the gods themselves

"Who?"

"Schiller. A German dramatist of three centuries ago. In a play about Joan of Arc, he said, 'Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.' I'm no god and I'll contend no longer."

(with apologies Isaac Asimov, who likely wouldn't have minded)

Due to some enormous cosmic joke in the form of a tyrant pointing their finger at a planet, there are only two people on Earth who can help her with what she's going through - and one of them is her boyfriend's mom. Videl wastes all of ten seconds considering that option before scrubbing any and all thoughts of that from her brain, then picks up the phone and dials Capsule Corp.

She spends thirty minutes trying to convince a bored-sounding receptionist that no, this is personal and I'm a friend of a friend of Bulma's and even pulls her least favourite card, do you know who my father is?

As it turns out, not even killing Cell will get you a coffee date with the richest person on the planet.

Her father's been getting antsy after all this Buu business, desperate to honour his commitment and keep the monster eating them out of house and home hidden, but personally witnessing the end of the world has made his leash on her a little looser and Videl a little bolder. She sneaks into his office and has a peek through his rolodex, finds personal phone numbers of presidents and kings and someone whose entry reads turtle hermit - smoke/mirrors? but no Bulma.

So Videl, never one to be defeated, picks up the phone and dials Capsule Corp again. The receptionist assures her that Ms. Satan, we will do our best to fit you and your important personal issues into Mrs. Briefs' very busy schedule and Videl tells them that she knows about Vegeta.

"So the receptionist comes to me in a panic, tells me that Mr. Satan's daughter found out about my husband," Bulma says, as she programs her number into Videl's cell phone. They're taking tea on a sheltered terrace as dinosaurs and strange aliens meander about in the courtyard below them. "Tears in her eyes! Like hell I'd ever bother trying to keep that man a secret."

"I, uh, I actually wanted to talk to you about that man." Videl sips her tea, a blend she can't quite place served in priceless antiques. Bulma's never been big on the small details but she knows what she likes, and Videl thinks she can appreciate that. "Er, those men. My - um, my man. Gohan."

"Saiyans. Do you like the tea?"

"Yeah, it's good." (Weird aftertaste, though. Like raw meat.) "Where's it from?"

"We get folks landing in our backyard every now and then, with gifts for the man who killed Frieza. I'm not about to tell them that the man they're looking for lives out in the sticks, or that the man they're really looking for is my time-traveling son from a parallel universe."

"Um."

"Anyways. Back to Saiyans."

"So in history class, we're learning about the East City Disaster? Two spaceships, these humanoids pop out of 'em, blow up the whole place? That was -"

"- Vegeta, yeah. And a friend of his. Vegeta killed the friend after Goku gave him a sound thrashing. Just, you know." She holds up a hand in one of the ways Gohan has taught Videl. "Boom."

"Can you do that?"

"Do what?"

"The, y'know. The 'boom' thing. Gohan's been teaching me."

"Nah, I never got a taste for fighting. Namek taught me that there are better ways to bring men to their knees." She rests her chin on her hand and smirks. Videl wonders if she's made a horrible mistake. "Gohan ever tell you about Namek?"

"Just what he can remember. He was six."

"Right, I keep forgetting that."

For a kid who was six at the time, Gohan remembers an awful lot. He's always been bright - it's one of the things Videl adores about him - but he prefers not to get into details about what happened out there. They went to another planet to revive Piccolo. A guy named Frieza was already there. Vegeta was there, too, and he wasn't yet as amicable as he later became, as Bulma later made him.

Videl shakes her head, unsuccessfully trying to get the image of old people sex out of her head - except that's precisely the reason she's there. "I'm not here to talk about Namek." (The sex part, not the old people part.) "I'm, uh, here to talk about something else."

Bulma leans forward, chin still in her hand. Her grin gets wider. She reminds Videl of a crocodile about to eat lunch. "Oh?"

It's that exact moment that Videl realizes that yes, she's made a horrible mistake. Brought a shovel and dug her own grave. What if Vegeta's overhearing this? Do Saiyans kill human women for asking too many personal questions? Are Saiyans' ears sensitive enough to hear conversations halfway across the world? What if Gohan can hear this - or worse, Goku?

(Halfway across the world, high above the earth in his palace in the sky, Piccolo is hearing everything. Now that he's paying attention he can hear Videl's thoughts, too. He blushes a dark, dark red.)

