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The truth is: you often find your infant son glaring at you with a ferocity the likes of which you were unaware a child his age could possess.
The boy is good-natured around his mother and grandparents, but with you, there’s an accusatory glint in his eyes—Bulma’s eyes, blue and gleaming with the same exact unnerving quickness—like he knows every terrible thing you’ve ever done (and that list, of course, is very long). His gaze says he is fully aware that, among other things, you left his mother to give birth alone for the sake of your own power; you avoided baby and mother both for the first few months of Trunks’ life; you chose not to catch them as they fell from a burning plane; you chose yourself over them as often as you could; you failed him when it mattered most.
You’re certain that he hates you for all of these reasons and more, and if he doesn’t, he will someday. The older Trunks—the young man who stared at you with Bulma’s eyes set into your own unsatisfied face—told you more than once that he hated you during that long, awful year in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber. You considered that to be a fair and honest judgment.
That version of Trunks seemed to forgive you in the end, despite your deficiencies, despite your many unpardonable sins, but you still think he made the right call the first time around.
The truth is: if the boy doesn’t hate you now, you know that he will learn to.
Or maybe he is a baby who doesn’t understand much of anything around him, and that’s just what his face looks like. He looks like you, after all.
(That’s what Bulma says, when you get maudlin like this.
“Of course he looks like you,” she says, soft against your ear, her fingertips smoothing your brow, “I always thought so. The first time we saw the boy from the future, I could see it.”
As always, it is exceedingly irritating that she’s right.)
The truth is: your infant son Trunks is so round and soft and little that sometimes (not all the time, but sometimes), you can’t stand to look at him. More precisely—more humiliatingly—you just can’t stand seeing your own angry face writ small.
“I love that he looks like you,” Bulma says, her fingertips smoothing his brow.
-
The truth is: you learned early on in what ended up being your courtship (a disgusting, although ultimately accurate, word) is that Bulma sings like a bird, if that bird were dying in agony. The woman has absolutely no talent for music.
Despite this, Bulma sings to herself when she’s happy or bored, when she’s working, when she’s in the shower, when she’s putting on makeup or getting dressed. You find it very, very annoying, you always have, and you’ve reminded her of this frequently over the years (rookie fucking mistake, obviously, as she now does it at least partly out of spite).
But although she lacks the gift of song, you regularly find Bulma humming and whistling bits of melodies to calm the boy. She holds him close and sways to her own off-key music; she offers him kisses and little lullabies and other sweet nothings during ornery moments.
The truth is: Bulma’s voice is weak and inharmonious, but Trunks clearly doesn’t care.
When you watch them, it strikes you that you cannot recall being soothed like that as a child. If you think back, really concentrate, you can remember snippets of old Saiyan war hymns and the legends of great warriors told to you from a young age—but that all of that would have been after you were old enough to go off-planet.
You cannot recall being held. You surely were not serenaded, even badly.
When you tell Bulma to quit coddling your son, she tells you to shut the fuck up.
-
“I need you to understand,” Bulma said when you first came back to her, after all the dust settled, after Cell and Trunks and Kakarot’s big stupid heroic death that you still won’t let yourself think about, “that this is conditional.”
“Alright.” You were so, so tired then. You didn’t know what the fuck a home or a life could be, if they could be, but you came back to her anyway. You were ready to take anything she wanted to give you.
You said, “What are your conditions?”
And Bulma looked surprised—or relieved—or both—like she thought you would refuse her even that. “You need to try,” she finally said.
The truth is: you honestly do try.
For once in your miserable life, you try to shut the fuck up and not to say every cruel and nasty thing that pops into your head. You try not to lock yourself away training all day, every day. You try not to flinch at every touch, whether gentle or neutral (there are no hostile touches anymore, and the truth is that this aches in you like a phantom limb).
This is peacetime, and you are the strongest being alive on this pathetic planet. All of your visible wounds have long since mended, and you are healthier than you’ve ever been. There is no longer any logical reason to keep yourself as heavily defended as your every instinct tells you to be.
The truth is: you would not be the last living full-blooded Saiyan if you were not armed to the teeth beneath it all, even during armistice.
You still snap too much at Bulma and her family; you still have too short a temper with Trunks and the many needs of a young child; you still spend too many solitary hours punishing your body. You still covet a hostile touch.
(Bulma still smokes too many cigarettes and she still drives her car too fast for anyone's liking. She still chooses to share a bed with you nightly, still whispers in your ear, still pulls you closer. You consider yourself remarkably fortunate that Bulma likes things that are bad for her.)
-
You don’t normally go into the boy’s room if you can help it, but you’re ready for bed and looking for Bulma. When asked about it, you always mutter something about all of the qualities of the nursery that irk you: everything has a rounded edge, all of the furnishings suggest docile animals, and it’s too colorful, too loudly embellished.
The truth is: your son’s room, in the wealthiest home in the world, is fit for a prince. A true prince. It’s inescapable, really, that you resent the room and its ongoing reminder of how few clear memories you have of your own royal quarters, the ones you must have had on Vegetasei before Frieza stole you and murdered your planet.
(The truth is: your son’s father is a prince with no crown, no kingdom, and no people. You are the prince of all Saiyans; you are a prince of nothing, with nothing to pass onto your son but your pride.)
By the time you dare to slip into the nursery, Earth’s sun has been set for hours. The only light in the room is coming from the spray of softly glowing stars, projected onto the domed ceiling by some hidden mechanism that Bulma built. The lights drift around serenely, and all is quiet but for the even sounds of breathing. Bulma dozes in the plush rocking chair next to the boy’s crib, and Trunks dozes on her.
You feel like you should move Bulma, or wake her. (Actually, you know you should: she’s complained before about the crick in her neck she gets when she accidentally falls asleep in the nursery. She’ll be in a foul mood if that happens, but she will probably be in one regardless if you wake her.) You could and would move her easily if it weren’t for the boy.
The truth is: you have never held your son.
The truth is: you are afraid of nothing, and you are afraid of holding your son.
The truth is: your hands are weapons, and your whole body is a weapon, and you are afraid of holding your son.
(You’ve never admitted it aloud; you never intend to. It’s a stupid and shameful weakness, and you have shamed yourself, your son, and his mother enough as it is.)
In her sleep, Bulma turns her head from one side to the other, sighing as she adjusts. The boy shifts with her, his tiny face nestled against her chest, his tiny thumb in his mouth. You spend too many too-delicate seconds just watching the two of them breathe together: rising and falling and rising and falling, moon and tide, mother and baby.
(And you, the cowardly sentinel.)
Your hand stretches out to them on a whim of its own, without your proper notice. You don’t know what you’re reaching for, or why, but in that long moment before your touch can sully anything, Trunks opens his eyes and looks right at you. You freeze, but your son is undaunted: he reaches for your hand in return, and as five chubby fingers wrap around one of yours and grip it confidently, all you can do is stand there in a trance.
He’s strong—it shouldn’t surprise you, you already know exactly how strong your son will grow to be, but it does. It makes your head feel light and your heart—that old ugly lump of muscle, shot clean through by Frieza in another life—feel heavier than it ever has. Once, as an adolescent, you were close to disemboweled on a purging mission, and it was less painful than this unplaceable ache.
Trunks holds on for a minute, or perhaps an eternity, before his eyelids grow heavy again. His grip slackens as he eases back into slumber, and all at once your breath returns to your lungs.
You’ve been to hell once before; when you die you will certainly return. It won’t tip the scale of your crimes—not even close—but if you can live and die protecting Bulma and your son, you will have done one good thing.