By: Dariyen Ryuseikyaku
~We were talking..... about the space between us all....
And the people.....who hide themselves behind a wall.......
Of illusion......
Never glimpse the truth.....Then it's far too late when they pass away......~
Piccolo remembered the fight with Lekiizin as if it had just happened. Of course, it had just happened. It was hard to believe that only yesterday he'd been fighting the sister of the women whose soul now existed only within his mind. He was glad to be rid of Lekiizin, but he knew that Tezhra had been--and still was--upset about losing her sister. How could Lekiizin have turned so evil? What made her become what she had become? Piccolo wondered. There's no way she could've always been like that. Tezhra would have left home years ago if that was the case.
He heard Tezhra's voice in his mind. "Piccolo, have you forgotten again that I can hear your thoughts as you yourself do?" Piccolo smiled dryly. "Evidently, you have," Tezhra quipped in jest. "You wish to know what turned Lekiizin evil? Then I will tell you...."
~We were talking.......about the love we all could share....
When we find it.....to try our best to hold it there.......
With our love, with our love, we could save the world.....
If they only knew........~
The village was on fire. People were running away from burning homes, only to be struck down by ki blasts from above. The source, or rather sources, of the blast could be seen hovering over the town that they had turned into a war zone. One man in particular stood out, mostly because of his extreme difference in height compared to his companion. This Saiyan was rather short--his hair appeared to be most of his height. His hair was spiky, and his hairline receded quite a bit, causing his temples to stand out. The royal blue, skin-tight outfit he wore showed his sleekly muscled build. Over this suit he wore yellow and white armor that stuck out over his shoulders and covered his chest. White gloves and boots completed the ensemble.
His companion was just the opposite--extremely tall, very bald, and sporting a moustache. This man was overly brawny and looked like a weight-lifter on steroids. He wore the same armor, but instead of the blue suit, he wore something that looked like a men's Speedo swimsuit. His boots were blue, and on his hands and forearms, he wore a simple curved plate that fastened around his wrist with a cord.
There were two things that both men had in common, however. First, they both had tails. The shorter man's tail was wrapped regally around his waist, while the taller man's tail was swishing about happily as he viewed the death and destruction. Second, both man's faces were twisted into evil smiles, seeing the people run like cattle in vain attempts to escape destruction.
Huddling in a corner out of sight of the invaders (hopefully) were two girls no more than ten years old. One was a dark-haired child with tanned skin and golden, cat-like eyes with sliver flecks in them. The other was a blonde-haired girl with milk-white skin and green eyes as cat-like as the other girl's eyes. The blonde girl spoke quietly, "Tezhra! We cannot simply sit here trembling in fear while these saiyans destroy our planet!"
Tezhra, the dark-haired girl, replied, "No, Lekiizin! There is no way we can help! We will be cut down like crops during the harvest!"
Despite Tezhra's warning, Lekiizin shook the younger girl off and ran towards her house, where the taller man had broken the door down. Screams could be heard inside...the screams of her and her sister's mother. Quickly, she broke the door down and ran inside.
Lekiizin was greeted by a horrific sight. The tall man had his large hand wrapped around her mother's neck, lifting her into the air, while her father ineffectually beat the man's back with various large, blunt objects. The blonde girl gasped, and this alerted everyone's attention. "Oh!" he taller man said. "You must be the daughter in this happy li'l home, huh? Well, kid, you better say 'bye-bye' to your sweet mommy." With that, the tall man grabbed the woman by the waist, grabbed the top of her head, and twisted with all his might. Lekiizin's mother's screams silenced. She would never again breathe another word. The tall man had broken her neck. "Oh, I'm Nappa, by the way," he said, letting the body drop to the floor. "And you guys are.....dead." Nappa sent his gaze towards Lekiizin. "I'll get to you a little later, kid. You'll get yours when I'm done with your daddy." He laughed evilly, then turned his back on Lekiizin, making for her father.
Lekiizin screamed in pure rage. Nappa paid her scream no mind until he felt an excruciatingly painful burning sensation in his tail. He screamed in pain then and fell to his knees. Lekiizin shouted to her father in their native language, "Father! Come with me! Quickly!"
The two ran, but Nappa--now minus his tail--quickly caught up. He growled in anger at the fair-haired girl. "You &*%@in' little runt! I'll let you go join your mother!" He charged a huge blast and pointed it at Tezhra and her father.
~Try to see it's all within yourself. No one else can make you change.......
And to see you're really only very small and life flows on within you
And without you....~
Piccolo gasped. You mean, Lekiizin saw Nappa kill her mother right in front of her?! He was taken aback at the sheer cruelty of it. Even after hearing of Goku's fight with the larger Saiyan he hadn't known that Nappa was capable of such out-and-out cruelty.
