Chapter 8: Thunderhead

Raditz was mostly asleep when Bulma directed him into the tiny, first-floor bathroom, which, lacking windows, was the safest place in the house. He shuffled over to the bathtub with a pillow stuffed under his arm, grumbling and grunting his discord for being woken as he made himself comfortable. She should have, as Vegeta suggested, left the idiot to suffer Darwin's fate.

Vegeta sat against the opposite wall and cradled his brother in his lap. Tarble's limbs shuddered and teeth rattled like he'd been left in the cold; either in shock or too tired or both to keep up his sobs, instead they hitched halfway up his throat like a bad case of hiccups.

"Here, this will help," Bulma said, tossing a towel at them from the cabinet. She draped another around Kakarot's shoulders and instructed him to play assistant and hold the flashlight while she rummaged for first aid supplies.

Two Tupperware boxes rattled as she slid them across the floor, drawing Tarble's attention away from the crook of Vegeta's shoulder. Every muscle in his body tensed when the heiress sat down beside them and reached for his foot.

"It's okay. I promise I'll be really careful," she assured him, waiting for his leg to relax before she went to work untying his sneaker; then stretching it as wide as it would go, she edged it over his heel with painstaking measure, followed by his swampy sock. Even in the dark, it was easy to see that the swelling and bruising extended across the top of his foot almost to his toes. Bulma examined him by touch, pressing her fingertips lightly as she felt her way around the injury. "Can you wiggle the piggies?"

Tarble wiped his snotty nose with the back of his hand and nodded as he waved the tiny digits.

"Good. How about your ankle? Try tilting it like this." She gestured her hand up and down like a seesaw.

The boy's bottom lip trembled miserably, but he managed to tip his foot the way she'd asked, albeit marginally. Asking him to rotate it in a circle in either direction, however, was another story, and Bulma was met with Tarble's stubborn side as he flatly refused to try. He buried his face in Vegeta's chest and cried tears that he knew were only half real.

Pain was the one exception to the rule when it came to his brother feigning hysterics. The kid was usually honest, but he couldn't stomach a paper cut, much less a loose tooth. When he showed Vegeta his first, he shrieked at a pitch that would impress banshees when he'd tried to twist it from his gums. Tarble refused to speak to him for the better part of a day until he apologized and promised to never reattempt what his brother had deemed a shamefully sneaky attack, which meant waiting until his teeth fell out on their own and praying he didn't choke on them.

Bulma was either more patient or gullible, because she didn't repeat her request and even hushed Vegeta for trying to reason with the kid.

"Vegeta, it's fine. It doesn't seem broken, and even if it was, there's not much we can do about it tonight. I'm gonna wrap it up though. It won't hurt. It will help make it feel better. That okay with you?" She tugged at Tarble's sleeve. Without removing his face from the crease of Vegeta's shoulder, he nodded.

They remained in the bathroom long after the threat was over while Bulma finished tending to Tarble's injury, serenaded by his quiet weeping and the far less quiet snores of their dumbass cousin in the tub. The late hour had subdued Kakarot into a dutiful lamppost, and he did little more than yawn and teeter between the soles of his feet as he held the flashlight.

"Power's back," Vegeta noted, seeing the hallway light flick on beneath the door.

He laid his brother on the couch in the living room where Nurse Bulma quickly went to work, sandwiching his foot between a pile of throw pillows and a ziplock she stuffed with whatever remained in the freezer's ice maker. The kid opened his bleary eyes for a moment to scan their faces, then his bandaged limb as if to be sure they hadn't lobbed it off while he was half-asleep.

With Tarble settled, Bulma turned her attention to Kakarot, tipping his chin toward the lamplight where she could more easily examine the contusion. It circled all the way from the bridge of his nose, across his cheekbone, and over his brow—a red ring around the bullseye of his lid that swelled and hung half shut. Watching Bulma play cutman to his cousin's affliction—one that Vegeta had both dealt and suffered enough times to know the exact shade of purple Kakarot's face would don by the time he returned him to his parents—his nagging guilt compounded to fill him with a darker dread. He slipped outside to pace the perimeter of the porch, like a fish hooked and tossed in a cooler, left swimming in circles as he waited for the inevitable hand to plunge down, grab him up, and deliver a fatal blow.

