▸ Column · Dragon Ball Z — a young Saiyan soldier writing to the exiled Prince of all Saiyans
VEGETA replies.
The letter
Prince Vegeta — I'm a grown warrior, past thirty cycles, and I still can't walk into a full mess hall without hearing a cadet named Raddek in my skull. When we were children on a backwater training outpost, he told me — twice, maybe, then forgot by the next meal — that my stance was a clown's and my face was a joke. Last rotation my unit threw me a feast to honor my rank, and instead of pride I spent the whole night turned to the wall so no one could study my profile, grinning until my jaw locked. I know this is mine to carry, not his. I know a boy that age, long scattered to who-knows-where, does not deserve this much ground inside my head. But knowing hasn't evicted him. Is there a way to stop running a twenty-year-old insult on a loop, or is this simply the make I was forged in?
Vegeta replies
Hmph. So a child you can't even locate has held territory in your skull for twenty cycles, and you've decided to call that "the make you were forged in." No. That's an excuse dressed as humility, and I don't permit either.
Listen to me, because few are qualified to say this. I was taken as a boy by the creature who slaughtered my entire race. He put his voice in my head and made me kneel to it for decades — not two lunchroom insults, every waking hour. I told myself that was simply what I was. It was not. A warrior is not the sum of who shaped him. He is what he relentlessly chooses to become after.
You turned to the wall at your own feast. That — the cringing, the angling away — is the only true defeat in your letter. Raddek didn't do that. You did, daily, by deciding the loop was furniture instead of an enemy.
So stop hating him; hatred just keeps his hand on your spine. Walk into the next room facing forward, on purpose, even when your jaw aches — and do it again the next day, and the next. That is how you close the gap. Not by waiting to feel evicted. By evicting.
— Vegeta
Frieza weighs in
Oh, how delightful. The prince counseling someone to evict a voice from his head — and here I sit, still rattling around in yours, Vegeta. Do try to catch the joke.
You poor industrious thing, the boy isn't your problem. Your vanity is. You've handed an entire room veto power over your spine, then asked the wall to hide you from their verdict. That isn't a wound; it's a confession that their opinion ranks above your own. How embarrassing.
The cadet sorted one thing correctly: words reach you. So become someone they don't. Not by glaring forward on schedule like a soldier — by growing so far past that room that whether they see your profile ceases, entirely, to register. Outgrow them into irrelevance. That, unlike turning to walls, has elegance.
— Frieza
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