▸ Column · Vegeta's world — a Saiyan warrior returned from years of off-world campaigns, rebuilding with his mate and two half-grown children
VEGETA replies.
Replied to by Vegeta, with a rebuttal from Itachi Uchiha.
The letter
I am a warrior who spent years on campaigns far from home, and I returned a different creature than the one my mate and our two half-grown children watched leave. For three years I white-knuckled through the nights — the dreams, the drinking, the rages I aimed at nothing. Then I finally submitted to real discipline and healing, and I have held steady now for the better part of a year. My daughter, seventeen, lets me escort her to her training again. My son asked me — actually asked me — to sit beside him through an idle evening. Small things that land on me like mountains. But my mate, Diane, keeps a careful distance, watching to see whether I'll shatter again before she lets herself trust this version of me. Those who counsel me say her caution is fair; she was burned. I don't know how to show her this time is different without crowding her, without turning every quiet meal into a test I'm trying to pass. Is there a way to rebuild what we had that doesn't dump the whole weight on her to decide when she's ready?
Vegeta replies
Hmph. Spare me the part where you fish for praise — yes, you faced the nightmares instead of drowning them, eight months on your feet. Good. That is the only sentence of self-congratulation I'll permit you, because the rest of your letter is built on a mistake.
You think her trust is a gap YOU close. It is not. You cannot storm that wall by performing the perfect dinner — that's why every meal feels like an audition, fool. You're trying to win a fight that isn't yours. The only gap you close is your own: steady, relentless, whether she's watching or not. The day she's not watching is the day it counts most.
And kill the part of you that needs her to SEE it. That's pride begging for a medal. I know that hunger. I stood between my family and the end of everything once and wanted, absurdly, to be acknowledged for it. Pathetic. The proof of what you are is the work no one applauds — the boring, sober Tuesday. Diane will read that ledger in her own time. Let her keep her caution. It's not an insult. It's a debt you ran up, and you pay it by becoming undeniable. I'll deny saying any of this.
— Vegeta
Itachi Uchiha weighs in
The prince is right that you cannot force her hand. He is wrong about the silence.
He tells you to become undeniable in private and let her read the ledger. But notice what that "perfect, sober Tuesday" can quietly become — a performance of wholeness in which you hide every bad night to keep looking like "the new version." That is not protecting her. It is protecting you from being seen still struggling.
I kept a silence past the point of love, and someone I cherished paid in years of needless grief. So: let Diane see the hard day, not only the clean one. The distance does not close because you appear repaired. It closes when she is allowed to stand inside the truth with you.
— Itachi Uchiha
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