Getting drunk was nothing more than the last domino to fall in a serial string of shitty decisions. Raditz he was used to, and even his classmates he could handle to an extent. It was Bulma he couldn't manage; each and every misstep was precipitated by her, one after the next until he was so damnably distracted, he'd lost his better judgment. Even so, he only had himself to blame for the fact that he entrusted the kids to his cousin's predictable stupidity. And in the grand scheme of things, even Raditz in some ways earned a pass, because it was Vegeta himself who should've checked the goddamn forecast, like any responsible parent would have. Maybe Bulma was right, and he was in over his head.

"Hey, you okay?"

Vegeta turned towards her voice, nodding as his mouth let escape a contradictory "No."

"Vegeta what's–"

"I didn't check the weather. It didn't even occur to me to check the fucking… He's gonna kill me. Gine's gonna tell him. I'm dead. I'm so fucking dead."

Bulma crossed the floor in front of him to grab his wrists and gently ease his fingers from the barbs of his hair. "Hey, they're both okay. Storms like that can be unpredictable. They'll understand."

Appreciative as he was for her attempt to reassure him, he wasn't stupid. It didn't take a meteorologist to know that storm was coming had he thought to look; only the exact path and severity in which it would manifest was uncertain. And when it came to his father's understanding, her words couldn't be further from the truth. Fearing that he'd breakdown in front of her to relay the fact, he fought his face into a plausible display of stolidity.

"You're just exhausted," she said, her soft, slender fingers sliding from his wrists to twine between his own. She pulled him toward the bench to sit. "In the morning, you'll see. It's bumps and scrapes, and it's not your fault. You seem to keep forgetting that you're a teenager, Vegeta, and you can't be expected to be one-hundred percent perfect. You and I both know our parents aren't! My own would have let me out there at Tarble's age. And they would have probably sent the nanny to retrieve me too had a storm popped up like that."

Vegeta let a laugh despite himself, knowing that was true. As he looked down to his lap where their fingers were threaded, he felt somewhat soothed by the motion of her thumb stroking the crease of his own like it was a pressure point; then there was the weight of her head as she dropped it against his shoulder.

The girl couldn't help herself. For as long as he'd known her, she sought to be close. And as much as her resumed coziness should have rallied his recommitment to a well-honed, scrupulous management of his only priority, the truth was he couldn't help himself either. Angry as he'd been with her, he'd become equally, albeit reluctantly, entranced. And on top of it, now he was eternally grateful. Had she not been there in the woods, the outcome would have certainly proven less fortuitous, perhaps even deadly. They sat for a minute in silence, watching the sunrise break the horizon to ignite the distant thunderhead in a spectacle of brilliant, fiery plumes.

"They look like your smoke bombs," Vegeta commented on the clouds. "Like the one you put in Mrs. Satan's purse at the summer cocktalian."

Bulma's head shot up from his shoulder. She wagged it back-and-forth in denial, her grin exuberant and teasing. "That was you! Vegeta that was all you. Your idea. You did it. That was you!" Her finger jabbed between his ribs, as if the action could jog his memory.

Perhaps it had been his idea; though it didn't seem like a prank he was capable of enacting all on his own, not even before his mother died and Tarble was born, but he couldn't remember what he'd been like back then. "I find that hard to believe, but if it was me, it was only due to your terrible influence."

"Fine! I'll humbly accept the award for influencing you to be fun every once in a while."

Unaware of the smile and simper he bore on his face watching her gloat, he noticed it the moment her mirrored expression had faltered and slipped into something peculiar—a look that hung her pretty lips with gravity and dulled her big, bright eyes with worry.

"Vegeta, I have to tell you something." She dislodged her hand from his to wring her own together, staring down at them in a way that suggested whatever had suddenly provoked her conscience to action was shamefully important; though Bulma Briefs was far too audacious to speak into her lap and dragged her focus back to meet him. "First, just to clear the air, I want to apologize for everything this weekend. I've been a pretty shitty host. I didn't help you with the boys, and worse, I didn't stand up for you when those guys were–"

"Forget it, Bulma. Yamcha's mangled face should tell you that I don't need anyone to stand up for me."

"That's not… Look, what I mean is, I'm sorry that I put you in that situation to begin with. I'm an idiot, and I should have listened to you when you warned me about them because you know them. And you were right by a thousand percent."

