Here's some trivia: Saiyans are farsighted, each and every one of them. Theirs was a species that could have produced written language and corrective lenses if they had cared enough, and indeed, some of those scouters were specially formed to assist with delicate tasks. But Saiyan fingers are clumsier than humans', meant to be shaped into a fist or wrapped around a weapon, and their eyes are specialized for picking things out in the distance. Saiyan science is death, and their art is brutality.
"I honestly had no idea," Bulma says, as she helps Gohan pick out glasses. "Never even thought of it! I mean, it makes sense, but Vegeta and Goku never said a thing. You'd think that the ability to see things close up would help you target weak spots in armour, or in something's skin…"
"I think I have a different sense for that." Gohan's embarrassed; he never likes to rely on his intuition about himself, and he doesn't like being an authority on Saiyans. "I kind of just...know." He'd taken an eye exam as part of his school's yearly physical - Bulma had gotten him exempt from the tests that would expose him, like being weighed, but nobody had thought twice about his eyes. "I thought everyone struggled to see the words on pages."
"Well, you're not everyone." She picks up a pair of thick frames, handsome and stately. His mother would like them. "It makes me wonder - would you let me run a couple more tests on you?"
"Gotta get my mom's permission first," he mumbles, taking the frames from her. She laughs and laughs, but he's right.
His mother agrees, reluctantly. Vegeta agrees even more reluctantly, but soon enough Bulma has Gohan alone in her examining room, stripped to his skivvies. Underwear with teddy bears on them. "They were a gift from Piccolo," he says, blushing. "I don't think Piccolo knows what constitutes a good gift."
He's six feet tall and just shy of four hundred pounds - most of that mass comes from extra muscle, though from what she can tell from X-rays his bone density is, like Vegeta's, astronomical - with an oral temperature just over one hundred degrees, and a resting heart rate of thirty beats per minute. He seems to have most of the same Saiyan anatomy she found in Vegeta: the double-helix muscle fibre, the thin strands of black skin standing in for hair, the duplicate circulatory system. Preliminary tests on Vegeta have suggested an entirely different sympathetic nervous response, in particular a system of erectile tissue that stiffens to protect vital organs when the body is under stress; she presses gently, and finds Gohan's underdeveloped.
"Have you heard of mules, Gohan?" She tries to take blood, but his skin's too tough to take a needle, just like Vegeta's. Lucky for her she's developed something for this, and she pulls out what looks like the unholy spawn of a hypodermic needle and a gun.
"Course I've heard of mules."
"They're sterile, you know. Cross-bred animals come out with all sorts of health problems - it's how species preserve evolutionary vigour - and none of them can have kids. Your parents may not have known what Goku really was when they had you, but the fact that you're alive and healthy is a miracle. I've found a vein. Hold still." She shoots him in the arm, and he winces. "It really raises profound questions about the origins of sentient bipeds."
"Am I -" He pauses. "Am I sterile?"
"Lucky for us, Saiyans reproduce the same way humans do. You would know better than I whether or not yours functions properly." She winks, and Gohan wishes he could melt through the floor. "I could run a test, but you'd have to give me a sample."
She draws his blood, then hands him a cup off of a shelf.
In the beginning there was the Void, and out of the Void came the Twelve Trees, for twelve distinct universes; and on each Tree grew a golden fruit, and from that fruit emerged the Supreme Kai.
(From each pit came the God of Destruction, the death-bringer, the Eater of Worlds. All things began and all things will end in darkness.)
But the Void was too large for one being, too much work for even a Kai; and so from tending the Tree there came four other golden fruits, and to the four of them the Supreme Kai gave the four quadrants of the universe. They busied themselves with creating the suns and the planets and all the clockwork machinery that makes up the sky, and in time, they made life, only a little less noble than they.
But immortality's a rough life, so the Supreme Kais split the heavens into death and life and death, heaven and life and hell; and when the tree produced more fruit they gave the task of monitoring life and death to the lesser Kais, who delegated death to the demons, who delegated planets to their guardians, and you know how these things go.
And finally, from stardust and fruit juice they made souls, the beating hearts of sentient beings, and sent them on their way.
The West Supreme Kai made a bet with the South Supreme Kai: her Saiyans versus his Frost Demons, loser make breakfast for the winner. It's a shame that Majin Buu killed them both before their bet was resolved.
The East Supreme Kai, infatuated as he was with the West, made humans in the image of her Saiyans. Sturdy bipeds with white bones and leathery skin in various earth tones, but unlike Saiyans, capable of writing love poems; he'd hoped that one day humanity would produce something worthy of her attention.
