Bulma stood quietly over her estranged lover's body. The worst of Vegeta's wounds had closed up, but he was yet to regain consciousness. From what the others were saying, it could take days for him to wake up, and longer still for him to truly move about again. His body was depleted of resources, and it would take a long time for those stores to be built back up.
She had gotten Goku to bring him back to the compound, the only place she found any vague sense of comfort at all. Seeing his broken body on the Lookout had almost made her lose her nerve, but it was a step that she needed to take. It had been too hard and too long on all of them for her to not rise to the occasion. Her friends were right, it was time for her to do whatever she could to mend the fractures. No matter how hard the situation was on her, she owed it to her family to take the reins.
So there she sat, looking at her…her what? Husband? Boyfriend? Friend with benefits? She still had no idea where their relationship technically stood. But no matter what they were calling it, it was an important bond that could not be ignored. Whether her feelings about him were the same as they were before the accident did not matter. She at least owed them acknowledgement of what they had. And at that moment, as she listened to the soft sound of the heart rate monitor beep at a slow, steady rate, she could not believe that it had gotten so out of control.
He looked so frail that it frightened her.
"You know you're an idiot, right?" she softly told him. "You took it way too far. You always took it way too far. I mean, I know that I haven't exactly been a contender for spouse of the year lately, but really? Taking yourself to the brink of death? Again? You need to learn some new tricks for coping with your feelings."
Vegeta showed no signs of having heard her, not that Bulma had been expecting one. "This has always been your way," she went on. "When something is getting to you, really getting to you, you go through this weird, masochistic, refuse to talk about anything to anyone for any reason phase. How many times have you nearly killed yourself because you're not comfortable talking?"
Bulma slid herself from her chair to the edge of her bed. "But I guess it's a little hypocritical of me to be lecturing you about this, huh? Ever since I came home from the hospital, I haven't wanted to talk about any of my problems to anyone. I didn't want to openly admit that anything was really wrong. I guess I thought that if I just made myself fall back into my old habits, things would just magically work out and be just like they used to be. You all told me that it was going to take more than that, but I wouldn't listen. I wanted everything to be back to normal, and I didn't want it to be my fault that it wasn't. So I guess I'm an idiot too, huh?
"Goku had an idea," she went on, a sad smile on her face. "He thought that maybe that old bad in the desert could have me look into her crystal ball and that it would restore some of my broken memories. I know, who would have guessed that Goku of all people would come up with an idea like that? He's a total goof, but I've got to admit, it wasn't a half bad thought. So he took me to her temple, and, well, I'll spare you the boring details. Except that she can project her summoned images onto a big home theater screen. Why the hell have we been looking into a two and a half foot ball when we've had that option lying around?"
She shook her head, regaining her focus. "Sorry, it's been a weird week. Well, you know that, don't you?" With a soft sigh, she slid his fingers over his. Again, he gave no sign that he was even aware that someone was in the room with him. "Anyway, apparently I already knew that, because it would seem that I asked her that a long time ago. I was curious about you.
"You probably won't believe this, but I actually did gain a few memories back while I was there today." She lightly gripped on to his hand, hoping to feel a squeeze that she knew was not going to come. "I don't know what about it triggered them. We never even got to the specific things I had Baba look into last time. But they came, and I needed to see you as soon as I could."
A small lump formed in her throat as the memory came upon her again. Most of the images and feelings that had come back to her were of a happier nature, but not this one. This one, though, made her heart ache in a way she would never have thought possible.
"I told you," she very slowly explained, "that I remembered certain things, and that I thought it was enough to make all of our problems go away. I thought that remembering who our enemies were and that I had once felt something for you was enough. But I discovered something. I found out that knowing that something once existed isn't nearly enough to force it to exist again. Sometimes things go out forever. Sometimes it's just extinct. And over the last few days, I've been giving in to that concept. I've been playing with the idea that maybe we had something special once upon a time, but without having access to my feelings, it just didn't exist anymore. I was getting ready to walk away from it because I really didn't know what it was that brought us together. I knew that something had, and I knew that it was special, but I had no idea what it was."
