Well, it's been three years, I've lost all my notes, and I'm pretty sure no one's following this. But rules were made to be broken.
ChiChi had had nothing nice to say about Bulma and Gohan's pact with the Prince, and Bulma couldn't blame her. ChiChi and Goku's every moment was controlled by the urgency to restore balance to the universe, while Bulma's newest patron—not just an Elite, but the Prince himself—likely reminded ChiChi of a time on Earth when Bulma was a bit more...reckless. Bulma might as well have done this all deliberately, the way ChiChi was reacting.
"Are you crazy?!" ChiChi had shrieked, causing them all to grimace, and Gohan's face to droop.
The Prince poked his head around the corner with wide eyes. Bulma glanced between the Prince and ChiChi and giggled nervously, attempting to shrug as though it had all just been a zany mishap.
Then Bulma pressed her face to the screen and glowered. "Look," she whispered furiously, "this is as good as it gets." She glanced up at the Prince, who was now standing at the door with his arms crossed, watching her with his depthless black eyes. "You do what you have to do, we do what we have to do. Yes, we don't have a whole lot of options this way, but we didn't before, either. At least now we have some measure of protection."
"And you're going morally bankrupt to pay him for it!" ChiChi hollered, and Gohan and Bulma's shoulders sunk even lower.
All of a sudden the Prince was hoisting the laptop up from the bed and turning it to face him. Bulma and Gohan's jaws went slack as the Prince and ChiChi were suddenly face to face. To ChiChi's credit, her initial shock was quickly replaced by a firm scowl at the man that took up her screen.
His face was blank, controlled, save for the way his brows pulled at the other in chronic disapproval of everything. "This is the Prince of all Saiyans. If I find that there is any duplicity in your agents, I will kill them both," he assured her matter-of-factly. "Tell the Super Saiyan I look forward to receiving him. Once our task is done, he will have to answer to me." Vegeta ended the call simply by ripping the wires from the back and flinging the laptop to the floor.
Bulma rushed over and gathered it in her arms. "Is that how you were taught to turn computers off?" She complained, sitting it gently on the nightstand.
The Prince had already left the room, though he left their double doors open, his silent, sparse sitting room in their view like a mirror reflecting their helplessness.
"I don't understand, Bulma," Gohan said softly, winding his fingers around each other. Bulma cast him a look of concern and settled on the bed beside him, sending one more annoyed glance at the doorway. "Why would he be so hospitable? Why stick his neck out for us?"
"He has bigger fish to fry, I think," she whispered uneasily, chewing the thought over. ChiChi's concern wasn't misplaced, and they both knew it. A small frown knit as she gazed into her lap. "He means to use us. He's like all the rest of them. He doesn't believe we're any threat."
Gohan turned to look at her with wide eyes. "Are we?"
Bulma met his gaze, mouth turned down at the corners. There were slight lines showing at the corners of her mouth and between her brows that weren't there in his father's photo of her from years ago, her arm thrown around his Dad with a wide smile. No laugh lines, no crow's feet on this woman. Just the washed out, gaunt face of a person who had fought to stay alive for a decade.
Her hand rubbed his back protectively. "We can't overpower him, that's for sure. I don't know...I don't know that I particularly want to outwit him, either." They glanced at the doorway. No shadow lurked in its threshold; just the empty red room, staring back at them. "We're important to him right now. We're safe as long as we remain that way." She leaned her head against his, drawing him in close to squeeze him to her side. Little Gohan, only eleven, too small to be taken to the no-mans-land where his father prepared to be a tool of war, but too kind to ever hold it against anyone.
"When I was your age," she said, turning the mood as she leaned back against the pillows and stared at the ceiling with a faint smile, "I was always outside, climbing trees, catching fireflies, playing tag with the kids in my neighborhood. Or in my father's lab," she amended with a quirk at the corner of her lips, "climbing all over his prototypes, turning wrenches with him. There wasn't a thing I worried about, except maybe going to the mall on a Friday night." She twirled a lock of his hair in her fingers. It was getting shaggy now. She aught to trim it, but scientists weren't allowed to have scissors. The Empire didn't appreciate when its free labor ended its life.
Gohan tentatively took the bait. "What was the Earth like, then?"
"Blue sky, pure cerulean blue. One yellow sun, one moon. And seasons, not just this eternal heat. Sometimes it snowed, sometimes it stormed. There were deserts, but also jungles, and marshes, and fields, and cities, and ice and snow that went on for miles." Her eyes rose to the ceiling dreamily. "I could hop on a motorbike, tell my folks I'd be back in time for dinner, and drive anywhere I wanted to in the world."
