Chapter 29:

It's hours later when he finally falls asleep, curled into a tight ball along her bed.

Bulma sits beside him, watching him, her heart, it feels like, a shattered mess. Gods, she's never felt so depressed in her entire life.

He looks like a little boy, knees curled up against his chest, arms wrapped round them in a defensive shell. In many ways, Bulma is beginning to realize now for the first time, he is. A little boy. That he was never really given the chance to grow up, at the same time never really given the chance to be a child.

She'd asked him questions about his past, and he'd answered. Gods, he'd answered, and she wishes almost more than anything that he hadn't.

She'd known his life had been hard.

She'd had no idea just how truly horrific.

She'd convinced him to come up to her room from the backyard and take a bath with her. He'd been, as he usually was, almost mute, saying so little. But he'd been so pliant under her hands that it had frightened her a little, his head and shoulders slumped down as he'd faced her. She'd washed his hair, and he'd allowed her to move him any way she'd wanted, giving no resistance as she'd turned his head this way and that, or when she'd decided they'd spent enough time in the water, pulling him up out of the tub and out into the main room.

She'd combed his hair for him, and it had been afterward, as they'd sat together on the bed, his back to her as she'd wrapped her arms round him from behind, her chin resting on his shoulder, that she'd started asking questions, and he'd begun to answer in a voice so soft and quiet it had, at moments, been hard to hear him, even sitting so close.

He'd told her about what had been called purges, the term used for readying planets for acquisition under the Planet Trade Organization, Freiza's personal empire.

He'd told her he and his team, the two other Saiyan's that had also come here to Earth, Nappa and Raditz, had been tasked with the job, expected to wipe out any resisting, sentient populace, while maintaining the structural and environmental integrity of the planet, so that Frieza could later barter, trade and sell with interested buyers.

They received payment for performing well, things called credits. If Frieza or any of his close aides were somehow unsatisfied with the Saiyans performance, they wouldn't get paid at all. That, Vegeta told her, happened often and with no real marker for understanding what they'd done wrong. Usually it was nothing more than the whim of Frieza, a malicious joy in depriving them their livelihood.

He'd spoken of the other two, Nappa and Raditz, with an awful kind of fondness which Bulma had never even considered. He missed them, that much was obvious to her. The more he'd spoken of them, the more she'd begun to realize, as terrible as the two of them had seemed to her, they were, for most of his entire life, Vegeta's only real family, his only real friends. It was weird to think that Raditz, the one who had first come to Earth, Goku's biological brother, was, in a way, more Vegeta's brother than he ever had been Goku's. Vegeta spoke of him as if he were an older sibling. He spoke of Nappa as if he were a father.

At the same time, he'd been more powerful than either of them by the age of six or seven, and had subsequently been put in the position of team leader, in essence becoming responsible for their well being as much as they were his. Bulma couldn't imagine that. Couldn't imagine a child that age having that kind of pressure and expectation put on them, added to the unbearable pressure of just trying to survive.

And that's all it had been. A struggle to survive. If Bulma had known that in a vague, detached way before, she understood it with agonizing clarity now.

He'd told her about his father.

King Vegeta. Still, he insisted on calling his father King, despite the fact that he'd been dead nearly thirty years.

His obedience to Frieza, he'd explained to her, had initially been a desperate attempt to protect his father from the tyrant. He had believed his father would eventually grow strong enough to rebel against Frieza and come for him. Had believed his father would on that day finally bring him home and together they could restore their kingdom. He'd thought that if he just did as Frieza told him, if he presented himself as a loyal subject, then Frieza would spare his father and his world long enough for his father to build his strength for such a rebellion.

His father, Vegeta had told her, had traded him off to Frieza in an attempt to buy their world and their people time, to forestall Frieza destroying their planet.

It had worked, for a time. At least, that was what Vegeta had been led to believe. But he now thought Frieza had likely killed his father not long after he'd been traded away, and soon after that Frieza had also obliterated their world.

It was his continual obedience after that which Vegeta had confessed to her in a voice hardly a whisper that still shamed him most.

