samson went back to bed
not much hair left on his head
he ate a slice of wonder bread and went right back to bed
and history books forgot about us and the Bible didn't mention us
and the Bible didn't mention us, not even once
- samson, regina spektor
Vegeta often gets up in the middle of the night to grab something to eat. It's a Saiyan thing, the constant struggle against an unending appetite. During the day and during full moons, when he can photosynthesize, he fares a little better - that's a Saiyan thing, too, the way their hair cells convert starlight to energy. She's gotten used to the midnight fridge raids, the strange quirks of his biology, the way he mumbles half-sentences in a language she doesn't understand while he sleeps. She agreed to all of that the first time she slept with him. Three years of preparing for the androids and they'd developed a strangely comfortable life together, almost a routine.
He comes home from the Cell Games a shell of a man, slinks into her bed battered and beaten, gets blood all over her sheets; usually she'd give him shit for being such a pissant, but something seems more off than usual.
"I died," Trunks says, when she finds him in the guest bedroom, equally hollow about the eyes. "Goku died too, but he wouldn't let us bring him back."
"So Vegeta killed -"
"Gohan killed Cell."
She sits him down in the kitchen with a mug of tea and a mountain of cooked meat and teases the whole crazy story out of him, from the look on Goku's face when he first strode into the ring to the sound of Gohan screaming to the way their hair stood on end when Cell declared the Games a draw, the sound of Goku's voice when he said goodbye, the way Krillin's voice cracked as he called out after his friend, the feeling of a beam of energy tearing through one's chest; the sight of Death, the great leveler, sitting stalwart and grand behind his mahogany desk.
Trunks speaks in a soft monotone and stares down at his folded hands. He's so damn eloquent, this broken little boy of hers. He couldn't have gotten his poetic little turns of phrase from his mother or father, from anyone other than Gohan.
He eats so little, too. That's not normal for a kid with his father's blood. He must always be starving in his world.
"So that's it, then," she says, near dawn. Trunks will be leaving soon, because as hellish as it is, it's his home. "All that work you did and Goku still died." Damn if she isn't a little pissed. You save the world with a guy enough times and you'd think he'd have the decency to tell you that he's decided to fuck off permanently to the afterlife.
- Well, that's so very much like Goku. She can picture the goofy little grin on his face when he'd made up his mind to disappear, the way he'd smile at his friends and down at his twelve-year-old son, the way his eyes would slide up to Cell and the grin would turn to a grimace. Call him what you want, the man's consistent.
"I mean, I came here to defeat the androids, so I guess I succeeded."
"Gohan's okay?"
"I think so. He's resilient."
"Hm. And you'll be okay, too?"
"Yeah. I have you to look out for me, after all."
She's about to say something about the absurdity of being jealous of her future self, or how damn proud she is of him, or how he should give those androids a walloping and then piss on Gero's grave for all the misery he's caused in two histories, but then his eyes go wide. She turns around in her chair; Vegeta has appeared behind her, red-eyed and still dressed in his battle-torn spandex. He grabs three roast ducks and disappears out the front door.
He's there the next morning, showered and adequately dressed, to see his son go.
It wasn't supposed to end in love, damn it! He'd been moping about in her backyard, high prince of one-and-a-half, obsessed with surpassing a guy who'd disappeared into space without so much as a word. They were all a little raw after all that bullshit on Namek but at least Bulma's life was back on track: she could finish her PhD now, marry a CEO or a semi-pro baseball player, pop out a kid or two, age gracefully and die inevitably.
Except the semi-pro baseball player was kind of an asshole and the PhD (on applied thermodynamics in capsule technology, thanks for asking) seemed kind of stupid considering what she'd seen in space; who the hell cares about calculus when you've seen an alien shoot an orb of pure energy straight into a planet's core? There she was, lonely and tired and confused and kind of high on the fact that she'd stared down Zarbon and lived; and there he was, lonely and confused and stranded on Earth.
So she gave him the space ship. Not because she loved him - hell, she didn't even like him all that much, not after what he'd said to Gohan, the arrogant, uptight, spoiled sonofabitch. She gave him the ship because he needed space and because it tickled her pink to be beholden to a prince and maybe, maybe, he'd find Goku out there and bring him home.
