The Reason
It was a fresh and glistening winter's day. The sun, basking in its radiant, celestial glory, cast its luminous shadow over the futuristic buildings of West City, allowing the respective businesses to adopt a picturesque sheen. Those driving this meteorologically perfect morning were forced into sporting sunglasses, due to the overhead glow, and the shoppers, who were being illuminated almost angelically by the cool gleam, trod carefully through the shimmering snow, their coats left flapping open as they contemplated the glory of their next purchase.
However, for one physician and her alien spouse, the morning wasn't particularly glorious. The diametric opposite, in fact.
This scientist, her name being Bulma Briefs, was extremely concerned at the clothing her husband was wearing. However physically competent his race may have been, he was still liable to catch a cold - especially in those damned spandex training shorts of his. As much as his naked flesh engrossed her senses and enthralled her thoughts, she didn't want him to become ill.
"Vegeta!" She yelled, banging on the door of the warrior's training facility, the like of which her own hands had crafted. "Vegeta!"
With a notable irritability, he powered the machine down momentarily, and stepped outside, sneering at her pathetic Human capacity for maintaining heat. She was wrapped, head to toe, in a trouser suit and enormously unflattering duffel coat, gloves, hat and scarf to boot.
"What?!" He growled threateningly, angered to be disturbed when he seemed to have been finally progressing.
She smiled tenaciously, and began to dictate Earth's climate to him.
"Vegeta, you need to put some proper clothing on!" She scolded, furious at his arrogant demeanour. He was just standing there, the short, pompous bastard...
"Stop telling me to wear more!" He spat, growing exhausted of her constant whining over his winter clothing. This was his thirtieth year as her husband, and every single year she'd warned him of impending illness at least twice a day, throughout December, January and February. "I will not obtain a human virus! Never have, never will!"
"What makes you exempt from contracting influenza, you obnoxious bastard?" She demanded haughtily, livid at his attitude towards her. Wasn't she allowed to be concerned at her own partner's wellbeing?
"The fact that I'm not human!" He roared, similarly irate at her apparent care. "Why can you not just leave me to train?!"
Rendered temporarily speechless, she sneered at him as he glared thunderously at her. What rattled her was the nature of the look - venom. Not anger, not authority - hatred. Pure, unnerving, unnecessary, unwarranted, disgusted hatred.
"I only tell you because I care!" She cried in retort, tears welling up in her eyes at the ferocity of his actions and glances.
"The save your breath!" He replied in a sharp shriek. "I have never cared about you, and I'm not likely to - so save your pitiful lungs the trouble of conversing with me, whore!"
He shot her another stare of pure rage, and slammed the door to his room shut in her face, throwing her somewhat abruptly, and in tears, from the steps leading up to it.
She landed rather unceremoniously and thankfully on grass, her eyes leaking saline liquid.
"Bastard," she whispered, lethal acknowledgement clinging to every fabric of her heart and soul. "Lying, unappreciative bastard…"
With a vengeful streak tugging at her conscience, she hitched herself off the grassy brook, and began bellowing at the outside of the training device.
"So you didn't give a damn when I held you all those years ago?" She screamed, attracting the attention of those in the nearest offices, who all craned their bodies to view exactly what their boss was trying to accomplish. "Didn't care when I kissed away the nightmares, when I saved your fucking life, when I gave up my whole social existence for you…? Shouldn't have bothered, should I? Should have just let Goku blast you into at -"
In a nanosecond, Vegeta sprang from the chamber, his eyes blazing with icy fire and pained fury. He strolled towards her, anger shining through in his very being, and crushed her against the wall of the gravity-inducing residence.
"Shut up!" He boomed, his face pressed directly against her own, his abhorrent snarl crystalline to her suddenly fearful features. "Just shut the fuck up and piss off! I never want to see you again!"
Tossing her with a disturbing severity onto the nature-strewn lawn, he left her to cry bitterly as their son rushed from the house, having seen his mother being manhandled by his father from one of the nearby windows.
Before Trunks could shout mutiny at his parent, he'd once again slammed the door of the Gravity Trainer shut, and had departed his injured wife and aggrieved son.
"Mother, are you alright?" The twenty-eight year old, lavender-haired man enquired, gently easing the woman into a comforting hug. "What the hell was all that about?"
She broke contact with her offspring, partially upset, partially enraged.
"Trunks," she murmured, her tears transforming into miniature drops of ice because of the almost frozen temperature, "go and round up the employees. We're about to find out how serious your father really is about never wanting to see me again."
"Mother, what are you going to do?" He queried, pondering her doubtlessly innovative revenge plot.
"You'll find out. I'll meet you in the Foyer in twenty minutes, okay?"
His mother replied fervently, shaking her snow-covered jacket down, causing thousand of tiny droplets of frozen precipitation to fall tersely from it.
"Okay," Trunks mused cordially, turning away and walking towards his home and workplace.
"We'll see, Vegeta," she muttered at the training machine, which was gently whirring with the gravity-laden pressure it was experiencing.
And with that, she followed her eldest child into the building, and stood patiently in the waiting area of the complex's reception.
Vegeta cried out in a verbal expression of pain as the drone caught him on the shoulder, searing the skin and enforcing the blood to encircle the singe.
It was no good. It was almost an hour past lunchtime, and he required nutrition or he wouldn't be achieving anything else for the rest of the afternoon and evening.
