person who spent his days teaching children how to take a planet, sitting on a peaceful one eating fried food, enjoying the quiet he made a living taking from other people. I didn't want to hold the thought long enough to look at it.
She caught something in my face. The easy thing went out of hers for a second.
"Oh." She shifted her weight. "You, uh— you got any other stories? Besides Naruto?" The subject changed like a door pulled quietly shut.
"Plenty," I said, and let her close it. "There's one about a kid who finds out he can see ghosts. Or one with pirates, if you'd rather. The pirate one's longer."
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<...>
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We reached the front of the queue.
"Go ahead," Tights said, stepping aside with a little wave, like she was presenting me to the cashier.
"Forty of the large burgers," I said. "Thirty of the fried chicken. All the fries you have ready, and however many more you can make in the next ten minutes. Twenty drinks, any flavor, doesn't matter."
The cashier's pen stopped moving.
He looked up at me. He looked at the screen. He looked back at me, scanning for the rest of the group I had obviously ordered for, finding only Tights.
"For... how many people?" he asked.
"Two," I said.
"...Two," the teenager repeated.
"She's not very hungry," I said, nodding at Tights.
"I'm not—" Tights choked. "Oh my god. Oh my god, you can't just— his face—" She grabbed my arm, lost the rest of the sentence entirely, and turned to wheeze at the wall. "Look at him! Look at the poor kid!"
"He's doing fine."
"He pressed the same button four times!"
The order took both of the back grills and most of the staff. A small audience assembled without admitting to it — people who'd finished their meals and discovered urgent reasons to stay seated, a man who'd been halfway to the door and was now deeply studying a menu board he'd already ordered from.
I carried the trays to a corner table. Three trips. Tights followed with a single milkshake and the expression of a woman who'd bought a ticket to something.
Then I ate.
I'd stopped being self-conscious about this around my fourth year of life. A Saiyan metabolism is not a polite thing. I worked through the burgers in steady order, and the room watched the pile shrink with open disbelief.
"That guy by the door." Tights leaned across the table, stage-whispering, delighted. "He's been holding the same fry for a minute. He hasn't blinked. I think you broke him."
"Eating's offensive where he's from?"
"No, it's how much, you absolute— " she dissolved, both hands flat on the table, head down, shoulders going. "I said— " she got out between breaths, "—I said take a break. A nice quiet break. And you turned a burger joint into a nature documentary."
"You said do normal things."
"This is not normal!" She came up wiping her eyes, pointing a fry at me like evidence. "Normal people order one lunch!"
"It's normal for me."
"That—" She jabbed the fry at the trays, the dwindling pile, the entire scene I'd created. "That is a war crime against this restaurant's kitchen, is what that is." She popped the fry in her mouth, stolen from my tray on pure principle, and grinned around it. "Best lunch I've had in years. I didn't even eat."
'Seeing her laugh like that,' loud, unguarded, not caring who turned, 'wasn't the worst way to spend an afternoon.'
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<...>
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The cinema was dark and it was, against my expectations, good.
Tights had picked something with explosions in it. Neither of us was following the plot. She kept leaning over to tell me which character was obviously about to betray the others, and she was right every time, and we ate our way through a bucket of something sweet that she insisted was the entire point.
I hadn't sat in a room like this in a long time. Longer than this body had been alive.
I shifted in the seat. Ran a hand over my jaw. On the screen a man was defusing something, and I watched him do it, and somewhere underneath the watching a quieter channel had opened on its own— the squad lands in four days, the drop terrain is bad—
I let the thought go. Brushed it off the way you'd brush lint off a sleeve. Watched the man defuse the thing.
"He's going to cut the wrong wire," Tights said.
"He's going to cut the wrong wire," I agreed.
He cut the wrong wire. We both made a sound. I reached for the bucket and found her hand already in it and we did the small territorial scuffle people do over the last of the good pieces, and it was fine.
Beside me, Tights had gone briefly quiet. Not watching the screen. Watching me, the jaw, the hand, whatever had crossed my face a second ago and left. When I glanced over she was already looking back at the film, fast, like she hadn't been.
She didn't say anything.
She put the bucket in my lap, which meant I could have the rest.
There was the kid, too, somewhere across the week.
Bulma had decided I was hers. We played the games small children invent and immediately change the rules of, and I let her win all of them, and at some point I took her up on a short flight, low and slow over the compound grounds, one hand flat against her back. She screamed the entire time in pure delight and demanded to go again the moment we landed.
Tights watched this twice before she said anything. The third time she opened her mouth, closed it, scuffed her shoe against the ground, and finally got it out in a rush, like it cost something.
"Can— I mean. Is it. Could you do it with me too. The flying."
I took her up. She was a great deal quieter than Bulma about it, white-knuckled on my arm the whole way and trying very hard to look like she wasn't, and when we came down she said the view was fine, it was a fine view, and would not look at me, and asked when we could go again.
On the last evening she walked me out to the ship.
"So that's it," she said.
"You looked tired in there," she said. "At the movies. For about a second. Then you put it away." She shrugged, like it was nothing, like she hadn't been carrying it since. "I don't need to know what it is. I just clocked it. That's all."
I didn't have anything to put in the space that left.
"Don't vanish for eight months again," she said, letting me off the hook the way she always did. "I genuinely thought you died."
