Soft sunshine peeked from behind the voluminous, late summer clouds, casting a ray of bright light through the window and across Vegeta's sleeping face. The Saiyan felt the intensity of the light through his eyelids, and he scrunched them together tightly in order to allow himself to adjust. Over the course of a few minutes, he found himself fully conscious, and he opened his eyes wearily. A faint clicking noise came from the corner of the room, and Vegeta glanced toward its source. Dr. Briefs sat alone, his nose inches away from a small device; intermittently, he puzzled at it, then poked at its metallic viscera with a needle-thin screwdriver.

Just before opening his mouth to speak, Vegeta realized an oxygen mask lay over his mouth and nose. Lethargically, he raised one arm to remove it.

"You're awake, Vegeta!" Dr. Briefs said, his eyes momentarily shifting away from the device in his hand. "How are you feeling?"

"Old man," the Saiyan rasped, "fetch the Earth woman at once."

Dr. Briefs raised one eyebrow. "Hmm," he sighed after a few seconds, "I'm afraid you're going to have to narrow it down a bit for me." He chuckled quietly to himself. "There's more than one of them, you know."

"Bulma, you idiot. Bulma. Get her—now."

Setting the small device on his lap, Dr. Briefs seemed unfazed by and wholly oblivious to the Saiyan's terseness. "Oh, all right," he said, pulling his cell phone from his pocket. "She'll be glad to know you're awake." He held his phone to his ear. Vegeta had no trouble picking up its quiet ringing with his sharp hearing.

"What is it, daddy?" Bulma's voice answered.

"Vegeta's awake, and he's asking for you."

"Really?" She sounded surprised. "I'll be right there."

"Do you mind if I step out and get some lunch once you get here?"

"Not at all. Thanks for watching him, daddy. Talk to you later." She ended the call, and Dr. Briefs returned his phone to his pocket. After dropping his screwdriver into the same pocket, he gathered up the device he had been fidgeting with from his lap, and he ambled out of the room without a word.

Not five minutes later, Vegeta heard the clatter of Bulma's light, trotting footsteps from the hall. "Hey, you," she said, smiling, once she opened the door. A small desk stood beside the bed, and she pulled its matching chair away and sat down, her knees brushing the simple white bedspread. "How are you doing? Did you need something?"

As if he had not heard her, the Saiyan stared blankly at the ceiling for a full thirty seconds before saying anything. "How long have I lain unconscious?" he mumbled. "I demand to know what they have done to me."

"You've been out for two days. They fixed you up. That's all they did."

Vegeta blinked. "What did they do?" he reiterated, clearly desiring to hear specific information.

"Well, you were in critical condition for quite a while. You'd lost a lot of blood. There was quite a bit of internal bleeding from your broken ribs—yeah, you broke seven of them and perforated a lung—and that glass shard almost sliced your liver in half. Talk about blood loss. They had to get you stabilized before they could open you up and repair that. They put a tube in your chest to drain some of the excess fluid. Then they did what they could to repair your knee, and they cleaned up your cuts and burns. They had to stitch you up in a few places. You had to get a couple transfusions. You're lucky you're related to humans, because blood replacement would have been a lot more difficult if you had some weird, alien blood type. You weren't breathing deeply enough, so they've kept you on supplemental oxygen and painkillers." She added, "And, no, they didn't do anything funny with you, if that's what you were worried about. No tampering—just surgical repairs. You should probably put that mask back on, by the way."

Not once shifting his unblinking gaze from the ceiling, Vegeta had listened carefully. Absentmindedly, he had raised his left hand to his forehead, and he had begun scratching the skin surrounding a thin line of stitches.

Bulma grabbed his wrist and pushed his arm back down to his side. "Don't do that! Great—now it's bleeding." She stood up, then fetched some antiseptic wipes and gauze patches from a nearby cabinet. Just before she began to clean the reopened wound, Vegeta muttered, "I feel... weightless." His voice carried a tone of intense fascination.