Gohan provides a sample. Bulma thanks him for his contribution to science. She wants brain tissue, maybe an MRI, to see if his neocortex is more Saiyan or human - but that will have to wait for another time. Bulma's intense when she gets into a project, a fierce and hot passion for what she does, and not for the first time Gohan thinks he can understand how she and Vegeta came to love each other.
He's only five minutes late to dinner, dressed in a suit, carrying flowers, uncomfortable. Videl picked the restaurant - and as much as she knows how out-of-place Gohan feels in fancy digs, she likes to treat him every now and then, introduce him to her life like he did for her. Dinner's her treat, chef's special for the city's saviour: a delicate cake of bean curd and shrimp paste with peas, roast duck with scallion and cucumber, an array of pastries in cream. It's a little high-end for a couple in their senior year, but if the Boy who Killed Cell isn't going to tell the world what really happened that day, well, at least she'll redirect some of their winnings back to him.
"You got glasses," she says, admiring his face, gesturing at him to use the large fork.
"Yeah," he says, picking up the right fork. "Turns out I'm farsighted. Who'd have thought, huh?"
"I always thought that might be why you held your books so far away from your face."
"Well, I -" He clears his throat. "You knew?"
She laughs, and places her hand on his. "I might not be able to punch planets in half, but I'd like to think I'm pretty observant."
He feels his face heat up, and not from the wine. (Saiyans are sensitive to toxins, and get drunk easily.) Not since his father in the time chamber had someone noticed something before he noticed it in himself.
"I ran the sample last night. Everything's good to go! Your kid might be -"
"I think I want to marry Videl."
"- More Saiyan than human, but - what?"
Gohan's holding his head in his hands, sitting in Bulma's office, casually conversing about his sperm count. "Bulma, how did Vegeta propose to you?"
"Well, he didn't, but - Gohan, are you sure?"
"I think so. He didn't?"
She barks out a laugh. "Does he seem like the kind of guy who would get down on one knee? After the Cell games I asked him to hang around, and soon enough we were in a civil union. I had our marriage officiated, right after I had him registered as a citizen of earth. The ceremony came after."
"Romantic."
"Getting the romance out of him took a bit more time. - Gohan, have you talked to your mother or father about this yet?"
He hasn't. "I haven't. I just thought, I dunno, I'd say it out loud. See if you freaked out, because if you freak out, my mom sure will."
"Well, thanks! You know, on the Lookout when we first thought Buu had killed you - poor girl was heartbroken. You've chosen well, kid."
Gohan tries to imagine Bulma young and full of questions, finding his father in a cottage by the side of a mountain road; or Bulma cold and frightened, abandoned on Namek; or Bulma looking at someone like Vegeta and having the courage to tell him to stop messing around. In a way she's stronger than all of them, for refusing to be forgotten. "Thanks, I guess. Means a lot."
"Now how about that MRI?"
Gohan's mother freaks out, of course, in the best possible way; Gohan's father admits that he knows little about Videl and less about marriage, but from what he's seen, she seems like a good choice for the rest of his life. Vegeta sneers at him and asks him if marrying the daughters of piss-poor fighters for their money is a Son family tradition, for which Bulma smacks him across the face and reminds him that he, too, refuses to earn his keep.
But science marches on, and pauses for no-one. The MRI returns inconclusive. There's bits in there that look like human grey matter, and bits that Bulma thinks are Saiyan, and bits she can't recognize. They talk about engagement rings as she hooks up the robot that will test his reflexes, and ideas for how to propose as she fixes it after he accidentally kicks a hole through it (Saiyans have a knee jerk reaction, but also ankle, elbow, wrist, jaw…she's beginning to think they're all bite, spring-loaded, deadly even in their sleep). Bulma has him swallow some tablets and then eat a meal.
"Well, you could always get a diamond, those are classic," she says, watching him eat, taking notes. "No, please, keep going. But it's best if it's sentimental, you know, something that has meaning to the two of you. Did Cell leave any bone fragments behind?"
"No," Gohan says, muffled behind a mouthful of rice. "I made sure of that. Did you ever give Vegeta an engagement ring?"
"I guess that's fair. Wish I'd gotten some tissue samples - maybe there's something in Gero's basement lab? He refused, said that the Saiyan marriage tradition was a pledge not to kill or cripple the other until the couple had produced a sufficiently strong child."
"Romantic. - Trunks and Krillin blew that up, too."
"Hopeless." She's grinning. "I wouldn't have it any other way."
There's a lot to be learned from Saiyan physiology - their stomachs convert food directly to energy, their skin does the same with light. Part vegetable, of course. She's dreaming up ways to give humans Saiyan skin grafts when Gohan asks her about poetry.
