▸ Column · Saiyan / Planet Trade aftermath — adapted to a warrior-caste family and their quarters
VEGETA replies.
The letter
My brother Declan limped back into our family's quarters fourteen months ago after his third "temporary setback" in four years, and ever since, our parents have outfitted the lower chamber for him like a noble's suite — new bunk, a cold-store of his own, a viewscreen bigger than the one they watch. Meanwhile my two children and I slept on the floor during our two-week visit. He's thirty-four, runs courier flights maybe twenty hours a week, and pays nothing toward rations or the household, yet every time I gently raise it, my parents tell me I "manage my stress poorly." Last cycle my father co-signed a brand-new fast-craft for him without a blink — which stings, because three years back I asked to borrow enough to cover a healing-tank bill and was handed a lecture on budgeting instead. I don't want their resources; I've stood on my own since I was twenty-two. But watching them quietly build a life-support rig for my brother while treating me as the one who needs nothing is turning a low hum of resentment into something I can barely keep out of my voice at family dinners — and I don't know how to say any of it without shattering a family that's already mended with tape.
Vegeta replies
Hmph. You've buried something true under a heap of accounting — the chamber, the rations, the loan they refused you. Let me cut to it. Your parents are not loving your brother. They are killing him slowly with comfort, building him a soft coffin and calling it devotion. A grown man who labors twenty hours and lets others carry the rest is not being rescued; he is being taught he never has to close a single gap. I do not envy what they're handing him. I pity it. I served a creature who handed me everything and made me a weapon for it — comfort from the wrong hands is a leash, fool.
Now the part you flinch from, which I'll say because I respect you too much to flatter: you are measuring yourself by what HE receives, and that number will rot you from the spine outward. You slept on the floor beside your children and demanded nothing — that is not the wound. That is your strength. The thing you would suffer for was in that room. Stop counting his furniture.
And the resentment cracking your voice? Don't strangle it into silence. Say one true, clumsy sentence at that table, even if it fractures something. I lost years unable to. The unsaid is the wound that never closes.
— Vegeta
Frieza weighs in
Oh, how touching — Vegeta, the prince I once owned and discarded, now ladling warmth across a dinner table like a nursemaid. You poor things, both of you. Let me correct the sentimentalist with something useful. Your parents haven't wronged you, darling. You committed the one unforgivable error: you made yourself self-sufficient, and the self-sufficient require no feeding. Your idle brother grasped a leverage you never did — he made himself a thing that must be maintained. You announced you needed nothing, and the universe, ever obliging, granted it precisely. Don't shatter the table, as the prince begs you. Simply stop performing your independence for people who reward dependence. How delightful, expecting fairness from blood. Adorable.
— Frieza
▸ Read next