TITLE: A Lesson Learned
AUTHOR: Deani
RATING: PG
PAIRING: ???/???
SUMMARY: Someone does a little research and gets -too- curious. Stalking
ensues.
WARNING(S): Shounen-ai / YAOI. Sadly, that’s pretty much it.
Wish I could say there was more.
DISCLAIMER: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don’t own shit. Whoopee.
We all know the bit.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is a first-person POV narrative type of thing.
You’ll have to read it to know exactly who’s POV it is. It takes place
post-DBZ. DBGT isn’t canon to me, by the way, so I ignore anything
that might have occurred in that series. If you have a problem with
that, my only question to you is, why?
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In all my life, I have learned that one thing above all others is important:
love. Love is the most intense of all emotions here. It brings
the greatest happiness, the most profound sadness, and the deepest pain.
Yet, do the benefits outweigh the detriments? Is love truly worth all
of the negative parts? Yes, it all boils down to that simple, single
question. Is love worth it?
Now, had you asked me this question a couple of years ago, my response would
have come swiftly and sharply: No. Absolutely not. Love isn’t
worth anything. Love is pointless. But that would have been in
the past, before I was taught the importance of love.
I will admit freely that I have had the best teacher imaginable. However,
he did not realize he was the teacher, nor did I realize I was the student.
It wasn’t until much later that I made the correlation in my mind.
He still doesn’t know.
You’re wondering, of course, about whom I must be speaking. Heh.
Maybe the question isn’t “who taught me” but rather “why did I want to learn”.
So here is a confession: I’m too curious for my own good. I found something,
became strangely intrigued, and then began studying. I suppose that
is how Capsule Corp grew into such a success; Bulma was always discovering
something and studying it. Funny that it would rub off on me after
so many years.
Knowing how many people Bulma has been around for a long time, you have most
likely been able to narrow down to a select few beings who I might be.
Maybe I’ve given myself away already with something else I’ve said.
It isn’t much of a secret, regardless. You’ll know for certain soon.
Back to the original topic at hand: love. If you’ll look back, you’ll
see that the cause of my curiosity was something I found. What was
it? A journal. You know, the kind in which you write your daily
thoughts and the like. This in itself could be interesting; that I
would read just any random thing I came across. But this particular
journal belonged to someone I knew. No, I cannot say that I knew him
then. I knew his name, his face, but I did not truly know the being
inside. It wasn’t until I read his journal that I knew anything about
the human we all know as ‘Yamcha’.
Unfortunately for me, that wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough that I had
read all of his inner thoughts over the span of a few years. I felt
this inexplicable urge to know more about him, to know why he felt the way
he did. Look at that; I was curious about someone else. I had
become so bored in my own existence that I needed to prey upon someone else’s.
And why Yamcha’s life? Just because I’d read his journal? Partially.
I’d formed my opinion of him. From what I knew of him, I had labeled
him a certain way, never once thinking that he could be different on the
inside, that his soul would betray him in written form. Had he been
as vapid and pathetic as he seemed on the surface, I wouldn’t have given
him a second thought and couldn’t have cared less. He wasn’t.
Call me a sadist, but his raw pain and torment sung to me in the most exquisite
voice I’d ever heard. Behind the face of weakness and the grin of ignorance
lay a soul that walked in worlds the others couldn’t even begin to imagine.
Well, perhaps that’s incorrect. I know two-three if you count myself-who
understand his exact pain. They didn’t hide it though, not in the same
way he did. It wasn’t trauma from the battlefield like you might think;
all of us have those scars. He held the anguish of unrequited love.
I know. You’re thinking that it’s completely ridiculous that I would
be interested in Yamcha’s unrequited love for someone. But you don’t
understand yet. Of course you don’t. I haven’t gotten to that
part. It was so insanely pitiful that I couldn’t resist the pull.
He was pining away for the one person in the universe whom he believed didn’t
care for him at all. Just… desperately in love with someone who didn’t
even care enough to dislike him, someone who was wholly indifferent to him.