"I want to have sex with him," Videl blurts out because hell, if she's a dead woman, she'll die with her questions answered. "I just want to make sure I know what I'm getting into."

Two Saiyans on the television screen, one tall and one short. She's wrapped in the relative safety of Kame House, thinking about Goku's return, a failed romance, and the day after tomorrow. It's a strange way to first see a future husband, fear and noise and confusion undercut by static.

Bulma doesn't believe in love at first sight, never has. If she did, then love must feel like some combination of disgust and curiosity at how similar Saiyans were to humans. They had no right looking like that; if Gohan was any indication, something very strange had happened at two opposite ends of the universe.

Almost thirty years old, she thinks, watching the screen, and not getting any younger. She'd been thinking about settling down with Yamcha, finishing her third PhD, maybe having a kid. Her mom is getting antsy about grandchildren. All of that undone by some long-lost brother of Goku crashing a reunion party in a world they thought was done with that kind of trouble. It's all for nothing, now; the earth's going to get blown up by a punk and his underling, and Yamcha's dead.

Bulma, to her great credit, doesn't laugh - doesn't even giggle. Just gets a twinkle in her eye and puts her free hand on Videl's thigh. "That serious, huh?"

"Look, I -" Where does Videl even begin? Wasting some CEO's valuable time with stupid questions she should have learned the answers to in the eighth grade is a jailable offense, isn't it? She feels her face heat up. When her father finds out what she's doing he's going to ground her for life. For two lives. He'll call up that guy at the mahogany desk and get her grounded in the afterlife.

Then Bulma does something really unexpected: leans back, sips her tea, and says, "I'm glad you came to me."

Videl's brain short-circuits, turns off and on again. "What?"

"Yeah, I'm glad I can be here for you. Lord knows I could have used someone to talk to back then. You want to know if he's going to hurt you."

"No, I -" Videl's whole body tenses up. She's been hard-wired from the day her father killed Cell to reject that idea, that someone is capable of hurting her; she's unstoppable, just like him. Then something gives and she feels the weight of all that fear all at once. "-Yeah."

"Vegeta hurt me."

"Did he, uh."

"Did he mean to? Hell no. Did he want to? Definitely not. Do I blame him? Maybe. We were both pretty messed up over what had happened on Namek, and he had no frame of reference for what I could handle. I wasn't really present. It was - well, it was nice, but there were consequences. Loving him came later."

"What, uh." Videl pauses for an uncomforably long time, not sure if this is a question she's allowed to ask. I mean, you look at the way Chi-Chi looks at Goku and you get it, but… "What drew you to him?"

Bulma had written her masters' thesis on her theory of the origins of the Dragonballs, back when she was fifteen - spent hundreds of hours in her father's workshop messing around with lasers and diodes and the two-star Dragonball trying to isolate the precise wavelength of electromagnetic energy it was putting out. (For a while she'd considered building a perpetual motion machine with the Dragonball as its source - but, well, that was kind of a waste of time, especially if all seven of them could grant some kind of wish. Then you could wish for that perpetual motion machine, or maybe a prom date, or some strawberries, or a boyfriend.) Built the Dragon Radar with her findings. Got a shitty grade on it, too - her supervisor had given her a pass without commendation for wasting their time on what really just came down to an electromagnetic anomaly, so that summer she stole a scooter and headed north of town to find the rest of them.

Found the second in a cave, easy work that just cost her five days, a little gas in the scooter's engine, and a broken nail. Went to visit sister before turning to the mountain district to find the four-star ball, and you know how that story goes.

And all of that work for nothing! She'd fought an emperor, accidentally revealed herself to a pervert, took on an entire paramilitary force; concluded that they were magnets, meteorites, that the spherical shape was related to the laws of conservation of mass, that the stars suspended in them could be explained with some basic Euclidean geometric properties, the Pythagorean projected into the interior of a sphere, that the seven of them generated an Einstein-Rosen bridge that just happened to end in a giant freaking dragon on the other side - nope! Aliens. Remember that guy who killed a bunch of people and then declared himself king? Well, he was half of a guy who came from a planet orbiting one of the stars in the 9045-XY system and made the Dragonballs because he was bored. Duh.

