Assignment

For many years, I was viewed by peers and superiors alike to be the mirror image of my mother. I even considered myself to be a carbon copy, if the blue hair and the deep sapphire eyes were anything to go by. The business associates of my mother, upon seeing my chubby, youthful form, would smile knowingly. I grew up surrounded by the foreshadowing remarks of my elders.

"Would you look at that? Let's hope she's inherited your smarts along with your looks."

"Look out, world—the next Bulma Brief is rising in the ranks!"

"If she's anything like her mother, I'd better watch out, huh?"

The business world revered and feared my mother, and it still does, despite her surmounting age. My mother has been an image of confidence and brilliance for every household—a woman with an infectious personality whose impact can be felt worldwide. The logo of her company is stamped in the annals of history. My resemblance to my mother may be uncanny, but I highly doubt that there will ever be a businessperson with a greater effect on humanity than her—not even me. My mother is truly unique: a rare gem. No one could ever hope to replace her, or trump her, if they tried. She is the queen.

But what if I told you that behind all of her successes is a man who has achieved a greater victory than she ever will? A man who has fought to the brink of collapse and beyond? This man prefers to stay in the shadows, shying away from attention. He has never been much of an extrovert. What if I told you that this man possesses intelligence that can rival my mother's?

He has been the victim of rumors, especially when the tabloids caught wind of a new relationship brewing in the Brief household years ago. The questions and allegations and speculations flew. Who was the mystery man? Why was he there? When did he enter the picture? It has been more than two decades now, bordering on three, since the reporters uncovered the news of my mother's mysterious romance with that mysterious new man.

Those reporters could never figure him out. He didn't let them. Being the private man that he is, he shooed them away. It still amuses me that, to this day, he manages to ward off the unfortunate journalists who try to take a step onto his lawn. It is rare now when one dares to trespass on Capsule Corporation territory. That man has gained quite a reputation for himself.

He is my father.

He takes quite a while to warm up to. In fact, a selection of my mother's closest gaggle of friends has yet to completely accept him as safe. Some still hold an inkling of a grudge against him for events that happened a long, long time ago, but they have mostly forgiven him for his past actions. He was a different man then.

When my mother first became aware of his existence, she thought him to be a ruthless fiend. She hated him for what he had done to her dearest friends. She was frightened of him, too, but mostly she was enraged at the sins he'd committed. It was only after a strange and unbelievable chain of events that she began to see him in a different light.

It was after the aforementioned events that my father found himself without a home, without a family, without a single soul who could ever truly empathize with him and his identity. He had managed to live with the loneliness for quite a while. But it did a job on his soul. Now that peace took hold of his life, the reality of his situation crashed down upon him. He was all alone. My mother saw this. While everyone else was inclined to condemn him and would have been happy to see him suffer, she decided to invite him to stay at her home so that he wouldn't have to roam the streets with nowhere to go.

She gave him a second chance at life.

It was during this time that she began to see an entirely new side to my father. He was not the cold and calloused man she had previously thought him to be. He'd become hardened to the world because of the darkness, pain, and loss that defined his past, and he was struggling to salvage the fragments of his life while putting up a mask of stoic strength.

That's all it was. A mask. A façade. He was afraid that his weakness would be discovered and preyed upon. He grew up in a harsh environment where one's weakness could be their downfall if they did not conceal it, and—as the saying goes—old habits die hard. He was really a noble and princely sort of man inside, but the scars of his past hindered him from discovering his true potential.

He wanted to be different. He wanted to change. He wanted to taste real freedom for the first time since he was a little boy. But he was stuck in the rut of his old lifestyle, and it seemed to be progressively swallowing him whole. He did not want his emotions to obscure his judgment, and so he avoided them, buried them, pushed them aside. He was a great man bound by old chains.

My mother saw this in him. She saw through his façade and realized that he was misunderstood. Ever since he was a child, he had been scorned. No one had taken the time to show him what love—true love—meant. Everyone around him only managed to hurt and twist and mangle him by tearing everything remotely good away, goading him toward the dark side. It was his pain—and ultimately his hatred of those who had caused the pain—that derailed him.

He made mistakes. He was not a saint by any stretch of the imagination. He succumbed to many temptations. The darkness inside of him had been festering through years of abuse, of hacking and slashing and bending his conceptions of honor, of love, and of sacrifice.

My mother was the one who helped heal him. Slowly, she worked to gain his trust, and inch by inch the layers peeled away to reveal the real man inside. It was a long and arduous process, riddled with battles and setbacks the likes of which no one but my mother's special friends would ever believe; and when a son was born as a result, it only grew more difficult.

But both of them pulled through each and every trial, and both grew stronger from them. My mother learned the art of patience and achieved the confidence she needed to run her business more efficiently. My father changed in ways that no one could have expected. There was one day, however, that blatantly showed how drastic his transformation really was.

It was the day he made final atonement for the mistakes that haunted his past. It was a day that occurred several years before I was born, for by the time I came into the world, my father had already become a hero. It was a day that clearly showed how much he loved my mother and their son—my older brother, Trunks. That day, it was made clear to all that he was a new man.

My father had a rival then, and he still does, but their rivalry is no longer one of animosity. In the years before I was born, my father hated that rival with a passion because he always managed to surpass my father's abilities.

His rival may be physically stronger, but my father, I believe, is the better man.

I watched the act that my father's rival committed with my own eyes, back when I was just a toddler. He left his family. He left his friends. And he left them indefinitely. He went away to mentor a young boy. His wife's pain was etched upon her features, and yet he winked out of sight without a second thought.

It is my father who still remains alongside his own family, mentoring his own children rather than a strange boy in a far-off corner of the world. It is my father who offers profound advice that stems directly from his experience during his painful childhood. (Sometimes I wonder if my father endured all of those hardships in preparation for the life he has now.) It is my father who has committed himself to being loyal until the very end. It is my father who is the only man capable of balancing my mother's mercurial temperament with his own.

It is my father who has become my role model. To me, he is a true hero.

Letting out a breath she wasn't aware of holding, Bulla brushed a blue curl from her eyes. Her lips tugged into a smile. The students were fully aware of her status as daughter of the richest woman in the world. They clapped in respect, but none of them had gotten the real significance of her essay. They could appreciate her choice of words and might appreciate that "mystery man" known as Bulla's father, but they were unable to accept the deeper meaning. And how could they possibly understand? They, along with the majority of the world, were deceived by Hercule and his opinion of the light tricks at the Cell Games. Their parents' knowledge of the Buu incident had been wiped away, so they were clueless as to what actually happened.

But Bulla got the feeling that her father didn't mind.

He'd never been much for attention, anyway.

END.