"I'll try."
"Try worse than that."
"I'll try worse than that."
She punched me in the arm, which hurt her more than me, and stepped back, and lifted a hand. I lifted one back. The hatch closed between us.
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<...>
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Kami was where I'd left him, near the edge of the plaza, as though he hadn't moved in the week I'd been gone. Maybe he hadn't.
"You came back," he said.
"I said a week."
"People say a great many things." He studied me. Whatever he found, he didn't comment on. "You used the time."
"Some of it on nothing."
"Then it was used well." He turned toward the inner grounds and I fell into step. "You wished to show me something before we resume. You said so when you left."
I'd been turning it over the whole way up. How to explain a lesson I didn't understand, taught by a being I couldn't describe, about a thing I couldn't do. In the end I just told him.
"Someone tried to teach me a technique. Before the hibernation." I kept it vague, someone was as far as I'd go, and Kami didn't push. "It's about space. The distance between two points. He said space isn't fixed, that it has a texture, that it yields to some kinds of pressure and resists others." I held my hand out toward the open air, the way Whis had. "He told me to ask whether the space was resisting me, or whether I was creating the resistance. Then he left. That was the whole lesson."
Kami was quiet for a moment.
"And you have been trying to answer the question," he said.
"For months."
"How."
I dropped my hand. "Every way I have. I push on it. I reach for it. I've tried it slow, tried it angry, tried it calm. The space stays a wall." The frustration came through more than I meant it to. "I can feel the edge of the thing. I can't cross it."
"Show me."
I raised my hand again, toward a point in the empty air, and pushed, not with Ki, exactly, with the thing underneath Ki, the reaching Whis had shown me. I felt for the give in the space.
Nothing gave. The air was air. The plaza stone behind it was stone. I held it as long as it was worth holding and then let it fall.
Kami had watched my arm, my shoulders, my breathing. Not the air. Me.
"I cannot teach you this," he said.
"I know. It isn't yours to—"
"It is not mine, no. I do not know what your teacher knows, and I will not pretend to." He folded his hands. "But I have watched you push at that question for the length of this conversation, and I can tell you what I see, which is the same thing I have seen since the day you arrived."
I waited.
"You attack everything," Kami said. "It is how you have survived. A problem appears, and you press your whole mind against it until it gives way. It has served you. It will keep serving you, for most things." He nodded at my hand. "Not this one."
"He didn't tell me to push."
"No. He did not." Something close to amusement crossed the old face. "He asked you a question, and you have spent months trying to answer it. By force. The way you answer everything." He let that sit. "But a question is not always a lock to be broken. Sometimes it is a direction to be faced. Your teacher did not ask whether the space resists you so that you would defeat the space."
"Then why ask it."
"Because the answer was never in the space." Kami looked at me, and there was the whole of his teaching in it, the thing he'd been trying to put into me since the first day, the stillness, now pointed at a problem he didn't even understand and somehow understood anyway. "You ask if the space is resisting you. I would ask you a smaller question first. What in you is making it feel solid?"
I didn't answer.
"I cannot solve your technique," Kami said again, gently. "I would not insult your teacher by trying. But you have been looking outward at a wall, and I think the wall is closer to home than that." He turned back toward the grounds. "Stop trying to win the question. Let it sit in you, unanswered, until you stop being afraid of the silence where the answer should be. That is all I have. It may be nothing."
It wasn't nothing.
It didn't solve anything either. The space would still be a wall tomorrow. But he'd moved where I was standing when I looked at it, and that was more than I'd done for myself in months.
"Thank you," I said.
"Thank me by being on time," Kami said. "We begin in the morning."
We began in the morning, and the days took a shape after that.
Mornings belonged to Kami. We worked on the inner thing. It was the hardest training I did and it left no marks and produced nothing I could measure, which was its own kind of torture. I sat with the space-question every morning the way Kami told me to. Most mornings it stayed a wall. Some mornings it felt, for half a breath, like something else, and then I'd notice myself noticing and it was a wall again.
Afternoons belonged to weight.
I'd take the ship up, seal the chamber, and turn the gravity past anything Planet Vegeta had ever put on me. I'd hit my ceiling at fifty the first day back. By the second week I was working at seventy and holding. The density the Ikari had left in my frame meant the weight settled differently than it used to, less like being crushed, more like being insisted upon— and I learned to move inside it, to throw the fundamentals Roshi had drilled into me under a load that punished every wasted motion.
One day in three I left the chamber alone and went down to the sea instead.
Roshi didn't train me the way Kami did or the way the gravity did. He undid things. He'd watch me run a form I thought was clean and find the half-second of arrogance buried in it, the place where I'd started trusting my strength instead of my structure. He hit me with a stick when I got it wrong. He hit me with a stick sometimes when I got it right, to see if I'd kept my guard up. He fed me terrible advice wrapped around good advice and made me sort which was which.
"You're better than last time," he admitted once, grudgingly, after a session that left us both sitting in the sand. Then, because he was who he was: "Still owe me magazines. Triple, you said."
"Triple," I agreed.
Morning, noon, and the sea every third day. Stillness, weight, and the old man's stick.
The wall stayed a wall.
But I kept facing the right direction.
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Author's note:Comment to let me know your thoughts about this chapter. if you have any ideas for the story, comment it here.