And after all that trouble, Videl gets there first. She doesn't get on one knee before him - the daughter of the Man who Killed Cell won't kneel to anyone, through force of habit - but she proposes marriage to him with the seven-star Dragonball, which she'd found on her own.
"I thought I lost you that day." She's whispering, trying not to disturb the peace of the woods around them, the place where he'd taught her to fly, and she'd fallen in love. "I guess you wormed your way into my heart without my permission. Don't you dare ever do that to me again."
Gohan would crush a star for her.
Finally, Bulma admits she's not sure what Gohan really is is - where his father ends and where his mother begins - just a far-sighted, soft-hearted, son-of-a-spaceman. "Every part-Saiyan might turn out completely different," she says. They've been talking about genetic bottlenecking and wedding dresses. "It's not fair - I wish I could fast-forward a thousand years when the gene pool's a little more spread out, see what we look like then. Maybe we'll become a new species entirely. Hopefully a little cuter. Maybe without those tails of theirs."
"I found the Saiyans handsome, but a bit rough around the edges," Kibito-Kai says. They're taking lemonade and sandwiches on one of the Briefs' terraces. "I thought I'd make humans similar to them, but a little less brutish. I'd hoped she'd like them. - You."
Bulma feels herself frowning. Just like with the Dragonballs, she'd spent all that time and energy investigating something - come to think of it, she'd written her Master's thesis on her theory of the origins of the Dragonballs - and then someone had come along and made it clear that all her inquiry was for nothing. It was aliens all along.
"To win their bet, they'd made the Saiyans and Frost Demons only capable of destruction. I wanted something like a Saiyan, but a species that could create as much as it destroyed. I'm proud, I think," he says. A dinosaur wanders by. "Your cultures are magnificent, your music and art and food so much more wonderful than I could have ever dreamed."
It's a great big universe they live in. Bulma's mouth curls into a smile.
"I -" Gohan clears his throat and pushes his glasses up; Kibito-Kai looks to him. "I've always been accused, by Vegeta and Cell and everyone else, of having a soft heart. I think it's the human part of me - feeling things. Wanting to feel things. Saiyans' power comes from emotion, and I was always feeling things. If you were hoping that it had all amounted to something worthwhile."
There had been this moment, locked in Raditz' Saiyan pod, watching his father be beaten to death - or when he befriended that dinosaur in the woods, waiting for Mister Piccolo to come back, and watched it be murdered - or when Cell had placed his foot on Sixteen's ear, and it hadn't been enough, he'd needed more power, he needed to protect someone who couldn't protect themselves -
Kibito-Kai looks him up and down, this strange pastiche of both human and Saiyan, but somehow a little more for all their trouble. The Kais are gamblers, and life is their game of dice. His features soften.
The sixth Saiyan had been a promise in Videl, the answer to an ancient question the fire in her womb. The delivery is easy, the baby perfectly healthy, and Piccolo makes an excellent godfather-slash-nanny.
And then there's Frieza, brought back by an unfortunate wish.
Here's some trivia: Saiyans have exceptionally good hearing, almost as good as a Namekian's. Frieza mumbles something to himself, but Gohan hears it, and Piccolo does too. He says, the boy has a soft heart, like his father.
There's been times when Gohan has wished for a bit of his father's love of battle, or Vegeta's pride. It's easier to live by surrendering to one's potential rather than one's wishes, call it quits as soon as a birthright has been realized. He'd cried as he'd fought Cell. It hurts being only half of something.
"But maybe it's okay," he says, later that night, as they feast with the God of Destruction, cheese fondue in return for their planet. "I'll take having a soft heart over having no heart at all."
"They're not opposites, goodness and strength," Piccolo murmurs. There'd been two parts of him, once, and the good side was so obviously stronger than the thing that called itself a king.
"I think you're both overreacting," Bulma says, wine-drunk. "I say, if Gohan wants to be strong, let him be strong. And if he wants to be smart, let him be smart! And if he wants to go off into space and do whatever with that Whis guy that gets him blue hair -" She pauses. "Hey, that was my hair colour."
The energy-sense is like a pressure-sense, and when they'd become gods before Frieza, Gohan had felt nothing at all, just the vague sense of being submerged in the ocean, with hair the colour of the sky. Something worth investigating, that odd colour. Gohan likes the idea of pursuing knowledge.
("The dry land splits the heavens," Kibito-Kai, the Creator, had said once.
"There's nothing like watching an entire planet's oceans freeze at once," Beerus had said on a separate occasion, dreamily, over crème brûlée. "The conditions have to be just right, but if it's cold enough - if you destroy the sun first - the outside freezes fast enough to keep the inside still liquid, and it's like a giant jewel floating through space…"
Creators and destroyers, eternally bound to their duty. But in Gohan, at long last, there's a choice; his choice is clear.)