"Yes, she did," Tezhra replied. "But there is more to this tale yet...."
Piccolo silenced his thoughts to let Tezhra continue the story.
Lekiizin thought fast. Shoving her father away with a surprising amount of strength for her age, she fired a very large ball of fire into the saiyan's face. Nappa screamed, the blast he was charging in his hands dying from his loss of concentration. Tezhra showed up just then, seeing Nappa reeling from Lekiizin's fire attack. To further distract the large man, she ran up to his side and swung her knee forward and in, hitting Nappa in the groin. He doubled over, and the dark-haired girl jumped into the air with her hands clasped together in a double fist, bringing them down with all her might on Nappa's back. He fell, and Lekiizin and Tetrei took the chance and ran as fast as they could. The made it to Lekiizin's laboratory, and she said, "Father, come here! I made two little pods which we may be able to use to get away! I have not tested them yet, but it is our only chance of survival!" At that moment, the door was blown open and a very pissed Nappa stood on the other side.
Tetrei cursed in his native tongue and, as if of one mind, the three made a run up the stairs to a small launching facility, Nappa close on their tails. The pods Lekiizin mentioned were sitting in two very crudely made launching pads. Lekiizin and Tezhra fit into one, and Tetrei fit into the other. Nappa went for Tetrei's pod first, wanting to kill the man and make his children watch. But both pods blasted out of their holdings and off the pads before Nappa could reach them. Nappa followed the pods out the holes in the roof, angered into a frenzy. The huge saiyan fired an enormous blast at one pod, and it sailed off-course, wildly spinning, smoke billowing from it. The other pod, which held Lekiizin and Tezhra, got away without a hitch. However, the two girls had seen their father's pod get hit by Nappa's blast and counted him dead for sure.....
"Lekiizin and I sought refuge on an alien planet. I managed to put the incident behind me and get on with my life, but she never did. The hate she harbored for the Saiyans poisoned her mind. I remember wondering what happened to the gentle sister I always knew?" Tezhra finished.
I'm sorry. I had no idea.... How could he have....? Piccolo couldn't even begin to find words for this level of shocking cruelty. And from Tezhra's description, the identity of Nappa's companion was unmistakable. The smaller man you saw with Nappa was Vegeta. He's the Prince of the Saiyans, and Nappa was his right-hand man. That is, until Vegeta killed him for losing to Goku. I know Vegeta. He and Bulma, a woman I know, are settled.
Tezhra gasped. "What kind of brainwashing has he done to her?! We must save her!"
Piccolo shook his head, chuckling a little. No, Tezhra, you don't understand. Bulma went to him willingly. They fight like a cat and a dog, but they seem inseparable.
"I cannot fathom why anyone would go to one of those vile beasts willingly." Tezhra shuddered just at the thought.
Piccolo chuckled again. Well, Goku's a Saiyan, too, and he turned out all right. A little too hung up on mercy, though, if you ask me. The only reason Vegeta's still alive now is because Goku let him live after a fight.
"Goku...is a Saiyan?!" Tezhra gasped. "That is impossible. How can he be of that vile, ruthless, heartless..... Ugh!"
~We were talking.......about the love that's gone so cold...
And the people.....who gain the world and lose their souls.....
They don't know.....
They can't see.....
Are you one of them......?~
Hey, take it easy, Tezhra. They sent him here to destroy all life on this planet, but he fell and hit his head, and now he can't remember anything before being found by the man that took care of him as a child. Coincidentally, Gohan's named after that man, Piccolo explained.
"I see. Then Goku will not commit atrocities such as the ones on Interma?"
He laughed at that. Goku? Hurt anybody? You've got to be kidding. Anyway, now that your fears have been laid to rest, I'm going to sleep. And you'd better not keep me up all night.
"I will not keep you up all night," Tezhra promised. With that, Piccolo closed his eyes.
During the night, he was awakened by an odd collection of sounds from Tezhra. He listened. The sounds continued. They were.... Sobs? Tezhra, why are you crying? What's wrong?
Tezhra made a tangible effort to pull herself together. "Nothing," she replied. "Simply old wounds that have been reopened."
Well, you didn't really have to tell me what happened to your planet. In truth, after she had, Piccolo had wished that she'd decided to keep it to herself. Not from the graphic nature of the events that Tezhra described--he'd seen that before. He'd felt her pain and sorrow during the tale, and had wanted to comfort her, but he didn't know how. And it was frustrating him that he was upset because he couldn't do anything to help Tezhra. The feelings were alien and confusing to him. Mostly he was just frustrated because something was happening to him and he didn't know what. He had gone through a change of some sort, and he didn't really know what it was, so he didn't know whether to welcome or fight it--whether to be happy or angry. It had happened too quickly for him to judge. Now that he thought about it, it all happened about the time Tezhra made that first appearance in his life. There had been something about her that had struck him oddly, and he couldn't quite put his finger on it, not even now.
