Title: Wu Wei
Author/Artist:
daffodil_brill Character(s) or Pairing(s): Vegeta/Goku, past Goku+Grandpa Gohan
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: YMMV Characterization, (hopefully) tasteful references to adult situations.
Summary: “Wu Wei is "without action" and is often included in the paradox wei wu wei: "action without action" or "effortless doing". A moment inspired buy
pixelgoddess ’s “
Quest”.
Disclaimer: I get to play with these guys, but I have to clean them off before I give them back. “Quest” belongs to Pixelgoddess, and the quote in the summary comes from the Wikipedia page on “Wu Wei.”
Flavor Music: “
wingless” by dai.
Author’s Notes: Semi-new writer here, hi! :D I've been a fan of these guys for quite a while, but this was the first time I felt really able to write them. There were a lot of good moments in “Quest,” and this was inspired by one of them. I say "inspired" because my characterization is a bit different, and because I imagined the moment described taking place in "Maintaining," but I hope you'll like it anyway. Sometimes there’s music I listen to so I can get in the “mood” to write a scene--it’s optional, but if you’d like to hear some of the music that had in my mind while listening to this, I’ve included the links above. Happy listening!
C+C welcome!
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Vegeta smiled to himself, remembering an entire day spent fishing - not that they caught any fish. Instead they just sat, hardly talking, enjoying each other's company, watching the birds fly overhead and the play of light on the water. He had been annoyed and bored at first - shouldn't they be doing something? But Kakorr had showed him what he saw and how it felt through their bond. He had eventually relented, not wanting to make Kakorr unhappy. It had been an amazing day - he hadn't experienced his normal worries and doubts - he had just...lived.
- Quest, Chapter 38
The leaves become lips, brushing against Vegeta’s neck in early morning sunlight, sending shivers over his skin. Vegeta scowls and screws his eyes shut even tighter.
It’s not even a bad feeling, he thinks, it’s just stupid. Everything about this is stupid. Stupid Kakarrot, stupid eyelids, stupid lips on his neck, breath on his throat, hands kneading butterflies into Vegeta’s stomach--
“Vegeta, are you sure you don’t want to open your eyes?”
A tree root catches Vegeta’s foot; he stumbles, almost letting his eyes fly open. Stupid Kakarrot. Stupid them and the goddamn bond letting those floating, sunlit thoughts brush up against his own, sneaking up on him. “Weren’t you the one who wanted me to keep my eyes closed?” he says, steeling his voice as best he can.
“Yeah, but--”
“Then stop--” Vegeta curses as leaves tickle his neck again, tickle and tease like fingers and lips that remind him of spring petals. Petals that he wants to burn to ash right now to keep them from making his pulse race and his face flush. “Stop distracting me!” he shouts, tail lashing behind him.
“We’re almost there, anyway, but okay.” Goku squeezes his hand--warm, skin and sweat and the press of his heart line against Vegeta’s life line. And the bond warms the back of Vegeta’s mind with Goku’s thoughts, wholesome specks of light he can almost touch.
“...geta?”
Stupid stupid stupid warm sunshine and stomach twisting and turning into his throat. “What?” he snaps, brows furrowing down again.
“You can open your eyes now.” Thoughts flutter at the back of his mind, quick flickerings of a child too excited to keep a secret.
Vegeta’s eyelids tremble, and he finally cracks them open to a scene right out of a painting.
The trees do not tower. Instead, their trunks meander up until the branches burst forth with leaves. Light streams down between the cracks, illuminating the forest that fences them in for miles. The clearing they stand in has a lake that reflects bits of the sky and grass inviting them to rest and shut their eyes.
“We’re training in a different area today, I see.” Vegeta says, brows creasing as he yanks his hand away and crosses his arms, and the sun is giving him sunburn. He’ll have Kakarrot deal with it later. “What’s wrong with the house?”
“Who said we were training?”