Her eyes slowly closed, and she forced herself to take a steadying breath. "I remembered," she whispered, "another time when I was getting ready to walk away from you. I was so mad at you. I didn't think there was any way that you and I could even hope to go the distance. Our son was so young, and you and I couldn't have been at longer odds with each other. We were miserable, and can you blame us? It took a long time for both of us to understand just what we were up against. Our lives were both changing as such a crazy rate, but neither one of us was really up to the challenge. Trunks came around, and I got lost in this fairy tale dream of what a family was and tried to force you to fit in to it. And you had just achieved the state of Super Saiyan, something you had coveted your whole life. You were gearing up for the battle against the androids, something that we had heard would essentially bring about the end of the world. Settling down and playing with a baby was the furthest thing from your mind.
"I screamed about you not being there for our son," she lamented, "and you would scream about the role of a warrior and how you refused to acknowledge anything that could be a weakness, even us. By the time the battle came around, we weren't together anymore. And I think we had both made up our minds that it just wasn't going to work out between us. We were ready to cut and run. Oddly enough, that actually seemed to make things better between us. When we no longer expected anything from each other, we started to get along again."
Suddenly her breath caught in her throat, and she found herself forced to look away from him. "And just when things started looking good again," she whispered, "everything changed."
The memory hit her again, and her whole world spun as that painful part of her life came crashing back against her. It felt like the entire room was spinning. She nearly fell off the edge of the bed, and would have if not for the insanely intense grip she managed to maintain on it. The entire process was almost more than she could bear.
"I remember," she tried telling him again, her voice cracking slightly, "what happened after the battle. After Cell was dead. After the future version of our son went home. After everyone had gone away. After the battle high was out of your system completely."
Her eyes stayed away from him, but she gently began rubbing his stilled hand with her thumb and index finger. "We never talked about that time," she weakly went on. "I remember that. I remember that we never went back to it, never let ourselves think about it. And because of that, I don't know how you really felt during all of it. We're the same like that sometimes. We just want to move on past the hard part, and never look back.
"But today I had to look back at it."
She continued to rub his hand, and she spared him a glance from the corner of her eye. "Trunks had just left us," she recalled, slowly switching her gaze back toward the blank wall. "You weren't training on those days, but that wasn't so strange. After all, you'd just finished a battle. It's natural to take a couple days off. For those first few days after the fight, you seemed alright. A little quieter than usual, but nothing so out of the ordinary that I thought anything of it. And I was trying so hard to come to terms with Goku's death that I didn't really watch you too carefully. There was no reason to. Or at least, that's what I thought."
Her hand stopped rubbing. Her grip, though, tightened hard. "How long were you quiet before I realized it?" she asked, finally looking back at him. "Hours? Days? Weeks? How long did you stay totally silent before I even noticed something was wrong?
"How did I not see it until it reached the next stage?"
The memory came back again, honing in on one particular moment. She wanted to shove it away, to never look at it and pretend that it never happened, but she knew that would have been wrong. She fought with it, looking straight into it with her mind's eye. She refused to back away from her past any longer because it might hold something she did not like.
"It had been days since I'd even seen you," she hoarsely whispered. "I didn't think anything of it at the time because you pulled disappearing acts all the time, and you almost never gave me any warning when you did. I figured you were just brooding somewhere. But you weren't. You'd been home the entire time. You'd been three doors down from me the whole time. You'd been sitting in our future son's room, and you hadn't left it in days.
"When I finally found you," she painfully recalled, "you wouldn't talk to me. At first I thought you were just being a stubborn pain in the ass. You know, like you usually are. So I said a few things to you, and then I yelled a few things at you, and then I left you alone. But then I went back the next day, and you were still there. And the day after that, and the day after that. You weren't leaving, you weren't talking, I don't even think you were eating. You were just sitting there, on the floor of his bedroom, staring at the wall. I never did find out if you were ever aware that I had been in the room, much less yelling at you all that time.
"And then, about a week after I noticed you there, something changed. I went in, and you were still in your spot, but the wall wasn't empty anymore. You'd moved at some point, and you had gotten the armor that Trunks had been wearing when…when Cell killed him. I didn't even know that we had it in the compound. I thought he had either gotten rid of it or taken it with him. It still had his blood on it. It was flaky and browning, but it was still clearly his blood. And next to it was your own armor from only a few years earlier. It was the armor you had on when you were killed. They were lined up with each other, sitting in that same spot you had been staring at for a week."
She faced him fully and moved her hand from his fingers to his cheek, cupping it gently. "I sat down with you," she recalled, "and I waited with you for a long time. You still weren't talking. Hell, you were barely blinking. I think six or seven hours passed as I sat with you. I didn't know what to do. You were so…I don't know what word to use. Lost? Bothered? Overwhelmed? I don't know, Vegeta, because you never told me exactly what you were feeling. You barely told me anything at all.