While he was tempted to ask her what brought her to this conclusion, besides self-gratifying curiosity, he didn't really care. It didn't matter. The apology, as much as he deserved one, he hated it all the same. It deflated the mood, a fatal puncture in the fantasy he'd let himself indulge for a few, selfish minutes: snuggling up with a girl to watch the sunrise. Not just any girl either—his history with Bulma Briefs had touched every edge of the spectrum. As kids, he'd always been annoyed by her forwardness, forcing friendship when he only wanted to be left alone. But she'd worn him down, and despite his foggy memory when it came to the details of how fun he was or wasn't around her, there was no question Bulma was the closest thing to a friend he'd ever known. And now, meeting her again after a more than five years hiatus, she managed the feat all over again. Only the title of friends seemed to fall short of what the foolish side of him wanted, even for just a few, pathetic minutes while his brother slept.

"They were planning to sabotage you." Her usually cheery features were burdened by a concern that was unwarranted because, as she'd pointed out, he knew the fools, and it wouldn't be the first time he'd been threatened.

"What else is new?"

"You don't understand. What they were plotting was reputation homicide."

"How?" he asked, his curiosity giving way to interrogation.

"On the internet. They were gonna impersonate you with fake accounts and paint you as some sort of deranged incel, create manifestos and shit to suggest you were unstable enough to do something crazy. Even steal your credit card and phone to plant evidence."

"They told you that? They're fucking dumber than I thought."

"Because they told me?" she asked almost hopefully.

It wasn't what he'd meant, but the fact that she thought so was worth a hell of a lot more than an apology. The visible relief that uncinched her worried features into a face he recognized had him slip a white lie.

"Yeah, of course. But even if they didn't tell you, that plan has so many holes, they might as well shoot themselves. Do they know who my father is and the kind of surveillance I'm under? How would they make accounts and use my name without alerting the horde of reputation management experts my father has in his employ? Much less, how did they plan to unlock the damn device? Or use my credit cards, which are his by the way, without his people noticing? They track every goddamn penny I spend."

For once the tight ship his father ran to track him proved useful. He was almost sorry his classmates couldn't attempt their scheme because he would have relished in watching them get busted.

"No idea. I don't think they got that far. They would never try it now because they know I'd tell you. But, that doesn't mean they still won't try to get revenge somehow."

"I'll be shaking in my patent-leather oxfords first day of school," he mocked; the reminder of which, like some kind of personal D-day, reassembled her dreaded expression. "You shouldn't be worried either."

"Not if I disenroll."

"Don't do that. Why would you do that?"

The heiress, it seemed, hadn't just ratted intel; she really did stand-up to them, for him, at the expense of her own reputation. The consequences of doing so, especially for someone as sheltered as Bulma who wasn't used to navigating the politics of a premiere academy, would prove miserable. But she'd get over it. She had more tenacity in her pinkie toe than those morons could scrape together from their entire cabal of impossibly dumber sycophants.

"Besides them promising to make sure that everyone at the academy hates me? Gee, I dunno."

"You don't need friends."

"Maybe you don't, but I do! Sometimes I think we should have switched lives. Let me be raised by a hotshot politician, and let you be the science nerd tutored at home. You'd probably love the isolation."

Vegeta tried not to let his face show the icy horror her suggestion provoked as his mind flashed through every strike against his mother, a small woman like Bulma who wasn't physically capable to defend against his father's attacks. No doubt, he'd have flourished in her household, but the image of her in his, as soon as she'd summoned it into his head, his subconscious triggered to life and sought to protect her from the mere specter of his father laying a hand on her, and he suddenly found himself turned in his seat facing her with his arm wrapped around her shoulders as if blocking a phantom threat.

The heiress's eyes bugged wide at the maneuver that, as her brows began to twist, he could see left her scanning her short-term memory for what exactly she'd said to invoke an awkward come-on. It was the only logical conclusion she could draw, and he had no choice but to play it off, like he'd meant to throw his arm around her, though perhaps in condolence.

"Bulma, there's hundreds of kids at that school. Those three idiots don't control everybody, despite what they'd have you believe. You'll make plenty of friends," he said, picking up the conversation as naturally as he could manage, relieved when he felt the girl's posture relax under his stiffened limb.

Whether it was the fact that his arm remained flexed in rigor mortis, or that she knew him well enough to be skeptical, she asked in a tone that sounded sad and dulled with preemptive defeat, "But what about you? If we pass in the halls, are you gonna pretend you don't know me or are we still friends?"

