A Calming Place
In the vastness of an ever-expanding universe, a human life is a tiny, frail, insignificant thing. This truth is undeniably evident in the very life energies of human beings. A single digit on a scouter. Usually invisible to the senses. Among the natives to this planet, only the Earthling fighters that followed Kakarrot around like dogs had raised their energy enough for it to be clearly perceived.
For Vegeta, energy-sensing is a mimicked trick. Such a thing was unheard of among the Saiyans or Frieza's organization. Like any technique he's copied instead of studied, his handling is clumsier than he'd like. On Earth, surrounded by such weak creatures, it is impossible to practice. Compared to someone who studied the skill underneath a master, his handling is inelegant and imprecise.
The unexpected energy level Vegeta feels entering the Capsule Corp. compound is in no way a threat to him. Though his rational mind knows this tiny energy is not a danger to him or his, Vegeta's own power spikes. His son is with him. He will tear this being apart should they try to reach the babe.
Energy-sensing is a trick he mimicked from Kakarrot and his cronies. For much of his life as a predator and hunter, he relied on other senses - smell, sight, hearing.
There is noise downstairs. Slamming doors. Shouting voices.
The volume and emotion he hears makes the voices hard to parse at first, but soon enough he realizes he is listening to Bulma. She's the one slamming the doors and yelling. The voice of whoever she is yelling at doesn't carry all the way to the nursery. Her mother, he presumes. "Venting," she would call it.
The unfamiliar energy he felt coincide with the commotion downstairs belongs to Bulma as well. He has never been able to sense her life energy before. Something has made her very angry, but since hers is the only apparent energy, she is not reacting to a threat from another being.
In a matter of moments, his own energy lowers as well. There is no threat, no need to fight or posture and he lets it ebb.
On the nursery carpet, Trunks growls.
Seated cross-legged facing him, Vegeta growls back.
Prior to the momentary distraction of Bulma's energy, they had been engaged in this exchange of noises for fifteen minutes. If he was on the outside, watching another father and son play this game, Vegeta would have found it insipid. But in his own offspring, it is fascinating.
Human children, Bulma has told him, do a great deal of learning in their first year of life. Though it seems as though Trunks is not capable of anything, he is in fact learning a great deal of challenging skills. He is learning to coordinate his body. He is learning to use noise to express his wishes purposefully. Much of this learning comes in the form of mimicry. If an adult does a repetitive action in front of Trunks, Trunks will copy it. Bulma and her mother have taught Trunks a repertoire of useless tricks this way - he will clap his hands, do something they call a "high five" and make a score of other gestures on command.
What is particularly surprising about this phenomenon is that it appears to work both ways. Vegeta had been silently observing Trunks "play," an activity involving picking up one or two of a multitude of brightly colored objects fashioned to resemble things found on Earth, move them about and ultimately abandon them for another, when Trunks suddenly looked as his father and growled at him.
Vegeta growled back.
Trunks growled back. And so the stalemate began.
"I swear to God," Bulma announces, storming into the nursery, "I don't care how many diapers you had to change, you had a better evening than I did." She is in a grotesquely large and baggy shirt, so long that the ends of her shorts just barely peek out from underneath the hem. The neckline is so large it has fallen off her shoulder. Her face is still painted in the rainbow of foul tasting powders she calls "make-up." Her hair is still pinned to her head in tantalizing loops that emphasize the graceful curve of her neck.
Trunks, still invested in his growling contest with his father, grunts again.
"Oh," Bulma chirps, "You found his rumble noise. He's been doing that since he was born. Isn't it cute?" She crouches down on her haunches and growls at their son. He growls back. She holds out her arms. "Come see Mama."
Obediently, albeit not very steadily, Trunks rises to his feet and begins to toddle towards his mother. He takes three good steps before missing the fourth and toppling over.
His son is the most unbearably fragile thing Vegeta has ever seen. His energy spikes again, that fierceness that Bulma has labeled "paternal."
She says, "You're fine." Trunks caught himself on his hands. He isn't so much upset by his fall as he is shocked. After a few seconds tick by and Trunks has not hoisted himself to his feet again, Bulma commands, "Get up." Her son seems to not only listen to his mother's voice, but comprehend her words. He pushes off the carpet and rises to his feet again to complete the journey to her arms. Bulma rewards him with a hug and a declaration: "Yay! Good job, Trunks!"
To Vegeta, she says, "You can't freak out every time he falls. That's just going to teach him to freak out."
"I did nothing."
Bulma wrinkles her nose. "You got all tense. Look, I know this sounds super callous and it's easy for me to say because I wasn't there, but you've got to let this thing about big Trunks go. Your son right here didn't die. He tripped. He's learning to walk. He's gonna trip. I promise you, he can handle it. And you know - I've never seen you have a hard time in a fight, but the thing everyone says about you is that you don't stay down. You get back up, no matter what. Don't you want Trunks to be the same way?"
The frown he's worn all day deepens. "He's frail."
Bulma laughs. "He's really not." She rises to her feet, his baby in her arms. "I could drop him."
"You will do no such thing."
"Of course I wouldn't!" Vegeta's commanding tone does nothing to cut Bulma's mirth. "I know a Saiyan baby would be able to purge whole planets at this age or whatever, but that doesn't mean that Trunks is going to fall apart because he can't." She shifts to address the baby. "Did you have fun with your over-protective papa bear?"