"Um," Bulma said, "I think the morphine's gone to your head a bit." Once she had wiped away the excess blood, she applied the gauze with slight pressure. "Did you want anything else, or did you just want to know what happened to you?" She held the oxygen mask over his mouth before he tried to speak again.

"Get that away," he said, turning his head to one side. "I do not need it."

"Yes, you do! Hypoxia doesn't make you tough, you idiot."

"I have broken ribs before. I know my body." He paused. "And what is this 'morphine' you spoke of?" His eyes had narrowed in suspicion.

"It's an opioid painkiller, if you know what that is. It bonds with the central nervous system's pain receptors to help raise the pain threshold. It mimics the effect that an endorphin release has. You see that needle in your arm? It's going in through there along with some fluids and antibiotics."

Vegeta glanced at his forearm, his eyes widening. "Remove it immediately."

Bulma sighed. "No, Vegeta. You won't be able to breathe deeply enough. It will hurt too much if you stop taking the medicine."

"I will have no mind-altering substances in my body!" He began to fidget with the medical tape on his arm clumsily. With only a single pillow supporting his head, he could not see what he was doing very well, and he attempted to sit up in order to get a better view. The instant he flexed the necessary muscles of his chest and abdomen, however, he recoiled. He fell back, letting out a delayed squeal of pain and frustration. He drew his fingers into a fist and struck the bed angrily, causing the whole structure to shake.

"I am nauseous," he croaked. Truly, he wanted nothing less than to spew up whatever his stomach might contain. The thought of gagging alone—his abdominal muscles contracting involuntarily—brought a foretaste of the physical torment it would exact. In attempt to stave off his nausea, he bit down on his tongue. A single tear escaped from the outer corner of one eye.

Bulma took hold of his right hand. He did not shrink away.

"Talk, woman!" Vegeta ordered, his voice strained.

"About what?"

"Anything! Do as I say!" He had forgotten entirely about his request for her to remove his IV. "You never shut up—surely, you cannot have suddenly run out of things to say."

"This is really weird, but okay. And I'm only obeying you because you're having a hard time." She exhaled. "Well, you must be in a lot of pain, because I don't see you as the kind of guy to whine about injuries. I've heard breaking a rib is one of the worse things ever. At least with a broken leg or something, you have a better time keeping it still. You can't exactly keep your ribs still, though, because, you know—breathing. Damn, it sounds annoying. I don't know how I'd deal with it. I sprained my ankle a while back, and I cried like a baby. And you've got a new injury every time I see you walk out of that gravity room. That takes dedication—going and beating yourself up every day. I get my ass out of bed in time to work out maybe once a week. Your willpower is crazy. How do you stay focused on things for so long? I get distracted too easily. I always have a million different things I'm working on at once, and I'm not exactly the tidiest person, so I end up just working on the thing that's the least buried under the other things. You're not like that at all. You keep everything crazy clean. I couldn't function in a space that clean. It's disturbing in a weird way. There's a certain amount of mess I need to keep me from feeling nervous. I'm actually kind of nervous right now." Vegeta felt her press his fingers with her thumb. "You doing okay over there?" she asked him.

Now that he had lain still for a few minutes, the spike in pain from his attempt to sit up had subsided. Once he had caught his breath, his nausea had diminished as well, but that strange sensation of floating would simply not fade. He felt exposed somehow, as if the walls separating his inner thoughts from his outer expressions had come crashing down. Normally, the loss of control would have perturbed him deeply, but, in spite of everything, he found himself strangely carefree. Part of his mind told him that he should feel perturbed, but he simply did not feel that way. Reality conflicted with the way his mind prescribed and defined reality. Yet even though this conflict raged within him, its violence remained light-years away.

"Hello? Earth to Vegeta!"

"Earth medicine is strange and inefficient," he mumbled.

"Mind telling me why you called me in here? Just curious."

"You would tell me the truth about what they did. And I wanted to hear your voice."

"Wait. What?"

"My toes itch. Badly." He wiggled them under the sheets.

Bulma snorted. "You are high off your ass."

"The sensation likens well to the one immediately following orgasm."