Goku steps forward. Now that his eyes are open Vegeta’s eyes catch the poles slung across his back and a burlap sack, sagging with food, hanging from his left hand. “Kakarrot? What are you--”
Goku takes the poles off his back, fingers touching the ground--almost petting it. “Grandpa brought me here sometimes if I was having a bad training day,” Goku says, sticking one pole into the ground and steadying it. “If he saw me struggling, he’d bring me up here, give me a rod, and tell me to help him catch fish for dinner.”
Vegeta narrows his eyes. “I’ve seen your son fish, and if he learned what he knows from you, then you definitely don’t use rods.”
“Nope, I’ve never caught a fish using anything but my bare hands. And that’s the entire point,” he says, leaning back and looking at Vegeta over his shoulder. A dark eye sparkles at him, a speck of sunlight against warm brown. His tail thumps against the grass. “C’mon. The sunlight is perfect.”
“That’s it?” Vegeta feels his tail thrashing behind him as he steps forward out of the shade. “We just--”
“--sit here,” Goku says, beaming as though this isn’t a phenomenal waste of time.
Vegeta’s fingers curl into fists, and the tip of his tail twitches. “You really expect me to--”
“Vegeta, please.” Goku’s smile softens and his brow lifts. He holds out a hand, twitching his fingers and lifting his eyebrows. “Try it for me?”
...Fucking Kakarrot, Vegeta thinks, and the twisting strands in his stomach tumble about into tangles. He steps into the sunlight, taking Goku’s hand and letting the other pull him to the ground. The grass yields beneath his weight, cool and gentle under his fingertips.
Goku’s hand smoothes up his back, splaying between his shoulder blades. “You’re so tense,” he murmurs, and Vegeta refuses to turn and look at his face, instead opting to gaze across the water.
He narrows his eyes when Goku prods his thoughts--not invasive, just curious. “Kakarrot,” he growls.
“Vegeta--”
“Hmpf.” Vegeta’s knees curl into his chest and he tightens his glare, tightens the hold on his side of the bond.
“If you squint any harder, you’re going to get a headache.”
Vegeta doesn’t care. He keeps watching, sunlight sharp on his eyes and forehead, and forces himself to focus and stay alert. He can’t afford to get caught off-guard with such low ki, and--
“Vegeta.” Goku’s voice startles Vegeta, making him whip his tail. “You’re ruining the whole point of why I brought you out here.”
A large hand comes up to rest on his knee. Vegeta starts back, uncurling, and the hand moves to his chest. Vegeta feels every beat of his heart against Goku’s palm as it presses him back into the grass.
Vegeta blinks and stares into Goku’s face, all wide brown eyes and lifted eyebrows, bright sunray thoughts prickling at the back of Vegeta’s head.
“I’m fine,” Vegeta says, and hates how his word-knotted stomach, Kakarrot’s palm, and the sun-sharpened edge of the world turn his voice meek.
Vegeta feels Goku’s other hand coming up, smoothing through the dark spike of his hair. “Vegeta,” he says, “close your eyes.”
Vegeta’s scowl deepens as his teeth clench, and God he wants this to go away, wants all his tension to just get soaked up by the ground--
It can do that.
Vegeta gasps a little at Goku’s thought, a whisper through the bond. Something starts trickling through, a steady, silver stream flowing into his shoulders, arms, torso. Every part of his body heaves a sigh and relaxes, weighing him down.
“It’s okay,” Goku says, and Vegeta wonders for a moment when the idiot got so close, close enough to touch foreheads. “Shut your eyes,” he whispers again, breath feathering across his cheeks.
Vegeta shivers. His eyes flutter shut to a gold-tinted darkness.
Vegeta, look. Goku’s thoughts brush up against his own. Vegeta’s eyelids open halfway, but a hand covers them, keeps them closed. “Keep them closed.”
“But you--”
“Shh.”
A pause in the air fills with bird twitters, and when Kakarrot leans forward again his voice was closer. “Open up,” he whispers, smoothing the hand on Vegeta’s eyes up into his hair. “Let me in, Vegeta. Please let me show you this world. Please?”