He didn't know that Tezhra could understand more thoughts than just the ones formed into actual words, those that were the last step before becoming vocal. And she knew exactly what was happening to the Namek, but didn't say, knowing that he wouldn't believe her at this point. "Just go back to sleep, Piccolo. I will be all right in the morning," Tezhra replied, somewhat saddened. Did he not know why she'd sacrificed her life for him? Or did it not matter? Deciding to put her errant thoughts away, where Piccolo could not understand them, she said, "I am fine, really." At this statement, Piccolo nodded, then drifted back to sleep.
Piccolo found himself in an empty room. "Where am I?" he asked out loud to the silence as if it could hear. A bright light flashed behind him, and he spun quickly. What he saw made his jaw drop. It was Tezhra, alive and well. She stood in front of him with her hands clasped behind her back. "How can this.... No..., it's not.... This is a dream. That's it exactly. This is a dream."
Tezhra smiled knowingly. "You wanted to comfort me, didn't you?" She held her arms open as if to receive him. "Then come here." He did, and she wrapped her arms around his neck. He looked slightly shocked for a moment, then one arm slid around her waist, then the other. In a moment he was holding her as tightly as she held him.
He sighed. This felt heavenly. Briefly, he wondered if Tezhra could see this dream, then quickly decided it didn't matter. "Tezhra, I'm really sorry to hear that things like that happened to your planet..."
"Do not apologize," Tezhra interrupted. "You were not there, and thus had no part in the events that transpired that day. You could not have stopped them."
"Maybe not, but I can stop something like that from happening to you again," Piccolo said without thinking. Tezhra just smiled her knowing smile and held him tighter. Then she leaned up, having to stand on tiptoe, and kissed him gently on the lips. He flinched at that, pulling back to look at her incredulously. "What are you doing?" he asked.
Instead of replying, she pulled him back against her and kissed him again. "That," she finally said, "is what I am doing."
"I know that," Piccolo replied. "But what was that in the first place?"
"That was a kiss. Here, let me show you." She kissed him again, this time letting the kiss go on for a little longer. Piccolo felt her lips press against his warmly and almost jumped again, his eyes widening in shock. But the warmth of the kiss finally got through to him, and he closed his eyes and held her even tighter. After all, he thought, it's just a dream.
Piccolo woke up the next morning so embarrassed that he was blushing purple. Good Kami, what the Hell got into me last night?! That was the most embarrassing dream I've ever had! Many more things had happened in the dream besides kissing, and he wondered where he got the imagination to figure out some of those things. I've never even so much as thought about using my extension technique for that kind of.... And where did I ever get the idea that Tezhra loved me?
In the back of his mind, Tezhra smirked. She knew about the dream, all right. She'd wormed her way into his subconscious while he was asleep last night. She'd been...very inventive, to say the least. After all, with the absence of genitalia, one must have a very active imagination to accomplish anything..., she thought with a giggle.
What's so funny? he thought at Tezhra sourly.
"Only that you are blushing. Why are you blushing?"
Piccolo hesitated. ....I had a really weird dream last night that I don't want to talk about.
"Aaah, I see," Tezhra replied. "Nothing too serious, then?"
Piccolo wanted to reply, 'Yes, is was serious,' but he settled on a vague nod.
Tezhra replied, "Well, if that is all, then I suppose that is fine. What is on the agenda today?"
First, I'm going to bathe. So go back into that part of my mind you sleep in until I give you the all-clear to come out, all right? Piccolo asked. After all, she could see through his eyes, too, and he had to look at himself to bathe.
She was torn. If she refused, she'd have to explain her role in his dream, and she didn't want to tell him that just yet. Tezhra acquiesced, pulling her presence into the very back of his mind, away from all his conscious senses. Piccolo sighed in relief and went to bathe in the nearby river.
While he was bathing, he couldn't help but think about the dream he'd had. Now in retrospect, he realized that the dream had actually been a good one. Inadvertently, he found himself thinking about some of the things Tezhra had done to him in the dream. He started to feel the way he'd felt in the dream, and panicked, quickly pushing the thoughts out of his mind. But the feeling stayed with him for a while. Softly growling in frustration at this newfound loss of control over his feelings, he turned his attention back to the task at hand--bathing.
~When you've seen beyond yourself, then you may find peace of mind
Is waiting there......and the time will come when you see we're all one
And life flows on within you
And without you........~
[fin]