Bulma laughed mischievously. "I would record this if I was sure you wouldn't kill me when you found out about it."

"You will speak to no one of this! One word, and I shall silence you forever. Damn your human medicine to Hell!"

"There's the Vegeta we all know and love. But no-filters Vegeta is pretty damn awesome." She squeezed his hand again. "What was it you said about my voice?"

"Oh." He extended the syllable for a full second or two, employing a gradual downward inflection as if he tried to remember something. "It was distracting. When I was on the floor. I needed a distraction."

"That all? Come on—does no-filters Vegeta stroke egos? What did you need a distraction from?"

"The pain," he answered monotonically.

Silence followed. "Nothing about my silvery, angelic tones? Nothing about the healing power of words spoken in love?"

"That is a load of shit."

"Goddammit," Bulma sighed. "I guess you're not secretly romantic. Judging by how much you're talking, at least, you really don't need the oxygen mask. Pretty remarkable, actually."

Vegeta blinked slowly. "I fucking hate Kakarot."

"That's random. Well, maybe not from you."

"He believes compassion holds some secret power. It didn't make me better, Kakarot. You're an idiot—just like Raditz. I fucking hated Raditz. Never thought about anything but what was right in front of his face—or his mouth, or his dick. Everything was always just fine. Give him a meal or a fight or a woman and he grinned like an idiot. It's just not that simple. It never is. I can't just 'enjoy life.'"

"What are you talking about, Vegeta?" She scooted her chair closer to the bed.

"Frieza," he whimpered. A handful of tears streamed down the sides of his face, but they soon dried, and the Saiyan reclaimed his empty stare. He felt too weightless to take up the burden of his memories."Talk, woman. Start talking."

"No-filters Vegeta can be depressing too, I guess. You know, I'm still pretty curious about Frieza. It would be a really bad idea to talk about him, though. So I'm going to stop now. I wonder if you're acting funny because of the pain or the medicine. It's probably a bit of both. I think I kind of understand why you don't like the medicine or anything mind-altering—like alcohol and stuff. You don't like it when you're not fully self-aware. A lot of people aren't like that—I'm not. Sometimes, I think it's fun to get a bit tipsy. At work, sometimes I can get pretty high-strung, and a good drink can calm my nerves pretty well once I get home. One time, I thought it was a good idea to bring the booze into the office. Turns out it wasn't such a great idea. At least I wasn't snapping at people like I usually do when I'm stressed. I wonder if you could even get drunk at all. I mean, your metabolism is crazy fast; you'd probably have to drink pretty much pure alcohol. The nurses had a fun time adjusting all of the dosages for your anesthesia and painkillers, by the way. What you're on right now would kill the average person." She paused. "I think one of the burns on your shoulder is bleeding again. I'll change the bandage for you."

Letting go of his hand, she strode toward the cabinet. After gathering some burn cream, a new dressing, and a pair of latex gloves, she washed her hands. Vegeta's eyes followed her lazily as she did so. He saw that she wore a casual red dress that skimmed the contours of her form rather gracefully. Its bright crimson brought out the coolness of her porcelain complexion, and the contrast produced a stunning effect of warmth and vibrancy. Transfixed, Vegeta watched her carefully as she resumed her seat. She walked clumsily as if she had never developed any keen awareness of how her weight shifted when she moved, but her overall silhouette showed nothing but balance and symmetry.

With cautious fingers, Bulma lifted the soiled bandage from Vegeta's upper arm. The wound stung slightly once exposed to the open air. Vegeta's attention shifted between Bulma's focused expression and his own injured flesh. He had expected himself to flinch at her touch, but his body gave no such response.

"Wow—this already looks a lot better than it did when I saw it a couple days ago! Saiyans are amazing." Once she had cleared away the residual blood and pus, she dabbed the soothing cream onto the Saiyan's raw skin before covering it and taping the dressing into place. Her eyes met his. "You should get some more rest," she said.

He did indeed feel incredibly drowsy, and his heavy eyelids closed of their own accord.