3 - JUST THIS ONCE
Vegeta tracked the minute ki of the woman through the common living quarters of Capsule Corp, completely overcome by his dour mood. It did not improve once he found her, curled up on an overstuffed leather couch around a small glass that reeked of booze. Though the room was only lit by a dim lamp, it was obvious that her eyes were bloodshot and her face puffy from crying.
"What the actual hell, woman?" he ground out.
"I broke up with Yamcha," she confessed miserably, knocking back the rest of her drink.
"So it's a celebration, then," he said sarcastically.
"Asshole," she snorted, but a smile pricked at the corners of her mouth despite herself. "Okay, let me guess," she said, sighing. "You broke something and need it repaired immediately."
"Yes," he answered curtly. "The circuits on the…"
"Tomorrow," she said firmly, cutting him off.
"What?" His expression darkened as his frustration rose. If she didn't start until tomorrow, he would lose most of the day.
"I'm not doing anything tonight, Vegeta, I'm not a machine," she said softly. "I need some time."
"To get drunk and wallow in self pity?"
She sulked. "Maybe. For the moment, anyways."
"What am I supposed to do in the meantime?" he nearly shouted.
"Join me?"
Her voice was so small that he almost hadn't heard it. "No," he replied automatically, caught completely off guard.
"Have you ever been drunk before?" she asked curiously.
"Very rarely, but yes."
"Join me, then."
"As if your Earth swill would have any effect on me," he scoffed.
She looked up at him mischievously. "Well, if it's something a bit more otherworldly you are looking for, this may do the trick," she said, getting up to root around the liquor cabinet, her night shorts hugging the curves of her ass indecently as she bent over. She produced a bottle and presented it to him proudly. "It's called Absinthe. I know you have a fast metabolism, but I bet after a bottle of this you won't be able to walk straight."
He looked at the glowing green liquid dubiously. "I highly doubt that. Too bad we'll never find out."
"Oh come on, Vegeta," she said dramatically, drawing out his name childishly. "Can't we just sit and have a drink and chat like regular people, just this once? I could really use some company tonight."
He almost barked out a laugh at that. No one in their right mind would turn to him for company, especially in such a vulnerable state, but this was Bulma. Impressive intellect aside, she had never had the sense to keep her distance from him, no matter how hard he'd tried to push her away.
"If you finish this and can still walk a straight line, I'll throw in a new battle droid to sweeten the deal," she said, tilting the bottle towards him tauntingly and smiling.
She knew that if he wasn't at least considering her offer, he would've already been gone. That he had become so familiar to her irked him. Damn her.
"Fine," he snapped, taking the bottle and sitting sullenly on the opposite side of the couch. He cracked the seal and almost winced; if the scent was any indication of the taste, he didn't have high hopes for this stuff. He poured some into the rocks glass that Bulma eagerly provided, and grimaced at the first bittersweet assault on his taste buds. "This is," he said frankly, "absolutely revolting."
That set her into a brief fit of laughter for reasons he couldn't grasp. He scowled and drained his glass, deeply regretting rising to her idiotic bet. He doubled down anyways, pouring another glass and resolving to get through this awful Earth liquor as quickly as possible, show her that he was still in complete control of his body, and gain a new battle droid to train with in the process.
"Cheers," she said, holding her glass out to him.
He eyed it suspiciously. "Why is yours different?" he asked.
"Absinthe is a bit too exotic for me, so I tend to stick to scotch. You're supposed to touch your glass to mine."
Vegeta looked at her quizzically.
"It's an Earth custom. You clink glasses and say 'cheers', then take a drink," she said. "It's a friendly gesture between people who are sharing alcohol."
"Ah, like bahkorat," he mumbled to himself.
"Bah-korat?" she repeated carefully.
He smirked, slightly amused by how her accent handled the foreign word. "Informal truce between comrades in arms," he said. "Before anyone in the group partakes, they hold out their drinks like this…" He held his own glass slightly away from him at about chest level, his index finger pointing up, to demonstrate. "Then they all say 'bahkorat', as a show of good faith that no violence will be done within that group while they are intoxicated."