Bulma's not sure why she agreed to travel to 9045-XY - that is, Planet Namek, a tidally-locked nightmare out in the middle of nowhere, outer space - but it's a giant pile of trouble. Maybe she still feels guilty about letting the Piccolo take Gohan, poor kid imprinting on a demon who then threw himself into the line of fire. Maybe they used up all their good luck when the atmosphere decided to be just left of perfect (a little too much oxygen, though; she's been light-headed since they got there) because everything since they landed has been one giant debacle. No way home! Some guy named Frieza that has Krillin and Gohan all freaked out! Genocide in progress!

And to top it all off she's face-to-face with that same Saiyan, waiting impatiently for her to hand over the Dragonball. There's fire and death in his eyes, and hell yes she's afraid, though her traitorous lizard brain is also a little turned on.

(No way Bulma's getting out of this one alive. Thirty years old and about to eat it off-planet. Is she the first human to die in space? But that green-skinned guy with his hair in a braid - wow, is he ever easy on the eyes!)

Imagine a four-year-old who goes with his father to a little reunion party and by nightfall his father's dead. He's taken into the woods by a demon, and over the next year he and the demon learn to trust each other - until the demon's killed, just before his father returns. Then they're off to space and when the dust has settled the demon's back and his father's lost again, not dead, but gone.

"So we were back from Namek, minus Goku," Bulma says, pouring another cup of tea. "Vegeta came with us. Try the chocolate cookies, they're good with the tea. He was - changed, by what had happened. Died out there, y'know, speared right through the heart, spilling his guts - literally and metaphorically - for Goku, crying at the feet of both of his most hated enemies. He'd spent his life swearing he'd kill Frieza or become a Super Saiyan or both, and now some schmuck of a soldier's son had stolen both of his birthrights, then fucked off to space. Pardon my language."

"You're, uh, excused."

"So I have this alien moping in my backyard, and I think to myself, Bulma, you helped take down the Red Ribbon Army, one spoiled brat of a prince shouldn't be a problem. Offered him a place to stay or a space-ship to go look for Goku. He came back a year later when his ship ran out of fuel."

Gohan was seven when his father came home, three years lost to the trauma of that one reunion party.

"...I guess it was - curiosity? No, that's not the right word. My son came from the future the day Goku came home and warned us about the androids, and Vegeta stayed with us since I'd already offered him a bed. I built him some training stuff and suddenly this cold-blooded murderer, this ruler of a race of two-and-a-half, was a permanent house-guest. Love's kind of complicated." Bulma puts down her cup. "It doesn't always knock on your door with chocolate and flowers. Sometimes you're sitting by a hospital bed watching an idiot bring himself back from the brink of death, and it sort of - well, it sort of moves in unannounced."

(Videl had hated Gohan when she first met him. Couldn't put a finger on why, but something about his naive, self-depricating personality and unreasonably fit body had rubbed her the wrong way. She'd worked herself to death her whole life and here comes this nerd from the woods who looks like he'd been given every gift in the world. Then she'd gotten to know him, each opening up a little to the other, and -)

"- I think I understand," she says.

"He was lonely. Until I came along everyone had courted him for his status. Beneath all that pomp and circumstance was a guy who'd lost everything, and I understood loneliness. I wanted to give him something. Also I wanted to see if it was possible to bang an alien."

"But, uh, but Chi-Chi had already -"

"Scientific method." And, good Lord, Bulma winks.

So she called him into her room one night when the tension had gotten too much, told him pretty crudely that she was fairly certain they had cooperating reproductive organs. He brought all of space in there with him, all his fear and loneliness, his misery and anger, the deep, deep well of sadness beneath it all. He screwed her into her mattress until her bed broke, and kept screwing her among the shards of broken wood.

They had cooperating reproductive organs all right. It didn't hurt that it was a full moon, and even without their tails Saiyans could get a little messed in the head during a full moon. He fucked her til she was hoarse, til every memory of Namek was driven from her mind. Did things with his fingers that she was damn sure no human being could do. Dislocated one of her shoulders and popped it back in like it was no big deal, and she was so raw and lucid that the pain hardly registered.

Near dawn he was done and she had one good orgasm left in her, so he shoved his head between her legs and devoured her with far too much teeth. She grabbed him by the hair. Hell if it felt like human hair, the strands far too stiff, far too smooth, with very little give to it.

"Do Super -" she said, groaning, feeling drunk, almost incoherent. "Oh, fuck. Go Super Saiyan."

He stopped, dragging a sound from her that she should have been ashamed of, then raised his head. "What?"

"Go Super Saiyan. I want to feel your hair."

He narrowed his eyes, and for a stunningly brief moment she recalled that this pathetically insecure man could very easily be provoked to kill her.