He didn't find Goku. What he did find, when he ran out of fuel, was his way back to Earth. That was odd enough; surely some battered remnant of Frieza's company would take him in and send him back to his old life. And yet -
Frieza came back with death in his eyes and revenge on his mind, and Vegeta went to face his destiny, and Bulma went too. Following a murderer who was off to kill a tyrant was pretty much par for the course for her by that point, and besides, she'd never gotten a good enough look at Frieza.
After Trunks leaves she invites the throng for lunch and hanging out, but the three years between when he first arrived and when he left have aged them all terribly, and nobody's in the mood. They say their goodbyes and head out, each to their own homes.
She's genuinely surprised when the dust clears and Vegeta is still there, his eyes quiet and his aura a little damp.
She can deal with his rage and his frustration. She has learned how to handle his heat, the fire that had been tempered only by the fear of Frieza, the storm of emotions about Goku that he had directed into his training; she understands his loneliness and his pain and his misery, but this - the shame of being surpassed by a half-breed child, the realization of how meaningless everything he'd ever strove for had been, the uncertainty about what to do next - this she does not know.
So she does what she does best. "Gravity room's still yours," she says. "And there's still the spaceship if you want to go find whatever you're looking for. Three years of gas in the tank. You want lunch?"
He follows her inside and eats lunch in silence, his focus elsewhere, and when she's done he takes the rest of the food and disappears out back. There's a televised parade in Orange City honouring Mr. Satan. Bulma has afternoon tea with her mother and settles Trunks down for a nap and pours over schematics with her father and wonders, for the millionth time, if it was ethical to pull a nuclear warhead out of a robot without his consent, without informing said robot about said warhead before he went off to blow up a gross old bug. Would whatever happened to Gohan still have happened if Sixteen hadn't died? Would whatever happened to Cell still have happened if she hadn't given the controller to Krillin? Can you really account for anything in a world where people can punch planets in half, and a genocidal maniac is still moping about, long after he was supposed to have died, in your backyard?
Bulma sees a name on Sixteen's schematics and something clicks. She pulls out one of her father's old photos from a robotics conference and sees him there, Gero's darling little redhead son, and suddenly all those nonagression subroutines buried in the code make sense; strip away the mad quest for revenge and Gero's a poet waxing nostalgic in the language of science.
A scholar and a gentleman. Eighteen's reproductive organs are all intact. Krillin would be glad to hear that.
In the evening her mother cooks up an absolute feast, operating on the autopilot she'd finessed after three years of hosting Vegeta, and before Bulma can work up the heart to tell her that there's no reason to expect him wouldn't you know it, he slinks in and and sits down and lays into the pork cutlet. He smells like ass, like he just finished training and didn't bother showering. Her mother makes small talk about the garden and her father chimes in about robotics and everything about the situation is so profoundly absurd, like Tights never left home, like the last twenty-eight years had never happened, like an alien prince and the father of her son wasn't tearing into a side of beef next to her.
When dinner is finished her mother asks if anyone wants coffee and Vegeta pushes himself up and leaves out the back door, into the night.
"That man," her mother says, as she pours Bulma a cup. "You can never tell if he's coming or going."
Bulma ignores the cup. She puts Trunks to bed and, following a whim or intuition or both, heads up to the rooftop of the main house.
"You can go," she says, when she finds him seated at the edge of the roof, staring up at the sky. "Nobody's forcing you to stay here. Goku's gone, and I'm not playing house for a, for a depressed puppy who lost his favourite toy."
"I'm not going," he murmurs.
"Well, then." She takes a seat next to him. "The fuck do you plan on doing?"
"There was a time when I would have had your head for insubordination."
"Yeah, well, there was a time when you weren't the last survivor of your race."
He scoffs. "And the half-breed, courtesy of a low-class warrior and some brainless human daughter of a middling nobleman."
"- And Trunks."
"And my son."
You can't see many stars in the city, not with all the light pollution - it's a pale haze that serves as a backdrop for other, more interesting things happening on the ground. Bulma can only assume he's not used to such a disappointing sight when he's spent so much of his childhood offplanet.
"Do you miss it?"
"Eh?"
"Space. Do you miss space?"
Back in the early days of their courtship - if you could really call it a courtship, rather than senseless, endless fucking - she'd walked on eggshells around him during his broody moods, careful not to ask too many sensitive questions about his childhood, or his father, or his feelings, or his thoughts. Now that she's survived Cell it has occurred to her that she may, in fact, love him enough to take the risk.