Yes, Vegeta tries to say, but it only escapes as a sigh.
Yes.
Vegeta feels something in their bond give. He lets it, stops fighting, as light blooms behind his eyelids, a vivid butter-yellow against blue sky.
“When I was little,” Goku continues, and his fingers scratch Vegeta’s scalp, “Grandpa told me that this was how he found the balance he needed to fight.”
Interesting. Vegeta thinks, and the crack in his mind goes wider, Kakarrot trickling in just enough to turn the grass beneath his back into velvet.
“He told me that when my body ached and my spirit felt weary, I should come here and just sit and be. To just--do something without doing it.” Goku chuckles, and the sound blends with the cool winds rustling Vegeta’s hair. “I didn’t really understand until I got older.”
Circles of thread-thin gold radiate outwards behind Vegeta’s eyelids, shimmering and glistening as they broke apart. Again and again--some small, some large, all moving up and down on a fluid surface.
These small, individual senses come together, start running along one another in a seamless tapestry of birdsong, sunshine, warm grass beneath his back and tail. Kakarrot presses harder, wanting in.
“Vegeta....”
His voice sounds so close. Goku’s tail runs over Vegeta’s palm.
“Open your eyes.”
Vegeta does.
The world has lost its hard knife-edge, and he doesn’t have to squint to appreciate the sunshine glancing off the leaves, or the ripples skittering across the water. His limbs feel too heavy to lift him those last few inches to Kakarrot’s mouth. And he’s fine with that. He’s fine. Everything is fine.
“Kakarrot,” he whispers.
Kakarrot doesn’t say anything, his tail swishing behind him as he purrs, loud, deep in his chest. He leans down, bumps their noses together, and his head tilts and his eyelids flutter as their lips touch, spread, try to get as much of the other as possible.
Vegeta breaks their kiss when he feels something tender and warm in his blood, fuck, fuck and his heart won’t stop racing, won’t calm down, won’t stop trying to force something out of his throat. “Later,” he says, hand splayed over Kakarrot’s heart. Vegeta nips Kakarrot’s lower lip and dammit, they won’t. Go. Away.
“Yeah,” Kakarrot breathes, laying down beside him. “Okay, Vegeta. Later.”
“Mmm.”
Vegeta rolls over, rests his head on Kakarrot’s shoulder, and doesn’t shut his eyes. Instead, he imagines himself soaring above these mountains, just below where the sky begins, and watches it play a patchwork of shadow and light over the rolling hills.
____
Bonus Story - Hoshi
It is sunset, but they still sit there.
Vegeta sleeps, his chest lifting and falling, the tip of his tail twitching. And for now, Goku watches over him, watches and wishes with all his might that he could reach in and pull every trace of Frieza from Vegeta’s body.
His hands clench, helpless frustration roiling into his body--and then his fingers loosen, open, palms facing each other as Grandpa Gohan speaks to a little boy in his memory.
“Grandpa, why are you letting those little light balls fly out into the sky?”
“They’re wishes, Goku. Wishes I hope--I know--will come true.”
“But didn’t you tell me once that there’s something out there that will grant wishes, no matter what?”
Goku shuts his eyes. He thinks of Vegeta’s face, his eyes, the fluid motions of their body in fighting and lovemaking, the two twined together. He thinks of Vegeta smiling, Vegeta snapping at him even as he lets Goku pull him close--the Vegeta he wants to find happiness
A tiny ball of Ki forms between his palms.
Goku shifts the ki into one hand and leans down over Vegeta. And as he presses a down-feather kiss to Vegeta’s forehead, as he feeds the ki into Vegeta’s chest, Grandpa’s words resonate in an echo.
”There is. But even so, I prefer this wishing, anyway.
“Why?”
“Because these are tiny wishes, Goku. But I believe in them with every fiber of my being, and I’ve learned that maybe, those are the most powerful wishes you can make.”