The Strongest Under the Heavens World Martial Arts Tournament.
With a new year, came a new chance to win. Yamcha had told himself that for the entirety of his training. It hadn't been easy. He knew that Goku and maybe Krillin were stronger than him. Hell, even LAUNCH could be stronger than him but she had a lot of firepower to back herself up with. Yamcha knew he was going to win something this time. He was confident. That confidence lasted for the whole trip to the tournament, through the preliminary rounds, all the way up to when he met the students of the rival school.
That's when his confidence took a sizeable hit.
The Crane students were an odd couple to say the least. One looked like a doll, for God's sake, and he was a stubby two feet tall at the most. The other one was the problem. He was easily the same height as Yamcha, maybe taller, and looked as if he had spent his whole life training. Pretty hot too.
"Where the hell did that come from?" Yamcha thought to himself as he turned his gaze away from the Crane students. He was dating Bulma and he was NOT attracted to other men. Right? He put the idea aside as he realized that the Crane student he was thinking about was walking towards him and his friends. He put on his best scowl and looked at the man. He tried to maintain a glare but its effectiveness was lessened by the fact that Yamcha couldn't pick which eyes to look into. He wasn't used to people who had more than two yet he didn't waver. This would be easy. He'd teach himself to hate this man so much that all his nagging feelings would just go away.
...
The feelings had not gone away.
Yamcha had seen a demon King kill a giant dragon, Goku kill that demon along with his spawn, plus all manner of weird and dangerous things over the past few months and yet he still couldn't get that damn triclops out of his head. They were on good terms now, sure, and Yamcha had already seen just how much Tien had changed in such a short time.
The one thing that hadn't changed, much to Yamcha's dismay, was how damn attractive Tien was. Now that his personality was coming through his quiet facade more often Yamcha had learned a lot about Tenshinhan.
He was stoic yet easily flustered. He was blunt yet kind in his own way. He didn't have much of a sense of humor but smiled at the group when he thought no one could see him.
In short - He was adorable and Yamcha had no idea what to do about it.
He was still dating Bulma and did his best every day to remind himself why he loved her, because he did. Bulma was his first and, as far as he was concerned, only love. None the less he failed to ignore the small part of his brain that was telling him to go after Tien.
He didn't do it, of course. He had Bulma and he was pretty sure that Launch was close to a romantic breakthrough with the three eyed man. Yamcha just had to wait it out.
All these feelings meant? They meant he had a crush. And a crush meant nothing.