"I don't have–"

"Time for friends." she finished his sentence. "Because of Tarble. But what if I helped you with him? I'm good with kids; you saw that! I'm smart, way smarter than you are, and I could help him with his homework. What do you have to lose?"

Her slight was so smooth and so Bulma that he almost smiled. But her proposition, if that's what it was—friendship in exchange for playing house with his brother—while in any other circumstance was an obvious win, it would only put his, and more importantly, his brother's wellbeing in jeopardy.

Vegeta getting close to anyone—especially someone with as much clout as the daughter of a corporation his father depended on as one of his biggest donors—the man would vehemently disapprove. And there were more reasons, at least from his father's calculated litany of excuses, than his fear of being found out for who he really was. But Vegeta couldn't explain that to her, nor could he push her away, not with the way she'd settled against him.

Her hair was mussed and tangled in dreadlocks beneath her head where she'd tipped it to rest against his knuckles. Fuck, he was screwed. While Bulma would always be objectively beautiful in whatever stupid string bikini she forced him to tie and a layer of mascara, this version of her was the real one—when she was a goddamn mess and had the gunk racooned beneath her eyes and didn't care. It was the version that wasn't compensating for anyone, the self-assured, give-no-fucks tomboy he remembered.

More than anything he wanted to tell her yes, or if he was being honest, that friends was a far cry from what he actually desired. Even if he was able to be near her, friends wasn't something he could settle for. Friends suggested that he'd be there for her when she did find her own academy clique and started dating some lesser fool among them. That scenario necessitated a state of mind that was far too evolved from his own, and imagining it was enough to bury his reluctant denial and instead deliver a vague response that wasn't yes or no.

"You want to tutor my brother? Seems kind of pointless when he's not even in kindergarten. He doesn't have homework besides coloring inside the lines and singing the alphabet."

"He says he starts this year! Kindergarten is when they start to learn to read, right? Swear to Kami, I'll have that kid's face buried in Harry Potter before the other kids have learned C is for cat."

What she suggested, even if it was a strange condition to tack on a friendship, offering to tutor his brother on its own was genius, so much that his father couldn't deny his logic if he took her up on it. Bulma Briefs had learned from the world's best, and as she was so quick to jab, even as a junior, she was quite possibly smarter than him, which wasn't anything to thumb at considering his was the reigning GPA in the region's most prestigious academy. Goddammit, she was smarter even without knowing the full extent of her brilliance—a brilliance that he was aware, at least in the back of his head, would blow up in his face even as he conceded to it.

Keeping a secret on two separate ends wouldn't last more than a week once they got back to school, and even if his father, by some miracle or twisted approval of pedigree condoned a relationship with the daughter of Capsule Corp., that was only half the problem. The real problem was that he was unwillingly willing to fall for this girl, and she was smiling at him. His perfectly concentrated mind that for years was honed on the singular goal of securing Tarble's future was instead being siphoned by a pretty face and fucking hormones. He was watching his own car wreck and wasn't doing anything to stop it.

"Geta!" As if to grind the axe deeper into his skull, Tarble had woken up and called for him. Though when he made to stand, the heiress shoved him back.

"You stay here. I'll prove it." Bulma was already bounding inside before he could object.

Vegeta hovered by the door to watch the show, trying to bury both his amusement over a situation he knew was going to be perfectly horrible and his guilt over putting Tarble through another round of needless stress. But it was too good to intervene, and though he couldn't see his brother's face, the moment Tarble found Bulma standing over him strapped with an eagerness the boy would be far too sour to endure with a modicum of class even after a solid night's sleep could only be that much more entertaining when he'd had nearly none.

"What do ya need?" Bulma chirped at him.

Tarble didn't attempt a response and twisted from his precarious position, enfeebled with a foot propped on two feet of pillows, to glare at Vegeta in the doorway.

"Sorry, T. You're gonna have to let her have this one."

"But Geta, I have to go to the bathroom!"

"Oh, that's all? Easy!"

The boy's eyes pulled so wide, Vegeta envisioned them popping from his skull and rolling across the floor as marbles when Bulma hefted him into her arms and carried him into the space. Raditz was still passed out with his hair draped over the edge of the tub, oblivious to the bright light she flicked on with her elbow. The heiress carefully set Tarble in front of the toilet to stand on one leg, but when she tried to assist him further, guiding his hand toward the ledge of the sink for balance, she found her fingers in range of his snapping teeth.