"It won't be like that again, though, will it?"
Bulma frowned testily at the ceiling. Her hand fell from his hair disheartedly. "Earth is gone, Gohan, and the dragon balls with it. If we can do as the Prince says, we'll have the chance to start again somewhere new, somewhere free and safe. And that sounds heavenly." Her eyes drifted to his, daring him to complain. Like the good kid he was, he didn't, just nodded softly.
She sighed. "Get some sleep, kiddo." She dragged herself out of the bed, pulling the blankets over him. "Your Mom will come around. Just give her some time to swallow the news." She pulled the fine chain that turned out the light. "And before you know it, Goku will be here to fix everything." A ghost of a smile graced her face in the dark.
She slipped quietly through the Prince's sitting room and found him standing at the window, his arms behind his back with military ease. The curtains rippled gently in the arid breeze, winding about his strong thighs.
She approached slowly, making sure he knew she was there. He didn't budge, just stood stolidly, his silhouette melding with the black sky and stars before him.
"It will never be the same," he finally said, unmoving.
Her eyes drifted to the stars beyond. "I know," she conceded regretfully.
"I have eradicated planets like yours." His face angled towards hers, shadowed in the low lamp light. "Do you not mean to make me pay for it?"
His voice was low, inflexible. He did not think she could. He wondered if she was still ballsy enough to try.
She frowned deeply, meeting his dark, indecipherable gaze. "If I could, I would, you bet." She sighed with contempt. "But I'm just a human. I have no power here. The Empires draw the world as they desire, and I have to make myself fit it."
"There is nothing wrong with power," he interjected cooly. "Not if it's earned."
"But who deserves power?" She countered. "And what about the people who are hurt when you use it?"
His face turned again to the outside world. "Power exists. It has always been. It's integral to life itself. There is no world that does not have someone who seeks to use it, and a social hierarchy that illuminates and enforces the power of power itself."
"People have the right to live peacefully."
"It is not for peace that I play this game. Let's be clear." He turned his whole body toward her this time, his arms folding over his chest. "It's power, it's dominance, it's mastery. It's the thrill of testing my strength. It's the profound satisfaction I feel to my very bones when I win." She found it hard to breathe around him sometimes. For having a much more human stature than other Saiyans, he took up so much space. "And don't you, too, seek power? Power over me, to get what you want? And your Super Saiyan. Even now, he trains to become more powerful."
She scoffed defensively. "We wouldn't act this way if it wasn't the only option left to us."
"Power is the universal language," he said dismissively. "The question is, 'who deserves power?'"
He must have wanted to hear her answer, though, because while he seemed to have his own thoughts on the matter, he waited for hers. She searched his face. Why would he care how she felt about it?
"A person deserves power if they're incapable of being swayed by it. Those who use it to help others," she responded quietly, "and not those whom others are stepping stones to their own desires."
"You are a stepping stone," he reminded her, unintentionally cruel. "I am helping myself by using you."
"Yes," she agreed bitterly. "At least this way I get something out of it."
"You, too, play the game of power. And you have dared to play it with me. Of all people." The corner of his lip curled at her pride's expense.
"I guess I'm no better than you, then." She looked up at him under a scowl.
The breeze ruffled his thick hair. "We all play the game, we just justify it in different ways." He turned back toward the sky, measuring the space between he and the stars as if he wanted to span the distance at that very moment. "It is only a matter of who plays it wisely. Even those who risk all and win cannot hold it for long without strategy."
"Why are you trying to debate with me?" She exclaimed. "You know we have different opinions on the matter, and I obviously can't change your mind."
He smiled then, a barbed thing, easy to get caught on, easy to wound. "To know how much of a danger you are to me."
She frowned, curiously. "I'm no danger to you."
"You're a woman with powerful friends and connections to an insurgency that is a plague on my empire." His dark eyes gripped hers. "You have snuck past Saiyan defenses in the Palace and are now holed up in my very quarters. I am not to be cautious of you?"
She'd never thought of it like that. "I'm just 42019," she finally sighed. "I just want to go home."
"There is no such thing as home," he snapped, bristling at her sentimentality. "Your home is dust, and mine...mine is gripped in a cold war, and even now the Senate seeks to either use me or silence me interminably. They hope I am dimwitted and impolitic, so that I may be controlled for their purposes. And while I have no desire to encourage them, I do not want them to know the deviations at the heart of it. The throne is mine: not the Elite's, not your Super Saiyan's, not the rebel's...Not even the gods."
She scowled, crossing her arms over her own chest and looking askant out the window. "Yeah, yeah," she muttered.
