One

The door swung shut behind Yamcha. The bar was dimly lit, smoky, and the air smelled distinctly of damp wood. Yamcha slumped over to the barstool, before pulling out a stool and seating himself on it.

“One shot of whiskey,” he called out, gesturing to the lone bartender.

The bartender got out a small cup. He fetched a bottle of whiskey, unscrewing the top and tilting it over and letting the liquid rush out of the bottle. He stopped when the cup was full, before screwing the lid back onto the bottle and putting it away. After putting a small toothpick into the glass, he brought the whiskey over to Yamcha.

“That’ll be 510 zeni,” the bartender told Yamcha, who took out his wallet. As he pulled out the money, he noticed a small, wallet photo of Bulma. He grabbed the picture along with the money, taking both out of the fold in his wallet.

Handing the money over to the bartender, he quietly asked, “You guys have a trashcan?” The bartender took the zeni and pointed over to a corner of the room, where a dustbin lie. He took the small photo and dropped it into the bin, watching it float down to the hole and into the trash. He put his wallet away and moved back to his stool. Sitting down, he swirled the whiskey around with the toothpick. Glumly, Yamcha stared into his one murky reflection in the whiskey.

He noticed that his hair had grown longer and that the origins of a beard were forming on his chin. His scars had not started to heal yet, which was of no surprise to Yamcha. As he swirled the whiskey again, his image disappeared, mixing into a blur of yellow and black colors.

Turning his head to the left, he saw a man physically dominating a girl. He had her backed up against a wall, leering over her. He was a large man, very muscular, and clearly was about to engage in some less than savory acts with the girl.

Yamcha’s instincts took over, as his heroism came immediately to the forefront. He stood up and walked over to them, before calling out, “Come on, man, let up on the girl. Nobody needs that.”

The man turned over to Yamcha, smirking a little bit. “Yeah, go bother someone else, big guy. I’m in the middle of something,” he scoffed.

“Come on, just let the girl go and we won’t have any trouble.”

“What’s that? You wanna fight? Come at me, big guy. I’ve got time for you.”

Yamcha sighed. He didn’t want to have to use violence against this guy, but he would do what he had to do. It wouldn’t be his first bar fight. He used to get into them quite often, getting into tussles before he was even old enough to drink. He and Puar would go around, stealing from people and scrapping with all sorts of folks. This was just another fight, just another scuffle.

Faster than anyone in the bar could see, Yamcha pinned the big man to the wall, causing a large dent in the wall. This would have been enough to stop the man – he had a genuine look of terror on his face – but Yamcha was angry. Maybe not at the man, but he was angry and dissatisfied. He needed an outlet, he needed to go off on someone, and this was the man that had been asking for it.

Yamcha raised his fist, mostly out of muscle memory, and laid a right hook across the man’s cheek. He crashed down to the floor, blood leaking out of his cheek.

It took Yamcha a moment to realize what he had done. He bent over, checking the man’s vital signs. There were none. That was all it took – one hit, one moment of indecision, one second of weakness, and a man was dead. Yamcha knew this before coming to the bar, he knew that a single bad decision could take a life. Why he kept trying to be a part of this society, he didn’t know. He knew that he couldn’t fit into the world of normal humans.

Looking around the bar, he noticed that all eyes were on him. Yamcha didn’t have much time to think about the morality of what he had just done – he wasn’t concentrating on the present and he wasn’t thinking much. He walked back over to the barstool. Swiftly, he grabbed his whiskey and drank it down. The bartender was one the phone behind the counter, presumably calling the police. Yamcha wasn’t too concerned about them.

He waited for the bartender to finish his call.

“Was that the police?” Yamcha calmly asked.

The bartender had started crouching behind the counter. “Yea – yeah! Get out of here!”

Yamcha calmly nodded. “Can you fix me another whiskey?”

“No! Leave! You don’t belong here!”

This line made Yamcha particularly angry. He walked away, back to the door. He kicked the door open, causing it to fly off its hinges. Looking around himself, he saw that he was alone. Silently wondering where the nearest desert was, Yamcha leaped off the ground. He took flight, and he started flying to the north.

Yamcha soon found the ground again. As his feet made contact, small puffs of sand came up into the air. He looked around, seeing an oasis to the left of him and more sand to the right. The stars were more visible here than they were in the city, and they all shone brilliantly in the dark sky. For a moment, Yamcha thought he saw the moon, but it was only a mirage. His memory of the moon was only a relic of the past, a faint image of what once was.

Well, what was Yamcha supposed to do? He couldn’t train with the Z Fighters – they were too much for him. He couldn’t live with the other humans – they weren’t enough for him. He had traveled to King Kai’s planet, fought against the Saiyans, seen the murder of Frieza and King Cold. There wasn’t much left in normal society to interest him. He was just a bug, a predator, in the normal world.

Maybe he could go back to being a bandit, stealing from clueless travelers in the desert. He had never felt unsatisfied back then, he had never felt anything less than happy back when he had done that. How was it possible that seeing so much more had left him so much less fulfilled?

“All right, Puar, I guess we should find our old base.”

The only response Yamcha received was one, single gust of wind.

Endnotes

 * This story takes place in between the Trunks and Android sagas.
 * This story is 1,111 words long.