By the time he had discovered his father was dead and was never coming for him, he'd been so beaten into submission by Frieza, that he knew no other way to be. He'd been scared of him, Vegeta said. Terrified. He'd told her this in a trembling, hardly audible voice.

How Frieza had achieved that fear in Vegeta was painfully, tragically obvious to her, even as Vegeta himself didn't seem to understand it.

She'd asked him what Frieza had done to him, and for a long time, he hadn't answered. Hadn't said anything for so long, she'd thought he wasn't going to answer at all. But then he did. And the things he'd told her...

Gods, she can't...

It was so awful. So unspeakably awful...

Starvation apparently had been a favorite tactic of Frieza's.

Bulma had seen the sort of metabolisms Saiyans had. She'd watched Goku clear entire tables of food all by himself and still continue to be hungry afterward. And though Vegeta's table manners were light years ahead of Goku's, his appetite wasn't far behind.

She can't imagine then the effect it would have had on him to be limited to a single, small meal a day. Not enough food to even come close to satisfying a small human being, let alone a Saiyan who's metabolism was more akin to that of a weasel or a mongoose.

He'd told her if they could make enough credit's from purges, they were allowed then to purchase food from various venders situated around the base they were stationed at. The food, though, was expensive, and with three Saiyans in their unit, there had never been enough money to provide the ideal amount. Hunger unto starvation was a constant companion.

That atop daily beatings handed out, either from Frieza, or his top men, or various, high powered soldiers around the base who simply hated Saiyans for what they were. It was Vegeta they targeted most. They knew he was a prince, and that only made him more attractive to their malice. Some beatings, he'd said, had been severe enough to leave him nearly dead. He said that made him stronger, said it was what he had wanted then, but every day... never knowing when or where someone was going to decide to attack him, never being free of that kind of anxiety and worry...

It was no wonder to Bulma then why Vegeta was so paranoid and anxious. Being in such an uncertain and fearful state, day after day after day... it would leave anybody's nervous system shot. It was a miracle, in truth, that Vegeta was as stable as he was.

There were other things... things he wasn't telling her. Things he'd hinted at but wouldn't elaborate on... Only Bulma could put two and two together easily enough.

She knows he'd been sexually abused in some way. He wouldn't say, wouldn't tell her, had fallen completely silent when she'd tried asking carefully around the subject. She hadn't asked him directly, knowing that would likely upset him, that he might shut down completely if she did. She'd instead tried asking about his experiences with intimacy. His silence spoke volumes then, and she could just tell. Who had done it to him, and to what extent exactly he'd been abused, she couldn't say. Only knows that whatever it was, it had destroyed any normal sense or understanding of physical intimacy for him. He'd been a virgin when they met, and that too was obvious to her why.

And then there were some of the things he'd seen, out on those purge missions. Death and destruction and brutal, violent violation, the frenzied desperation of people who knew they were going to die, or be raped, or enslaved... The way he'd described it... The ugly, stark reality of it... Gods... Gods, he'd told horrors to her which hardly seemed real, which she could hardly even imagine. Didn't want to imagine.

He lived with those memories. Lived with them every day and night of his life. She doesn't know how. She doesn't know how anyone could deal with that.

She had had to remove herself afterward to the bathroom, barely making it there in time and closing the door behind her before she'd burst into tears, muffling the sound of her sobs behind palms pressed hard against her mouth.

She hopes Vegeta hadn't heard her.

When she'd finally composed herself enough to return back to the room, she'd found him like this, curled up and asleep on the bed.

She can't help thinking what a startling contrast it is, the sight of him now juxtaposed against the things he'd just told her.

He seems so small.

There's an ugliness to that now. To how small he is. Bulma had never considered it before.

He'd been starved, growing up. Deprived of basic nutrients vital to a child's healthy development, and still developing bones subjected to blunt force trauma, severe beatings almost every day.

He hadn't grown properly. He hadn't been allowed to. There's little doubt in Bulma's mind that that had been deliberate. Given what she knew now about Frieza's hatred of the Saiyans, given Vegeta's prodigious talent and power...

There wasn't any way that son of a bitch was ever going to allow Vegeta to realize that potential.