"I would have you tomorrow sniff out the motivations of First Strike. The Council and the Colds are plotting something, and First Strike has a hand in it. I will expect answers promptly when I return tomorrow evening at 1700." He watched her face go slack, her eyes compute the enormous task, maybe calculating the probability of escape. "You will not be going anywhere," he warned. "The guards have been notified to kill anything trying to come in or out of my rooms on sight." He watched her face fall further with some satisfaction. "Now tell me," he urged silkily, "would you rather it be me or you with the power?"
She watched him jeer with growing outrage. Her mouth parted, but he interrupted. "You may have what is left of my dinner. Do not think to kill me in my sleep; I am a light sleeper." He sent her a contemptible smile and turned away from her then, pulling off his gloves and striding to the bathroom.
She fell into his study chair with a plop, hanging her head in her palm. She felt her eyes burn and a single tear hit her nose, and she sniffed angrily, dashing away any wayward tears. Tears were a currency that bought nothing.
The smell of steak was too overpowering, though, and she couldn't help turning toward it, and with barely a backwards glance at the closed bathroom door, grabbed it with both hands and shoved it into her mouth, chewing through her frustrated sniffles.
The cage remained. There was always a cage.
Bulma slept hard, though she hadn't thought it possible to sleep with a universal terror in the other room and with the events of the night turning over and over in her head. But she managed, and when she woke, Gohan was helping himself to a large platter of eggs. "Good morning, Bulma. The Prince let me have his leftover breakfast. All the meat was gone but there's still some toast in the sitting room. And there's plenty of eggs left."
She squinted at him, brushing the hair from her face with the flat of her hand. "Is he still here?"
Gohan shook his head. "He left awhile ago."
Her arm flopped over her eyes. "What time is it?"
"About 0500."
She grumbled. The one morning in ten years she got to sleep in and her body was so wired to wake up at 0500 lights-on that she couldn't sleep through it if she tried.
She grasped for some clothes and dragged her feet to the bathroom, closing the door groggily behind her. Her fingers slid against the on-off pad, and the shower heads began spraying, quickly steaming the glass doors. Bulma stepped into the shower, roomy enough to rival the size of her bedroom in the Science Wing, which had been just big enough to turn around in. She cursed the Prince's privilege under her breath. The marble was cool and smooth against her feet, and she hurried to find the shampoo before she slowed dumbly. The Prince's shower wouldn't turn off in five galactic minutes like her own. She exhaled heavily. The hot water ran over the top of her head and she craned up to it, dragging her hands over her face and relaxing into the spray. Since no tyrannical princes threatened her life after a few minutes in the steam of his bathroom, she took a moment to enjoy it, breathing deeply and finding a stillness of mind, however brief, that hadn't been present in far too long.
Stepping out of the shower, she grabbed at a thick towel and rubbed herself dry. She threw it haphazardly back over the rack and pulled on the high rise polyester panties, clipped on the stretched-out, pilled bra. Like her own, there was no mirror in this bathroom, and she was grateful for whatever Saiyans had against looking at themselves. She hadn't seen her reflection in eight years, and she had no intention of seeing it again at this point just to get depressed by it.
All she had to choose from was a work uniform and a single set of pajamas, and so she pulled on the coarse scrubs and lab coat and tied her stiff oxfords. She ran her comb through her hair but left it down and against regulation, swaying damp against her shoulders. It felt profoundly rebellious.
Padding into the Prince's sitting room and relieved to see that he was, thank Kami, not present, she swiped the leftover toast, what remained of a whole mouth-watering loaf soaked in imported honeyed butter, and began the tedious task of setting up her computer. She had approximately eleven hours to hack First Strike and find the way in which they antagonized the Saiyan Empire, or else it was off with her head.
"I'll let you know if I need your help, kiddo." She addressed Gohan distractedly. "Why don't you get caught up on your calculus homework?" Gohan knew what she was implying: she'd need some time to herself to get this done. Used to Bulma's obsessive absorption while working on a project, he nodded and hopped off the bed.
He hoped the Prince didn't mind if he did homework in the sitting room. After all, Gohan was half-Saiyan, and even he could smell every person who had been in the Prince's quarters recently, like a lingering psychic residue. He didn't know if it was because Bulma wasn't Saiyan that it didn't bother the Prince that her scent was everywhere, even in his bed—Gohan didn't question it—but Saiyans were naturally competitive with each other. So Gohan, even while trying to give Bulma some berth to work, tried to make himself as inconspicuous as possible outside her door but as far away from Vegeta's room as he could manage.
Unless things got messy, he'd let Bulma handle the Prince.