It was done. The time machine had been built and her son was on his second trip to the past, to help her friends stop the impending Armageddon. She had worked her fingers to the bone, spent year after year locked away in the pitiful laboratory she had managed to rebuild after the androids had attacked, obsessed with finding a way to save her world.

And everything she could do was finally done.

Bulma turned on her coffee pot, feeling a sudden drop in energy and a definite need for caffeine. As her drink brewed, she let out a tired sigh and looked around the deteriorated kitchen.

Everything had gone so wrong so fast. In one hour, her perfect life had been completely destroyed. She had lost her home, her friends, and worst of all, her lover. She had barely been able to get her son and get to safety before the androids descended on West City.

Humanity spent decades living from day to day, with no way to know where the next attack would come. Materials were hoarded, and many things that she once would have put on the 'necessity' list found their way onto the 'luxury' list.

Things like a cracked kitchen ceiling no longer seemed to matter.

For the first time in decades, the remains of the compound were completely silent. There was no echo of Trunks training, no clanking of Bulma's tools, no noise besides that of the brewing coffee.

A flood of memories seemed to rush at her in the silence, most of them circling her son or her lover. The first time she really met Vegeta, their first fight, the first time they were together, Trunks' birth, their slowly growing family…the day the androids came, Vegeta's broken, bloody body being carried in, Trunks screaming wildly as the world fell to ruin…

Bulma shook her head, forcing the images away. It happened to her every time she thought about the past. No matter how hard she tried to focus on the good times, death and misery always ended up dominating. She grabbed at the coffee pot, her movements clearly showing her frustrations. "Damn it," she growled, pouring her cup. She slammed the pot back down before storming down a corridor.

As she had many times in the past couple decades, she wondered if Vegeta had the same issue. Bulma knew that he had lived a rough life, one far more difficult that her own. She did not know too much about his life, but she did know that much. Their relationship had only been in its infancy when her prince had died, but they had been able to have one or two real conversations. She recalled one of the few talks they had.

/////

It had been about two weeks before their son was conceived, a scalding hot May afternoon with a temperature that broke records. Bulma had been trying to fix a programming problem with the pools. The lights kept turning on in the day instead of at night, the jets for the hot tub seemed to be going off at completely random times, and the temperature could never seem to maintain. It would be too hot one minute and borderline freezing the next. There had been a thousand other projects that she could have and should have been working on at the moment, but that was the only one that would cool her off. Twenty minutes of programming was all it should take.

Unfortunately, it seemed to be taking significantly longer than that.

The beautiful heiress wiped the sweat from her brow. It had been over two ridiculous hours since she started her little project, and every time she thought she had made progress it turned out that there was a whole new series of complications. She was dead set and determined to get the programming done for the pool lights as soon as possible.

"Damn maintenance staff," she growled. "Who the hell messed with this?"

"Your mother did," a deep voice chuckled behind her.

Bulma whipped around and glared at her lover. "Why would my mother play with the circuitry for the pool?"

"Because," the prince said, sitting down next to the woman, "she came out with a pitcher of lemonade, tripped on those idiotic shoes of hers, spilled it over the wiring, and when she went to dry it off she decided that the wires would look better in a different order."

Bulma blinked, staring at the box she had been working on. For the first time, it dawned on her that the wires actually did seem to be in a decorative pattern. "Son of a bitch!" she shouted.

Again, Vegeta chuckled. "I will never understand you humans. You, for instance, spent all of yesterday bitching at me that you had too much work to do to fix my training equipment, yet here you are, playing with the pool."

The heiress shrieked, tossed her tools on the deck and huffed. "Well, of course I'm out here with the pool!" she shouted. "It's a hundred and eleven degrees! It's frying out here!"

"Hardly," the prince snorted. "Where I come from, this is considered barely warm. I haven't been this comfortable outside since I got to this planet."

Bulma glared at her lover. "You're insane."

"Not relevant."

"It's boiling out here!" Bulma whined.