"...Yes."
She gives him time. He blows a puff of air out his nose, and continues. "I could always find my home. Even if I couldn't see our suns, I'd know where to look."
"And now your home's gone."
"My race. My - legacy. When I had finally caught up to Kakkarot, I was surpassed by his son. And then - and then Cell killed my son, and I wasn't strong enough to defend his honour..."
It's a lot to stomach for a man who had been driven for twenty years by the thought that he would one day kill Frieza, and then for another four by the thought that he would one day defeat the man who had killed Frieza. "It's still there, you know," Bulma says, unable to think of anything else to help him but science. "The light from your planet, I mean. Given how many light years away from your solar system we are, we'll be seeing it for thousands of years to come."
He angles his chin heavenward.
"It's just old light," he murmurs after a while, pushes himself off the roof, takes off into the night air.
Should have known better, she thinks, as she slides into bed. No use trying to convince a man who can fly to stay grounded. At least she has Trunks. In the dead of night her dreams are interrupted by a sudden gust of air and the sight of a man robed in gold light at her open window, and in the morning his side of the bed is empty but still warm.
He's in the gravity room the next day, training like he has a reason to. She takes advantage of the good weather and hauls some of the prototypes out onto the lawn for a bit of tinkering, but her attention is elsewhere. He'd promised them subjugation after Namek, hadn't he? Back then he'd sworn he'd have them all under his thumb once Goku was out of the picture - what's stopping him now? Is he that afraid of Gohan, or has something else changed?
The tenuous peace holds all day and evening, as she tinkers and he trains, she plays with Trunks and he makes scrap metal out of her father's robots, and they meet in the middle for lunch and dinner. Her mother and father chat about things that matter to them. Something's different about Vegeta that she can't quite put her finger on, something new in the way he carries himself, like the way Goku had looked on the television screen when he'd waltzed up to Cell: has he made a resignation? A resolution? A choice?
He goes with her to bed that night and undresses her slowly, rolls on a condom deliberately, fucks into her gently in a way he's never done before. He grips her shoulders and makes love to her like he's only human. God, she's forgotten how good he is at this, how quickly he learns his partner's body; he has such a well-honed skill at tearing someone apart from the inside, his skin flush and his cock so hot in her she thinks she might combust alongside him. When he leans in she arches her back into him and submits.
"I could have had anyone," he whispers into her ear as he thrusts into her with precision and grace, his voice hoarse and pleasure-wracked, and she can only respond with a series of gasps that echo alongside the sound of her headboard rhythmically hitting the wall. "I chose you. - Your stupid green hair - your petty arrogance - and you - damn it to hell - Woman - you're so - damn - beautiful -"
He is, too, this profoundly lost soul, this nightmare of a man, this devourer of worlds; and when she leans up to kiss him - for the very first time! - he acquiesces. She nicks her tongue on his canines and tastes blood and static electricity, space-dust, a love more powerful than death.
When she's in need of a moment to recuperate he hops out of bed and disappears downstairs to the kitchen, comes back with a sandwich too large for any normal man and a glass of water for her. She drinks, he eats.
Perhaps the silence should be awkward, but Bulma had spent too much of her life chattering to fill silence like her parents had done before her; and then she'd found Goku in the mountains and her life had gotten so noisy. Vegeta, for all his pompousness, is choosy about his words, and it's one of the things she loves - yes, damn it, loves! - about him, the way he'll wait for the right moment to speak. Maybe it's just an aristocratic thing, but then again, she did choose a prince.
"I'd like it if you stayed," she says, finally. "I can't promise you anything like your old life, but I'd be happy if you stayed." The sandwich is nearly demolished. There's something so preposterous and charming about the sight of him next to her in the quiet heart of the night, chewing thoughtfully on a piece of bread because he needs a moment to recover as well; it's domestic, she decides. She stole him from space, from the stars that hung about him as he traveled from world to world like some ancient god of destruction, and turned him into a lover and a husband, and she is sorry for everything he has lost.
He swallows around the bread. "You did alright." It's not I love you but it's very close, maybe as close as they'll ever get. He leans in and kisses her, and they remain at that until morning light seeps through the curtains.