"Damn, dude! I thought you were a vegetarian," she said, retracting her knuckles. When Tarble only continued to frown at her, unmoving, she asked, "You need help with your pants, bud?"

"No! Just go away already! I don't want you to see my wiener!"

That was just the kind of comment to draw the heiress's eyes into a perfunctory roll. "Kid, you really need to get out more. Your brother is a very narrow influence."

She couldn't see the sneer Tarble shot at her back, but it held enough venom to redeem him and Vegeta both for the insult.

Bulma hopped toward him in the hallway, a conniving grin stretched across her lips and pointer fingers ready to needle him. Before they made contact with his ribs, he lazily caught her wrists, feigning to hold off the heiress's playful assault. He backed himself against the wall, his hands moving with hers, invoking the barest pressure like a magnet of the same pole whenever the tips of her fingers drew close. Vegeta was mildly aware of his own laugher that petered as the heiress pivoted tactics. Her arms went lax, and her giggling slipped into a hum. She pressed herself against him and set her chin atop his shoulder, eyelids closed in an extended blink as if the stress of the night had finally caught her.

Vegeta knew better. The heiress wasn't tired as much as she was baiting him, sussing out his reaction to her invasion of his well-guarded fort. Embarrassing, awkward diffidence was only the outer wall, and she'd been chipping away at it all weekend, so successfully that he managed to let go of her arms to wrap his own around her in an embrace that was light and rigid and reluctant all at once.

As much as he wanted a conventional relationship, he knew that once she'd gotten through his first defense, she'd immediately set her sights on the next one, and he was delusional if he thought he could contain her. He was already crumbling. His head tipped to rest against the wall inches from her own, watching her eyes drift back open, wondering if she was ballsy enough to force a kiss again because he certainly wasn't. At best, he was capable of not throwing-up on her in a fit of anxiety.

Bulma only smiled through closed lips. An almost indiscernible flit of her pupils toward the open bathroom door, as if she could read his mind, was enough to remind them both that a six-year-old was pissing a few feet away. She did, however, return his stiff embrace, sliding her arms beneath his to tie at his waist, and though it wasn't the same as kissing, he'd admit it was a relief. The way she nuzzled her face into his neck twisted his nerves inside his chest, nerves that were already shot thanks to a day and night that made Hell itself seem like a vacation. But it felt good to be hugged, something he didn't even know he needed until it was happening, a different kind of hug from someone that wasn't Tarble and instead was a girl his age whose hair smelled like rainwater and coconuts. Just as his own grip finally relaxed enough to pull around her, however infinitesimally, a whine interrupted the moment, one that Vegeta sensed contained more layers than simple stress and over-exhaustion; though perhaps it was his own projection of guilt.

"Geta, I'm really hungry!" Tarble had managed to hobble over to the doorway on one leg. He milked his condition, playing the pathetic puppy card he knew would steal Vegeta's attention, with his bottom lip puffed-out, pouting.

Bulma reanimated with a refreshed commitment to the role she was vying for as she tore her head up to exclaim, "I can cook!"

The brothers cocked their heads dubiously as the heiress scampered into the kitchen.

"Bacon?" Bulma tossed a package of meat onto the stone counter to further goad a child who already disliked her for the very fact of her constant teasing.

"No! Tell her!" Tarble scolded, pounding his fists against Vegeta's shoulders as he carried him into the space.

"T, she knows. She's messing with you. You tell her that her jokes suck."

Tarble managed to collect himself to a degree once Vegeta set him on a barstool at the counter, enough to inform the heiress with a haughty lift of his chin, "Pigs are smart you know, just like we are."

"They are smart," Bulma agreed, tipping her head thoughtfully. "Would you settle for cereal? Or waffles? We have a waffle maker, but that's a bit beyond my skill set. Eggos?"

"You said you cook."

"You caught me, little dude. There's a chance I was embellishing. We can test the theory, but it's gonna be garbage. Microwave or toaster or cereal, take your pick."

"Um, Eggos, I guess."