Vegeta just casually rolled his eyes. "As I stated before, this is hardly that hot."

Bulma sat down and put her feet in the pool, a deep scowl on her face. "I swear, in the deepest depths of hell where they torture the worst villains, it is not this hot!"

All sense of joviality left the prince's face. Bulma's eyes grew enormous as she remembered that the man she sat next to had been not only evil, but at one point dead and in hell. Somehow, in the past few months they had spent sneaking around together, Bulma had managed to keep thoughts of his damnation out of her head.

What she threw out as casual conversation had been one of the most horrible moments of his existence.

"Heat is the least of your concerns when you're in hell," he deeply said, glaring at the woman at his side.

Bulma swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. She knew that it had been horrible for him, but he had never actually said anything about it. In fact, he had never really said much of anything about his past. Or anything, really, for that matter. Talking just wasn't something they did. It was one of those things that they had just avoided.

But for once, he was talking. She wasn't sure why he was doing it, why he chose that moment to not just get furious and storm off. But that was what he was doing.

His eyes seemed to lose focus. "It was so much more than simple heat and physical pain," he quietly said. "You relive every mistake you made in your life over and over and over again. I heard later that I was only dead for about twenty minutes, but it felt like it went on for days…weeks…it never ended, not for a moment, not at all…"

Bulma looked down, watching the ripples that her feet and ankles made as she gently kicked.

Vegeta shook his head. "I know I will go back some day," he softly said, his eyes still not focused, "but I sincerely hope that it is not for a long, long time."

His lover frowned and leaned over, resting her head on his shoulder. Some day, he would die, and he would go back and face that torment for all eternity. It was a fate that he had clearly understood, but the depth of it had previously been lost on her. She did not want to think about it.

Not ever.

"Come on," she softly said, nuzzling against his neck. "That's then, this is now. And right now, I'm really hot and sweaty, and I could really use a nice, cool shower to cool me off."

A hint of a smirk appeared on his face. "Is that an invitation?" he slyly asked.

Bulma smiled and pulled him to his feet, giggling as she guided them to another fun round of afternoon delights.

////

Bulma sighed and opened the door to her deepest lab. Her coffee was growing cold, but she did not really care. After everything she had been through in her life, something as trivial as cool coffee just was not high on the care list.

She turned on just a single light, taking another sip. The room she stood in was her sanctuary, the place where she went to hide from the world. It was a place that only she had been in, a place even her son had not been there. Only one project had ever been done in that room. Only one machine had ever been build. Only one symbol of hope ever stood in that room.

The soft bluish glow of the room was soothing to her often taxed nerves. That room had been her salvation through the years, the one place she could go when she just needed a chance to feel safe from the stresses of their chaotic world.

"I can't believe he's really gone," she said, placing her mug on her simple desk. "I mean, I know that this is what we were preparing for, but he's my little boy and he's going off to fight…" She let out a tired sigh. "He's my baby…"

She turned to her project and offered a sad smile. "It's so weird that he's not here anymore," she spoke. "But he'll come back…he'll come back, and he'll be okay. He's going to be just fine. He's got a whole group of people to look after him."

Her eyes closed for a moment, and she reached out for her coveted prize. Her aging hand rested on the glass dome, soon followed by her forehead. "So much has happened," she whispered. "So many bad things have happened, and I'm not sure that what I've done will be able to fix it. Maybe this will save the world, maybe this won't change a thing, but I had to try. I had to try anything I could to save the world from suffering."

Bulma slowly opened her blue eyes, tears slowly rolling down her cheeks. "I had to try anything I could to save you."

The room fell silent as she leaned against the tank, save the gentle hum of the machine that held her lover's body.

She could not let him go. She could not let him suffer in the depths of agony for the rest of eternity. All she could do had been done. He might not be alive, but she had kept him from being completely dead. No suffering, no anguish, no feeling. Nothing but nothingness. She kept him in the one place she could keep him safe from it.

She kept him in purgatory.