WIP Wednesday | Lachrimae

He barely ate. Nerves were twisting and gnawing at his guts. He had made this haphazard, roughshod plan, getting from Point A to Point B, but now that he was here, the prospect of walking into a room with his father — as a child — was…

…daunting.

He could feel him. Vegeta's ki had never left his awareness ever since that first moment in the shuttle. Not when he'd finally managed sleep, and not now that he was awake in the earliest hours of the morning. A small star now, so much dimmer than the one he'd known, and yet unmistakable.

Trunks finally shoved out of bed with restless energy. The tile was cool beneath his feet, and he found himself focusing on the details of the sensation. He noted the press of each individual toe against the floor, then the ball of his foot, then back to the heel. Each recorded observation eased some of that waking anxiety, until he felt himself even once more.

Trunks was surprised to discover that he’d be taking a shuttle to the capital. For a brief moment, he thought about arguing the superior speed of flying, but set the impulse aside soon enough. It would give him time to think, at least.

Frieza’s visit had clearly been a brief one; he felt his power begin to recede from the planet the morning after the bar. But even then, the planet still buzzed with countless lower level ki. It was a strange sensation: he grew up with so many unbelievably powerful fighters, but Earth by and large was populated with people without any fighting ki at all. Vegetasei was like a constant hum of feedback in comparison. Feeling so many palpable ki made everything a mess in his head, as each individual became a single pixel in a screen of television static.

Trunks was half-asleep when he felt a slow creeping in the edges of his awareness, like smelling something from his childhood that he couldn’t quite place.

He opened his eyes, blinking into the dim light of the shuttle, and then at Nappa across the way from him; he was dead asleep and snoring audibly. Trunks closed his eyes again and eased into the inner sense he’d been cultivating since childhood. He reached out carefully, like grasping smoke between his fingers. Like he was chasing a ghost.