Even the idea of the girl tossing frozen waffles into a toaster was a suspension of the boy's belief in her capabilities, and he narrowed his eyes as if trying to gauge the toaster's settings across the counter. Perhaps he and Tarble really were too narrowly cast, as she'd claimed. Tarble, though he had his own preferences and a system of beliefs and morals that were advanced beyond his years, in many ways still worked within the framework of Vegeta's own. This whole anti-meat obsession was relatively new and something he would never adopt for himself, as hard as the kid tried, but the way in which Tarble stuck to his guns read the same. If Vegeta continued raising him like a miniature version of himself, refusing to expand the kid's worldview beyond his own insecurities and aversions, Tarble would turn out the same only worse—a hermit, just like him, but far too weak and sensitive, which in the real world where life was either eat or be eaten, Tarble was sure to be devoured.

The heiress set his waffles before him alongside a jug of real maple syrup, but Tarble didn't like sweets so much in the morning, and as he bit into the unadorned, lightly toasted disk of what essentially held the same taste and nutritional value as a piece of cardboard, her eyes stretched wide as if she was watching an extraterrestrial eat a shoe.

"You wanna put something on that? Peanut Butter? Anything?"

"Peanut butter?"

"Oh goddammit, Vegeta. Please tell me he knows what fucking peanut butter is—pardon my French, kid."

"I like peanut butter!" his brother answered for him, thankfully, because he couldn't stand the way Bulma was looking at him, running a palm down her face to reveal her shock and horror at all of the experiences she assumed Tarble, by virtue of being raised by Vegeta alone, was deprived of—not that the girl could talk, being sheltered herself.

"We've got the essential food groups covered. Thanks for asking."

"Kid, if you've never put peanut butter on a waffle, you haven't really lived." Bulma carried on with Tarble as if Vegeta wasn't there, rummaging through the cupboards in search of condiments for which she clearly didn't know the location.

She finally found what she was looking for and slammed what appeared to be a liter of peanut butter before his brother's face.

"No regrets," she said and unscrewed the cap.

Tarble ripped a waffle in half to dunk inside the tub she tilted in his direction, analyzing the concoction as if it was a discovery perhaps worthy of the nature programs he watched with obsessive focus. The moment he bit the thing, his face split into a smile. It didn't make any sense. The only difference in the toast Vegeta coated with the stuff was the texture and the fact that he fed the kid whole, sprouted grain, yet this crap somehow deserved a Nobel Prize.

"What are you doing next weekend?" Bulma asked, turning her attention to him once she'd effectively glued his brother's lips shut.

"Why?"

"Would you wanna come back?"

"Yeah, but uh, that's up to T." Vegeta looked to his brother. "It's your birthday. You wanna spend it here?"

A look of the most unfortunate dismay fell across heiress's face as her lips flattened beneath the span of her already large eyes. It was a little funny. Eager as she was about Vegeta's willingness to return, what she hadn't expected was the goofy antagonism she'd instigated between herself and his baby brother to come around and bite her. All of Bulma's chips, it seemed, had suddenly landed in a vat of peanut butter. Despite the heiress actually saving them back in the woods, that substance was the only thing that placed her back in Tarble's fickle graces.

"We can stay?" he chirped in an excitable pitch that surprised him and Bulma both. "Kat too?"

"Not today, next weekend," Vegeta clarified, adding for safety, "Kakarot can come, I guess. As long as I don't have to drive him back and forth. Maybe we'll stay for a while."

"You'd stay for more than the weekend?" asked Bulma with a fervor that matched his brother's.

"Maybe. I dunno. It's better than the city."

"And daddy's home," the kid added, almost absently, like it was a random notation in the back of his tired brain that popped up unconsciously to diagnose Vegeta's internal thoughts, or maybe just expressed his own relief at not having to be near their father on his birthday. With what Vegeta had done to Yamcha, and Kakarot's black eye to serve as the mangled cherry on the weekend's spoiled cake, Tarble's birthday weekend wasn't going to be fun for either of them.

Regardless of his brother's motive, Vegeta fought the impulse to toss his hand over the idiot's sticky mouth. Tarble's lips were so coated with peanut butter that it would have been more efficient had he stuck his face directly into the tub rather than bother with waffles as a medium. Vegeta wished he had done just that rather than incite him to glare at the kid, as if a six-year-old was actually capable of reading his stiff, murderous eye gestures and translating them into shutting the fuck up. He knew their stakes, or at least Vegeta thought he did.

"So spend your birthday with your dad and come up after," Bulma said, misinterpreting his brother's comment for normal chummy, familial sentiments.

