When she arrived home, covered in dust and— in more places than she cared to think about — splattered with blood, she placed Trunks in his crib. He went down immediately. He was too tired to cry.
She was not so fortunate. She closed the nursery door and the grief seized her. It bent her double like a hard blow to the stomach. Her hand tight against her mouth, pressing back the animal-like sounds that threatened to emerge.
In bed, she wept. At first, bitterly, choking on tears, agitated. Then, languidly, miserably, luxuriating in the agony of it, till the pillow beneath her face was saturated. She turned it over, and did the same to the other side.
She told herself she was crying for all of them. Her brave, brilliant friends. And she was, in a way. But it was his face that kept swimming up from the depths. His black eyes and his sharp, distrustful expression.
It would never have been possible, she told herself. A lifetime of abandonment and disappointment had lain ahead. She was mourning a future that was never going to exist in the first place.
But something very small within her protested at that idea, demanding recognition. It beat its fists against the insides of her rib cage. She remembered his knee between her legs. It had been a question he only knew how to ask in the form of action. Words didn't work for him. Everything he said came out rude, or cruel, and he seemed to understand that after a while. He switched to the language of bodies, in which he was fluent. In which he could say something different to her, if she cared to listen.
She remembered the alarming gentleness with which he'd held her face when he had come back to her bed 6 weeks after Trunks was born. She didn't have to tell him she wasn't ready for sex, that she wasn't fully healed yet, he appeared to know. He seemed to drink the information in just by getting close enough. He lay on the bed, not looking at her, while his hands roamed pleasantly over her, without urgency. She felt his steady breath on her neck and realised he had fallen asleep beside her for the first time ever.
He'd rejected the boy in public more than once. Each time, it felt like a blunt force blow between her shoulder blades. It threatened to knock her off balance. But in private, he had touched her with reverence ever since the birth. His appetite for her seemed only to have grown, but its shape had changed entirely — it was no longer a furtive, fast release for both of them. Now he would wordlessly maneuver them both till they were panting side-by-side, noses touching. And move within her so slowly, the tension building exquisitely, his hands in all the right places, with the right pressure, at all the right speeds.
They barely spoke when it was just the two of them. Everything that needed to be said was communicated in their physical exchanges. They'd spent the first year of his time on earth arguing viciously, but the moment when he'd reached for her had spelled the end of that. She could still recall the flicker of fear she'd felt when his intentions became clear. Could she really refuse him? He might kill her if she did.
Then the knee between her legs, the long pause, and the realisation that he was waiting for a sign, any sign, and that nothing else would happen unless and until she wished it.
It was so unlike him, to seek permission for anything, that it had seemed to alter the whole world around her, making it a curious, uncanny place. Had she fallen through the looking glass? Was the prince of a conquering warrior race really here, pulsating with raw desire, and holding his thigh still between hers, breathing against her cheek, not looking at her, just waiting? She had felt intuitively, in that moment, that she had the power to break him. He didn't just want her, he wanted her to want him. He had wanted something that couldn't be taken by force. He was done for. She had smiled against his neck, and pulled his body closer.
To the outside eye, Bulma knew, he was the same brittle, unpalatable man who'd been involuntarily transported from his grave on Namek to the sunny glade near Capsule Corp. She was the only one who'd seen the transformation up close.
She'd enjoyed only 10 months of this new Vegeta.
She lay awake with the cold, heavy slab of this thought in her mind until, as the first rays of sun began to venture under the blinds, she sat up. She reached, with sudden purpose, for the notebook on the nightstand, for the pencil that had rolled beneath the bed, and she began to sketch the machine. She added its legs. Why should she have to live without ever knowing what could have been? A glass top, egg-like, went on next. Who was anyone to say that he couldn't have found a way to love her? That he didn't already, in his own way? She moved from the outer design — the easy bit — to a series of equations, working towards a proof she knew would take at least a decade to solve. But that hardly mattered. She was determined. She would give herself, and him, the chance they both deserved.