"You did tell me something, though," she went on, looking at his pale features. "You had your eyes straight ahead, still looking at the armor, and all you said was, 'It shouldn't have been him'. I remember asking you what you meant by that, but all you did was say that same thing again. It shouldn't have been him. That was all you ever told me. I tried talking to you, but you didn't speak again. I tried bringing you food, but you still wouldn't eat it. It was another week before you left the room as far as I know. It was two and a half more before you talked again. And then you slowly got back into your old routine, and you pretended it never happened. And I went right along with you on that. After how miserable I was when you were shutting down, I was just happy that you were back up. So I didn't push it. You were up, you were moving, you were eating, you were training. I didn't care what had been bothering you, so long as it was over."
Another sigh escaped her. "You never talked to me about what you felt at that time," she softly lamented. "And I never talked to you about how I felt. Watching you waste away, watching you lock yourself off in your own mind, it scared me. We weren't romantically involved with each other at that point. Our fling was well over, and our real relationship hadn't started. But you were still an important part of my life, and watching you self-destruct from the inside out frightened me. You had never shown me anything like that before. I'd seen you physically abuse yourself when you got stressed out a thousand times, but never mentally. And during those days when you wouldn't talk or move or respond to anything, I was genuinely afraid that you were going to stay that way forever. I thought you had been pushed one step too far, and that I wasn't going to get you back. I thought you were just…gone. And that was when I realized just how much I had come to depend on having you as a part of my life.
"I didn't know, Vegeta," she defended. "When I stopped involving you after the accident, when I treated you like the enemy, when I kept pushing you away when you were actually trying to do what was best for me, I didn't know. How could I have known that you were going to start up with this again? How was I supposed to know that you were going to stop eating and sleeping like you should be? I know you haven't taken it as far as you did last time, and I'm so grateful that it hasn't gotten that bad. But holy crap, Vegeta, you've traded out the gravity room for taking on the three strongest people on the planet that are not you, and doing it without any rest or recovery at all. What the hell did you think was going to happen? I know you, you're more than smart enough to know what this would do to you if you kept this up. You couldn't possibly have thought that it was going to just be a quick form of stress relief that was…did you?
"Did you think this was more controlled? Is that why you did it? Because you needed an out, but there would be someone to stop you if you started to really lose it again? Was that the only way you could ask for help?" She shook her head and closed her eyes. "That's it, isn't it? That's why you've been pushing it so far. And I missed it. You disappeared for three days and showed up looking like hell, and I let it go completely because I had 'better' things to worry about. Because my life was falling apart."
Getting to her feet, she stretched out her sore back. "In my defense," she told his stilled body, "I was going through a bitch of a time on my own. Trust me, if you woke up one day to find yourself severely injured and that you were missing over a third of your life, you wouldn't want to deal with anyone else's issues. Now, that being said, I would like to take this opportunity to say that you and I might very well be the two most messed up people on this planet. If either one of us was mentally stable, we probably could have handled this entire debacle much better. But let's face it, we're both self-involved, a bit manic-depressive, and above all that we're control freaks. Neither of us handle loss of control well. Like, ever. And we both do the same stupid thing. We pretend that we have control, and tell everyone else that we have control, usually when we're more lost than we've ever been. So you started this psycho sparring thing, and I insisted that I knew what I was doing to get my life back in order, and we were both lying through our teeth."
Bulma turned and sat down in the chair at his bedside, and she leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. "So here's what I have to say to you," she firmly stated. "I am sick of lying. I am sick of pretending. I am sick of trying to assume control over something that I clearly hold no control over. And I know you're the same way. We want to get back to where we were, and I say we start now. I will make sure you get healthy and strong again. I will not leave you again. I will be your significant other of unknown official status again." Reaching out, she slid her fingers among his again. "And together, together, Vegeta, we are going to help our son through his own troubles before he turns out as screwed up as we are. I am going to confront my problems, and you're going to deal with yours. We start again, just like we did last time. And when we're ready, we'll actually talk. But I won't force it, just like you won't. I'm not going to try to make something happen when it's clearly not the right time. We'll do what has always worked for us. We'll take it one step at a time. And we will make it. Are you with me?"
Maybe it was nothing more than a figment of her imagination. Maybe it was just a dream that she was forcing into her own reality. But Bulma Briefs was certain that she felt his fingers move, and she smiled. The fight for normalcy was finally starting.