Trunks responds with, "Papapapapapapapapapa!"
"Oh, yes, I see," Bulma nods thoughtfully. "Thanks," she says, addressing Vegeta again, "for tonight. The party sucked and I am so annoyed that whatever I bribed you with, you aren't gonna get, but thanks for watching him. Was he too much trouble?"
"He was an infant."
"I don't know if that means 'yes' or 'no' in Saiyan."
"He made incoherent noises and threw things."
"Right. Did you feed him?"
"No."
"Change him?"
"No."
Bulma sighs and assaults the dignity of his child by taking the boy's pants and peeling them away to look down his diaper. "What are you doing?" Vegeta asks tersely.
"Checking to see if he needs a change."
"You have a sense of smell," he growls.
"And I have eyes, too! I can use both!"
"Why do you expect him to soil himself?"
"Vegeta, he is too young to understand how to use a toilet. Never mind getting himself to a toilet."
"Because you have low expectations. You're teaching him to be lazy."
"Says the guy who practically went bleach-blonde when he tripped. And ugh, I can't believe you didn't feed him. He's half-Saiyan. He's hungry."
"Your estimation of Saiyan blood is very inconsistent. He's not Saiyan when it is time to walk or defecate, only when it is time to eat."
"I'm not going to listen to you talk about poop, Vegeta. I have a child to feed."
Human mothers, Bulma has explained to him, secrete milk to feed their babies. He remembers this conversation largely because it rankled him at the time. Saiyan child-rearing practices were different from the Earth's, but that did not mean he was unfamiliar with mammalian biology. He made that very protest at the time, which only angered her because he was not letting her "get to the point." It was some time before they were able to get back around to the topic, but ultimately the issue had been that while she considered breast-feeding important on a social dynamics level, her human body was simply not capable of keeping up with the demands of feeding Trunks.
Pointing out that she had adequately fed him in utero and now should be no different only resulting in Bulma pulling out a series of charts she had prepared which showed the growth of Trunks' appetite over time.
What Vegeta had taken away from all of this when it was all said and done was, firstly, this had absolutely nothing to do with him and secondly, Bulma enjoyed plotting data on charts. What she had intended for him to take away from the conversation was that Trunks was fed on a mixture of breast milk and formula, and when he was baby-sitting, Vegeta was to give Trunks formula.
Tonight, however, Trunks is to dine on a meal of his mother's milk. For some reason, Bulma thinks this is best done with parent and child both nude - for "bonding." As much as he wishes she possessed some sort of modesty, Bulma simply strips down and attaches the child to her breast with Vegeta still in the room.
With her in this state, his eyes are drawn to her breasts: larger than he remembers and the nipples have grown discolored.
She's looking down at her baby with a gentle smile when she says, "You can go. I'll put him to bed."
He had certainly not been waiting on her permission, or a formal dismissal, but even so, Vegeta is willing to depart once his responsibility for the evening has been taken up by someone else. He doesn't resent his son, exactly, but keeping another creature alive and in good spirits is a somewhat more difficult prospect than killing one. It's an unfamiliar territory, a landscape with many variables and no shortcuts. He finds himself both eager to be with the child and eager to be away from him simultaneously. Bulma's feelings on the subject to not appear to be as mixed as his own, so he finds relinquishing Trunks to her palatable.
Kakarrot is gone. Frieza, as well. To toggle between his original and ascended state is simple. He has no goals left. Nothing he particularly cares about on this or any other planet. Not that long ago, he had a partner in battle; a fierce and unyielding warrior, rather sloppy in his tactics, but stubborn as hell, quiet and determined. Vegeta learned too late to appreciate the boy, learned too late that a comrade's life held more value to himself than his own, learned too late that the respect he felt for his son was love.
Vegeta is without goals on this planet, or anything he particularly cares about, aside from the baby upstairs with his mama. Trunks will never grow up to the young man who spent a year in hell with his father or the one who was murdered by Cell or the one who spent his life being hunted by robots. He will never become the young man who idolized, was disappointed by, and ultimately learned to accept his father for who he was.
Vegeta simply will not let him.
He has had partners before Trunks, but they were always out of necessity. When mere survival required working with someone by your side, Vegeta had been able to accept a temporary alliance. Trust stretched only as far as the knowledge that the person he worked with needed him for their own reasons. Goals were not aligned completely and good character was a thing of children's fictions.
Bulma is, perhaps, the first person he fully trusts. She is just as invested as he in seeing their son grow up to be anything but the last man standing.
She finds him again, sometime later, in the kitchen. Talk of feeding Trunks had made Vegeta hungry, as the mention of food always did. In the interim, Bulma has clothed herself, thankfully. Her eyes rove over his plates, seeking something appealing to steal. He is not surprised when she takes a pork bun.
She starts talking about the party she went to that evening, about how she didn't have anything in common with her old friends from "high school," and all the things that made her angry. But she doesn't seem angry anymore. Seated across the small kitchen table from him, Vegeta can no longer feel her energy. Her movements are languid. She smells content.
"Hey," she says, apropos of nothing and with a mouth full of pork, "how about you bunk with me tonight?"