Thankfully, Tarble's mouth was stuffed with another bite of goo, but he still managed to scrunch his nose with disgust and shake his head, a gesture that prompted the heiress to turn towards Vegeta curiously. The way she seemed to penetrate him made him feel transparent, as if he were some kind of inside-out boy whose skin was see-through and she could make out all of the exorbitant breaks and fractures that left scars across his bones. Vegeta did his best to cast his face into a mold of expressionless nothing, like some defiled Roman statue without a head, but the moment Tarble's lips smacked open again to clarify, "Daddy's mean," his head snapped back onto his shoulders and his act gave way.

Vegeta's palm hit the counter with enough force to rattle the plate that sat before the kid as he shouted Tarble's name.

His brother lurched upright in his chair, eyes drawn wide, like he'd been struck by a cattle prod. The instant Tarble regained enough sense to register the origin of the thwack and the fact that he was its indirect target, his composure melted from his face with a consistency that mirrored the peanut butter left dripping from his hot waffle. Vegeta yanked the boy into his arms just as he began to scream.

He hadn't meant to frighten him, but he was scared himself that Tarble, in his compromised state, wasn't thinking clearly and would out them both. Not that a six-year-old should have to carry the burden of their family's darkest secret, but it was the way of things, and the kid had been doing just that successfully since the day he was born. It was sleepless delirium and shot nerves that left the boy exposed to his own natural instincts, which were entirely honest. His comments wouldn't have drawn more than Vegeta's camaraderie and comfort had they been alone—a shared eye roll, the heavy, drape of his arm across his shoulders, a full-blown embrace if he seemed weepy. But they weren't alone now. Tarble knew it, yet even as Vegeta hugged him to his chest, he failed to maintain control and instead spiraled out of it.

"I don't want to go home! I hate him! I don't want to go!" he shrieked on repeat through his tears, flailing in Vegeta's arms like a wet fish, smacking at his face and tugging at the collar of his t-shirt.

Bulma's eyes enlarged the same as he felt his own, likely reconsidering her offer to help with the demon child whose voice was hitting a pitch that only casting directors for campy poltergeist films could appreciate.

"I've gotta deal with this," he explained, unnecessarily, watching the heiress rapidly nod. As he strode toward the bedroom, trying to wrestle Tarble's slaps away from his face with one hand. He caught his youngest cousin's gaze, frowning over the back of the couch with one, purple eye swollen completely shut.

Vegeta dropped Tarble to the bed to let him writhe in a fit against the mattress. He could hold him down, but was reluctant to do anything because it wasn't clear what the kid wanted, or needed, or even who he was most upset with. Their relationship, as deeply bonded as they were, wasn't perfect. They had their daily tiffs and the occasional passive-aggressive argument that stretched for days until the least stubborn of them gave in, but nothing like this.

As Vegeta stood next to the bed watching Tarble—deeply red-faced, screaming more than crying as he balled his fists into the comforter, practically spinning it around himself like a homemade straight jacket—he wondered if the day's events had perhaps broken his brother, tipped him off a ledge and made him crazy, like those stories of perfectly normal people who took a hit of weed and emerged from their high as schizophrenics.

Once Tarble had managed to inadvertently roll himself into a cotton croissant, his cries subsided into heavy gasps, swelling against the comforter's cocoon with the force of every breath. He stared blankly across the room, launched from Planet Earth to whatever dimension he always escaped to inside his head.

Vegeta laid down at his back to drape his arm over the puffy blanket and stuff his nose in the kid's hair; the scent so familiar and consoling often served to downgrade his own anxiety whenever it threatened to pitch. Tarble smelled the same since he was a baby, like clean laundry even if he hadn't bathed in days. The science behind it, he didn't want to know, because it would only tarnish its purity, put a deadline on all the selfish ways Vegeta used his brother to calm himself. He couldn't hold on to Tarble forever. The tiny boy was going to grow up eventually, and soon he'd have to find alternative means for comfort.

"I'm really sorry, T," he said, a blanket apology that couldn't, in his own mind at least, befit the severity of injustices he'd forced his brother to endure. It was the same, useless regret their mother whispered against his own neck when he was Tarble's age; though the circumstances then were slightly different. While she may have been afraid for their lives at times, the irksome part he could never understand, the part he knew bound her to his father above her fear of him was that, despite everything, she was still very much in love. Vegeta was only a coward.