His body, she realizes for the first time, beyond the scarring over his skin, was nearly as damaged as his mind.

How he had gotten as far as he had, how he had matched Goku now in strength, if what he said about achieving Super Siayan was true, she doesn't know.

He hadn't shown her yet. Super Saiyan. She watched him train in the gravity chamber at least once a day, hoping to catch a glimpse of it, but she'd never seen him transform. She'd thought about asking him to show her, but she worried too that, if for whatever reason he'd lied about it, she would then be putting him in an embarrassing situation.

She doesn't think he's lying though. He's never lied to her before, about anything.

She moves closer, lowering herself to her knees along the edge of the bed, studying his face.

She'd been so angry at him just a few hours before, horrified and disgusted at what he'd told her he'd done. Had thought, even, that their relationship was over, that she could never understand or forgive him for it.

But her mother had been right.

Vegeta wasn't a monster.

He was a wounded, wrecked child. A displaced child who had fought to survive in a hostile, alien world that worked with all its fathomless resources to make certain he didn't succeed. A young and lost man who fought now to survive within a world he again didn't belong to.

He had no home. Not really. No family. Not for almost the entirety of his life. Bulma can't even begin to imagine the loneliness of that. Of what that must have been like.

Trying to imagine herself in that position is an impossibility. She'd always had a place she felt welcomed, and safe. Always had a home. Always had people around her who she knew loved her with all their hearts, would do anything to protect her and give her what she needed. Family and friends.

Vegeta had had none of that. Had had only the opposite, in truth.

More than anything, she feels sadness for him. A heartbroken despair.

She can't stay angry with him, even as logically she knows the things he'd done were horrific.

As great as the suffering was that he had caused through his actions, his own suffering was, in many ways, worse still.

How could she stay angry with him, how could she hate him, when all his life had been such a hell? When it had been the hatred and cruelty of others which had molded him into what he had become?

And still, in all of that, he had somehow found it in himself to treat her with tender gentility, to be soft and kind and quiet around her. To be sincere and trusting.

She couldn't repay that trust he had put in her with such awful cruelty and betrayal, a trust which, given his life, she understands now to be nothing short of remarkable.

She reaches out, laying the back of her hand gently against his temple.

Even asleep, he looks so tense, so defensive and fearful of an attack.

That's what his life had been like, she supposes, under Frieza's rule. Never knowing when his life might come to an end. Expecting the attempt on it every second of every day.

It's late, she realizes, glancing at the bedside clock. Almost 2:30 in the morning. She needed to get some sleep too.

Looking back to Vegeta, she thinks about how she doesn't want to sleep alone tonight. Doesn't want to leave him alone either. And so she decides to risk it, placing her hand on his shoulder and giving him a light shake.

Almost immediately his eyes come open, though his lids are heavy, gaze bleary with sleep. He looks up at her without much focus, and she smiles lightly at him.

"Hey." She says softly. "Mind if I get in with you?"

He looks at her for a long moment without saying anything, until suddenly he uncurls himself, pushing himself up and scooting to the other side of the bed, giving her space.

She smiles more broadly at him, relieved and happy that he hadn't decided to just up and leave.

"You wanna get under the covers with me?" She asks, pulling the blanket back.

He nods at her after a pause, and after a few clumsy moments they manage to arrange themselves underneath the blankets.

Bulma feels a vague pang of disappointment as he curls up again with his back to her, lying, it seems, at the farthest edge of the mattress. But she could hardly expect anything more at this point. Vegeta liked physical contact. She knew that. He just never quite knew how to initiate it himself. That weird shyness of his again. He was embarrassed, she thinks.

And so she closes the distance between them, spooning him from behind, her arms wrapping around him.

Predictably she feels him stiffen again, and she leans her face close, pressing her lips to the back of his neck.

"It's okay." She whispers. "Just relax baby."

It takes a few, long seconds, but eventually he does, his ridgedlly held frame softening under her hold.

It isn't long after that Bulma feels his breaths steady and even, and it's with the knowledge that he's again found some peace in sleep that she too, at last, drifts off.

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AN: As always thank you so much for all your support guys! I hope you continue to enjoy!