"Woman, you know I can't."

Hell if she cared.

"You can." She bucked her hips and he caught her, intimately, with one hand. Drove into her with a finger in a way that made her gasp. "Fuck, Vegeta. You will."

He left in the morning, shortly after dawn.

"It's warm," Bulma concludes, like she might conclude a talk on the applications of the Pythagorean Theorem over prime-numbered Z-sets. "Nothing like human hair. Closer, actually, to skin cells. If you pull out a strand it goes back to being black, but their hair doesn't regrow."

Videl stares at her, wide-eyed, deeply scandalized. Then, in the quiet voice of someone who already knows the answer, says: "Gohan wouldn't do that to me."

"Oh, Videl. Of course he won't. They can -" She motions with her hand as though she's pressing down on some invisible balloon, "- They can dampen it, you know. Lower it. Hide it. It's a human thing, actually, that Vegeta picked up when he was first here, and I'm told it's how they defeated Frieza."

"Huh." There's a rush of pride that comes with feeling like her species contributed something, anything, to the lives of those strange and powerful beings. Videl catches the feeling and files it away next to her shame, that one might one day overpower the other.

"It's not easy loving Saiyans. Hell, it's not even that easy being friends with them. Nothing's been quiet or easy since I met Goku."

"It's interesting, though. Way better than hanging out with my dad and our servants."

"Mm."

In the menagerie below the terrace, dinosaurs wander among small, plantlike creatures from a faraway planet. Vegeta's not so interested in grinding things beneath his heel these days but Bulma still likes to give him a few reminders that his domains are still his own, that despite her vocation Bulma is still very much a queen. Trunks and Goten have wrangled a brontosaurus by the neck and are very happily swinging around and around in the cool afternoon air.

"I have this theory," Bulma says. "What's the underlying force that holds the universe together?"

"Um, gravity?"

"No, no. Cause and effect, right? Something happens that makes something else happen. From that come the four fundamental forces, including gravity."

Their physics teacher might have said something along those lines. "Right."

"So I thought that the similarities in biology were covergent evolution, you know, similar environments, similar niches. Couldn't figure out where the tails came in, why Gohan's kept growing back but Vegeta's never did."

"Gohan's tail grows back?"

"Long story." Vegeta wanders into the terrace and shouts something up at Trunks, who disengages himself from the brontosaurus' neck and floats down. Goten waves good-bye and flies in a bold streak of electrostatic energy off towards the mountains; father and son head out back, to train. On their way out Vegeta catches Bulma's eye and she waves. He frowns, then offers a tiny wave in return. "I just couldn't figure out why the universe is filled not only with sentient bipeds, but sentient bipeds who speak a language we understand. Vegeta says it's called Common, the language of Frieza's company. But how do we know Common?"

"Maybe," Videl says, "Maybe, um, language evolves like people?"

"So then Goku tells me he's met the Supreme Kai, you know, the god above the other gods above the lesser gods, the guy who rules life and death and life from the centre of the universe, et cetera, et cetera. So then I get thinking that this whole enterprise wasn't random at all, that the Supreme Kai made us all in his image, the demons who run the afterlife, the Namekians, the Saiyans and humans, all of us."

"Okay, but -"

"- That didn't explain the language thing, right! So I start thinking that maybe the earth was colonized by Frieza's company thousands of years ago and we've just forgotten, that we're related to Saiyans somehow, but then I take out Occam's Razor." She leans towards, over the table. "Perhaps what governs us isn't cause and effect - one thing leads to another - but another law, a law that says whatever tells a good story."

(Hundreds of thousands of light-years away, the Grand Supreme Kai, ennobled by the deaths of his comrades millions of years ago, takes his tea and smiles. She's right, of course. Then he thinks of You, dear Reader, and grimaces, for he envies You most of all.)

Here's the thing they don't tell you about high school: it kind of sucks. After years and years of homeschooling, raised haphazardly in her father's workshop taking machines apart and putting them back together again and picking up astrophysics from her father's old university textbooks, Bulma had begged her parents for that regular teenage life. Got all starry-eyed at the thought of boyfriends and best friends and prom. Convinced them that she needed the socialization. Hey, if she's going to take over the company some day she'd probably need to learn how to deal with people, right?

(She's also getting her undergraduate degree at the same time, but that's all by correspondence. Nobody goes to high school to get an education.)