Tarble's breath slowed and lifted, streaming shallowly as if asleep, but he wasn't. His voice broke the silence in a tone that was quiet and so even that it seemed ageless, almost robotic when he stated, "You shouldn't go home."

It seemed he'd underestimated his brother's bravery. Not lake monsters or jet skis, pesky heiresses or tilt-a-whirls, bears or black forests, sprained ankles or thunderstorms, tornados or falling trees, not even his own displays of violence could scare Tarble for very long. Only their father could be so esteemed to earn his brother's constant, abject fear, and not even out of fear for himself. It existed on Vegeta's behalf.

"I know," he said. "He won't be there. I'll show you his schedule again if you don't believe me. We'll leave long before he gets home. This shit will blow over, eventually. But you gotta keep it together, man." He squeezed the kid tighter against him. Tarble sighed heavily with a kind of mixed bag of defeat that suggested he knew he'd fucked-up with his outburst and that Vegeta was throwing sugar on an outcome that wasn't going to be so sweet, no matter how long they deferred their father's temper. "If we come back here, you're sure you don't mind hanging out with Bulma?" Vegeta asked, testing the water.

"She's weird."

"Yeah, well, so are you."

"You just wanna lick her," stated Tarble in a tone that was so confident and matter-of-fact, it could have passed for a lecture in his sex-ed classes.

Lick her? The fuck? Kami, the kid needed to ease-off of Animal Planet and watch porn. Not porn, obviously, but sitcoms or something age-appropriate with human romance, or he'd end up as one of those psychos trying to get a marriage license for him and some pet goat.

"That's what Raddy says," his brother clarified. "You wanna lick her tongue."

Ah… Puzzle solved. Now there were two reasons to murder his cousin.

"It's not licking, and that's not… Goddammit! I don't–"

Besides correcting his cousin's gross incompetence that, gods knew why, thought teaching the young boys about making-out was appropriate—Vegeta didn't know what, exactly, he was failing to stutter and explain to Tarble, not knowing himself what would come from pursuing a relationship with the heiress. The tutoring plot he'd envisioned an hour ago to hide a romance, if that's what developed, was at best a stop-gap that wouldn't last past the first day of school if he was lucky. Someone would rat him out, Raditz being the most obvious culprit, if not Bulma herself.

He didn't know how close she was with her parents, but she always spoke well of them, especially her mother, which meant they were perhaps close enough that she would discuss her love life. If that was the case, Panchy Briefs, at first whiff, would be too giddy to inform his father through sing-songy cooes and batting eyelashes that their children were an item. Though the more he thought on the notion, he wondered if it could actually prove beneficial. Bulma's mother and his father had been skirting around the temptation of hooking up themselves, even when his mother was alive, and if they hadn't already, perhaps living vicariously through their children would satisfy the weird sexual tension that surrounded their parents whenever they happened to cross paths at parties.

There were so many question marks. Above his father, was Tarble. None of it meant anything if his brother didn't like Bulma too. But Tarble could be wooed eventually, if the source was legitimate. Tarble could sniff out bullshit the same as his beloved pigs could hunt truffles. A bad first impression was just that, because the kid didn't hold grudges for long unless they were valid.

The biggest gamble Vegeta feared, the one that made the entire endeavor an absolute bullshit distraction was if Bulma herself wasn't interested in something serious. He wasn't about to stake his brother's future on the heiress's whims, but it wasn't like he could ask her out of the gates just how serious she was or wasn't about him without seeming clingy and desperate. Hell, maybe he'd be annoyed by her after a few weeks.

Best case scenario, if she was serious, if they both were, if he could trust her—when the time came for him and Tarble to escape their father's sphere of influence, whatever form that took, Bulma had the resources at her disposal to help them, far more than he could conjure on his own. It was risky, and it meant eventually telling her the one secret he swore he'd never let leave his immediate family. But he'd known the girl since they were kids. Regardless of a relationship, even as friends, Bulma—the one he'd grown up with and avoided at parties, who in his memory had a shameless honesty about her, an unbridled capacity to only be herself—that Bulma would help them.

"G'night, Geta." Tarble sighed against his forearm as if he could hear his thoughts spinning and meant to alert him to the fact and shut them down.

"It's morning, T."

"G' morning, Geta." His brother's tone was too cheeky to be taken seriously, and Vegeta had to marvel at the fact that he'd exorcised himself on a dime, at least enough to joke around.

"Shut up and sleep, T."