He also needed to find Bulma. His frustration with lack of physical progression had been immense recently, and he'd taken it unnecessarily out on her earlier. It wasn't his style to apologise, but smoothing things over couldn't be a bad suggestion. It had, as much as he detested admitting it, hurt him earlier, when she'd said she should have allowed Goku to kill him. That had burned his very soul, it truly had, which was why he'd flown off in the handle in so pointlessly enraged a manner. Not because the fool would have been able to kill him, but because she'd denounced his existence in such a manner.
Then again, you said you never wanted to see her again, his mind informed him cruelly, and he sighed softly, now acknowledging how far this was from being correct.
With a surge of regret, he closed down the Gravity Room, just as he heard a deafening scream escaping from his house.
"What the fuck is going on?!" He shouted, rushing out of the door and to attend to the scream he was sure had been his wife's.
He sprinted towards the Corporation building, where the shallow shriek had come from, and crashed through the reception area, which was sadly devoid of Humans - lunch break, he deduced rapidly.
No, there was someone in the room. Bulma was there.
But she was lying on the floor, stationary and deathly pale.
"Bulma…" he mumbled in concern, moving towards her quickly and kneeling at her side, mentally blocking out anything that wasn't her. "Wake up, woman…"
He stared at her closed eyelids, feeling totally helpless. There were no physical wounds afflicting her body, he soon realised - but, if that was the case, was there some sort of internal problem?
"Bulma, this isn't funny," he murmured, shaking her cold, heavily-clothed body with an extreme and highly uncharacteristic gentility. "Come on, get up..."
She didn't move, and her husband's urgency escalated rapidly, a tear burning near his eye, which he wiped furiously away.
"I'm sorry, alright?" He whispered, continuing his ineffective attempts to rouse her. "There wasn't a word of truth within what I said, do you hear me?"
Apparently not, his spirit replied harshly, making him want to scream. No, he couldn't take this. She'd been fine a few hours ago...
... before you thrust her against the trainer...
"That wouldn't have done this to her!" He yelled, misery piercing at his skin like cool, calculating, steel knives. "I didn't even intend to hurt her!"
Saiyans don't know their own strength, Vegeta...
"I didn't do this! I couldn't!" He roared at his overenthusiastic conscience, close to tears now. He kept trying to wake her, and nothing seemed to be working…
"Don't do this to me, woman," he said firmly, no longer wanting to be here, but similarly not wanting to leave her. "Don't leave me alone…"
His shaking palm found its way to her heart, and he splayed the fingers across it in some twisted manner of protection.
"I love you," he told her with a sudden sincerity, not quite sure what he'd do alone after all this time. The thought sent fear slashing into his very soul. He didn't think he could cope with that. Several tears slipped down his scarlet cheeks at the very idea of it.
"I need you," he whispered to her. "I need to know that you're not going to…"
He couldn't even consider the notion of her death, so gripping was his panic and love and need and fear.
"Don't make me face the nightmares without you. Please…"
She still remained unmoving, freezing. Without thinking, Vegeta gathered her in his powerful arms, and ignited a little of his ki to maintain her body temperature. Keeping her held tightly against him, and trying to prevent more tears from spilling from his dark eyes, he flew out of the door, telling her that he'd save her, and that she couldn't do this to him…
Trunks, who had been watching the entire scene from the upstairs balcony of the stairwell, able to see and hear perfectly thanks to his father's genes, stood there in both amazement and satisfaction.
"There's your answer, mother," he remarked to himself, stunned at his father's response, and returning to the Conference Room, where the employees of the company all resided, waiting for the "safety checks" Bulma had lied that she wanted to carry out to be confirmed before they broke for lunch.
Vegeta swooped over the city, making sure his wife was firmly attached to him and torn between flying slowly to protect her, or flying faster to get her quicker medical attention.
"Any time you'd like to regain consciousness is fine by me," he commented, trying to lighten his own spirit slightly by making a small joke - it didn't work, however, and only succeeded in disturbing him further.
"Is now okay?"
The alien very nearly dropped his wife in immense shock as her eyelids fluttered open and she smiled softly up at him, congratulating herself briefly.
Her plan had worked to perfection. The employees had kept effectively silent, and Vegeta hadn't even considered searching her ki to see whether or not she was truly dead.
However, when she met the despair in his eyes, her plan was all but shattered by the gravity of his response.
"Where are we?" She enquired, mostly to shield her emotions at his panic from his mental connection to her.
"Somewhere above the city," he commented, grinding to a mid-air halt. "Are you alright?"
"I… yeah," she responded hastily, his expression slightly frightened. "I think I just blacked out or something…"
He pulled her body closer to his own, his eyes closing in contentment and relief as he pressed his head into her shoulder.
"I thought you weren't coming back."
No more words were necessary; Bulma understood his plight, and felt awful about her plan to show him how much she meant within his life. His murmured words of love and need in her feigned faint had been heard so clearly that she wondered how he'd coped with seeing her like that.
"I'm sorry," he said softly, his hold intense and loving. "I didn't mean -"
"Hush," she whispered, pressing a finger to his lips. "I know. I'm sorry too."
"Nothing to be sorry for," he replied, kissing her neck for a moment before drawing his face back and revelling in a further shock.
"Vegeta, you've been crying…"
"I haven't!" He snapped, his temper cutting through as she realised his weakness. At her affronted look, he immediately calmed down, sighing.
"Do you feel like going somewhere, woman?" He asked, his eyes alight with immature curiosity and the need for adventure.
Bulma smiled.
"Lead the way, my Prince."
He grinned down at her, so glad to have her back with him that he kissed her gently before rocketing off into the distance.
That night, Vegeta held his wife just that little bit tighter that he would normally have done; and his wife didn't mind one bit.