But the journal was twenty years old. So much time had passed, yet
my mind was wrapped around a single question: did Yamcha still feel the same
way? That was what finally drew me into his world. I began studying
him, practically stalking him, the very next day.
At first, all I could do was watch him. In true stalker form, I hung
out in trees, in the shadows, any place where I wasn’t easily visible.
Are you aware of how difficult it is to sneak into a stadium to watch him
at baseball practice? And then perching for hours on a tree limb, watching
him through windows and glass doors? I know you’re wondering why I
didn’t just hover or fly. I needed to suppress my ki; otherwise, he
would’ve known I was there, and I couldn’t have that.
This satisfied me for a while. I don’t know how many weeks I spent
observing him, but eventually, that no longer sufficed. I grew impatient
with it; watching him just wasn’t enough. I knew his habits, but I
didn’t know anything more about who he really was. I wanted to talk
to him. I needed to talk to him. Or at least break into his apartment
and read his journal.
So, I broke into his apartment while he was at baseball practice. I
knew he kept a journal because I’d witnessed him writing in it nearly every
day. It was a lot like the old journal I had in my possession, except
it was solid black leather, no silver embossing or any other ornamentation.
Just very simple and nondescript. Not wanting to chance Yamcha discovering
the journal was missing, I sat on the floor in front of the bedside table
where it was kept and read it there.
Sitting there, I began to wonder: was this too perverse even for me?
I only read two entries before I put the journal back into the bedside table.
My head leaned against his mattress as I stared blankly at the wall.
I was being a weakling-unable to face the man who’d intrigued me with his
pain. It was then that I decided I’d try to find a way to become part
of his life. How could I do it though? It wasn’t as if we’d had
any real acquaintance beforehand. We weren’t friends and had nothing
in common really. For me to approach him, it just seemed so unnatural,
like there was no reason in the world for it. I locked up his apartment
and seated myself on his doorstep, hoping I would figure out something by
the time he returned and found me there.
I never did come up with a reason. He was only moderately suspicious
of me, yet not so much that he didn’t invite me in for tea. We actually
had a decent conversation, although I barely spoke. I honestly didn’t
know what to say to him. I had basically been stalking him for weeks,
and my mind was blank. Confessing I had read a journal that belonged
to him twenty years ago was, of course, out of the question. Asking
him if he still yearned and craved the love of someone who had no feelings
whatsoever for him was certainly also forbidden. But we talked anyway.
It turned out that it wasn’t difficult at all to insinuate myself into Yamcha’s
life because he sought me out, and I kept coming back to him as well.
We became friends.
I’ll admit it was a tad uncomfortable for me in the beginning since I had
no friends in general. I even continued to keep Yamcha at a distance.
In spite of that, we spent increasing amounts of time with each other.
It got to the point after a while where the only times we weren’t together
were when we were sleeping or he was playing baseball. I began to show
him parts of me no one else saw, things I reserved for him alone. I
should’ve seen it coming, but I might as well have been blind. It crept
upon me so slowly that I was completely clueless that it was happening.
Out of nowhere one day, it dawned on me. I had fallen in love with
Yamcha.
If it makes no sense to you, you should know that it makes even less sense
to me. How could I have let it happen? One minute, I’m stalking
the guy and breaking into his home, and the next, I’m noticing how charming
the lock of ebony hair that falls across his forehead is. I’m realizing
that the scars on his face show his determination and strength, not his failure
and mistakes. And the worst part is that each time I see him, it gets
more and more difficult to leave him.
And it was all because I read a journal he’d stopped writing in twenty years
ago. I read years of his emotional torment, and I wanted to understand
it. I wanted to comprehend his pain. Now, I do. Because
I fell for him, just as he fell in love so many years ago. That was
not my intended goal. Falling in love with him was not supposed to
happen. I only wanted to know if he still felt as he did in that old
journal. But I haven’t yet found that out. Does he still love-?
I just realized I never even told you with whom Yamcha had fallen in love.
Do you even want to know?
Yamcha loved Vegeta. That wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t Vegeta.
But I am.