Which is all well and good, except it turns out that boyfriends and best friends and prom are tiny little nuggets in a steaming ocean of crap, math teachers trying for the hundredth time to force idiots to understand basic concepts, girls getting into fights over silly things and crying in the bathroom, composition teachers forcing her to write another dumb essay. You can't just decide to not do your homework if the assignment is a waste of time. Two weeks into her late-April start and Bulma's considering taking up smoking just to give her something interesting to do during her lunch breaks.

So of course the rest of her life begins with her compositions teacher assigning another stupid essay: fifteen hundred words on their family, due Monday. Instead of giving her teacher exactly what they wanted in a few less words (her dad's a scientist, her mom's an idiot, and her older sister fucked off to some island to hook up with an alien and never came home), Bulma decides to do some digging. Her dad has always been on her case about not poking around in the basement, but he can't fault her for digging up stuff to use for school, right?

("Miss Briefs, I want to talk to you about your latest composition, the one on three wishes."

"Yeah?"

"I asked for one thousand words."

"So?"

"You wrote, and I quote, 'I'd wish for a bowl of strawberries, a hot boyfriend, and for something exciting to happen to me.' That was your entire essay."

"...And?")

Among the broken machinery, the exposed wires, the faulty plumbing, and the secret stash of sex toys, Bulma finds a strange glowing orb.

Bulma sends Videl off that evening with her best wishes, a roll of reinforced condoms she'd designed herself (just to be on the safe side, you know, can't be sure about the specific alkalinity of their semen) and the private phone number of a doctor who is a friend of the Briefs' and won't ask too many questions.

She sets the helicopter down in the field beside Gohan's house. Goten rushes out to meet her, says his brother is helping their mom make dinner if she wants to join in. Videl helps chop scallions and enjoys a dinner of fried rice accompanied by a really delightful oolong. It's not meat-tea from outer space, but maybe it's just as good.

When the night is upon them and Goku and Chi-Chi have retired for the night Videl takes Gohan's hand and leads him out into the woods, to their favourite spot - a little circle of grass under an ancient apple tree. Takes a deep breath under the sliver of a crescent moon, tells him she's thought it over and decided that she's ready.

And just like Bulma said it's hot and heady and awesome, as he prepares her for what feels like hours. Fingers her til she's red down her chest begging him to just get on with it, holy shit, Gohan. He does, ever the gentleman, kisses her and pushes in like he's done it a hundred thousand times before, with an ease born of instinct or love or maybe both, and she meets him halfway. He's firm but gentle. She breaks the kiss and grabs his hair and demands he go harder.

Oh fuck but he does, grabs her with those hands that challenged Majin Buu and rolls his hips and drives into her, leans in til the tip of of his nose touches hers and there's something in his eyes she can't quite place, the galaxies he's crossed in the blink of an eye, the beast that the Old Kai ripped out of him, then she blinks and he leans in and kisses the crook of her neck with the softness of a man who loves someone dearly.

Hours later he pulls out and she's clammy and exhausted, limbs like jelly, and he hasn't even broken a sweat. Damn those Saiyans! He rolls over and says, was that all right? We can try again if it wasn't.

You idiot, that was perfect. She smacks his arm. I'll take you up on going again though. I need a glass of water. Wanna do it in your bed?

He stands up, the hard lines of him dashing and dangerous in the moonlight, grabs their clothes and picks her up under the legs, holds her close to his chest.

Yeah, let's go home.

It occurs to Videl that maybe, all this time, Bulma was just looking for someone to talk to. There are only three women in the world who'd understand, and she's not sure how close Bulma is with Chi-Chi.

"They're gods, really," Bulma says. "They love us, and we love them back, and that's really all there is to it. Have you read any Asimov?"

"No, we're still on Thoreau in English class."

"Cabins in the woods, huh."

"Yeah."

"You should read this book Asimov wrote, The Gods Themselves. It's hard sci-fi, three parts. Parts one and three are about scientists in two different parallel universes interacting, trying to use the radiochemical differences between their universes to generate clean nuclear energy. Interesting stuff."

"Um."

"Second part takes place in the parallel universe. Time flows differently there, so a short time there is twenty years here. It's a love story. Asimov said it was his favourite and the most difficult thing he ever wrote."

Love and science, it turns out, are not mutually exclusive.

"We're a small part of their lives," Videl says, thinking she understands. "But also a big part of it."

"A big part of a big story."

(Maybe the biggest story their world will ever know.)