"I assume you are safe within your group of friends or allies or whatever, but anyone else around isn't part of the truce unless they also say it when coming up to you. That's why you very rarely got drunk," she deduced.
He grinned wolfishly as he recalled him and Raditz being banned from every official drinking establishment in one quadrant by the time he was sixteen after a legendary bar fight that had leveled half a city. "Indeed."
"Well in that case, bahkorat!" she said enthusiastically, raising her glass and lifting her finger the way he had shown her.
"Tch, I wasn't worried about you," he snarked, but reciprocated in kind.
"You trust me."
"You pose no threat to me would be more accurate," he corrected.
"Oh please," she said. "I could have killed you just as many times as you could have killed me since you've been living here, and you know it. I don't have to be able to overpower you physically. Hell, I could have let you die a few times over when you mortally wounded yourself training, just by doing nothing."
He opened his mouth to counter her, but she had a point. The first couple of months he'd been on Earth, he had been very wary of everything; the people, his food, his drinks, his quarters, even his gravity room. Gradually, he had let his guard down and stopped existing in survival mode, which allowed him to focus better on his training and rest properly. On the other hand, he had let himself be lulled by the security and current peacefulness of this planet, something that would have disgusted Frieza Force era Vegeta.
"It's okay, I trust you, too," she said, almost shyly. She smiled at him, a genuine, kind smile that suddenly made him feel so out of his depth that he focused intently on refilling his strange green drink and gulping it, unable to meet her eyes directly.
She remained blessedly quiet for once, getting lost in her own thoughts as she slowly sipped her scotch.
I trust you, too. He had done little to warrant her trust, but then again, as much as she seemed to nag him, in reality she had asked for very little. Don't blow up the planet, don't kill anyone, don't harm anyone unless it's in defense. It was essentially the opposite of everything he had been raised and trained to do, but when he reflected on it now, that had been the easiest adjustment for him to make on Earth. He could have done anything he wanted to the planet and the people on it, especially when Kakarot was gone. For the first time he'd had his own choices to make, and though they had admittedly been purely selfish, a rebellion of sorts after a lifetime of obeying the commands of a cruel master, he had taken a different path.
He snuck a side-long glance at Bulma. She was staring off into space, no doubt contemplating her own problems, but their silence was a comfortable one. Vegeta fell into the warm, melancholy embrace of the alcohol, and by the time half the bottle was empty, the pressing weight of the destiny foisted upon his shoulders by his long-dead kin was lighter, his failures far enough afield that he could let go of them for the moment. His body tingled, the tension in his muscles slowly seeping away, and he let himself relax in the safe haven of her living room.
"What's wrong with me, Vegeta?" she asked with a slight slur, as if she'd been waiting all this time to build up the courage to speak.
"Your sense of self-preservation is appalling," he offered, abandoning his glass and taking a long pull of Absinthe directly from the bottle.
"No, no," she said, her brow creased and waving a hand dismissively, as if that was common knowledge. "I mean, you know, as a woman."
He grumbled as he watched her dribble the last bit of scotch from the bottle into her glass. "Why are you wasting your time, and mine, I might add, moping over such a fool? It was his loss, not yours. That much is obvious."
"I caught him with someone else, so I obviously wasn't good enough."
He polished off the last of the Absinthe, finally, wondering if he would ever be able to taste anything else besides that foul liquid again. Still seated, he reclined slightly and his head lolled back on the couch and he smiled sardonically at the ceiling. "He hurt your pride. That's what this is really about. You don't even want him back, do you?"
"What is it with you and pride?" she asked sharply, sounding offended.
He closed his eyes and let himself sink into the softness of the cushions a little more. "It is the only thing I have left that is mine, and mine alone, tattered as it may be. It was the only thing that they couldn't take away from me."
If she replied, he hadn't heard. He drifted off into a blissfully dreamless sleep, waking the next morning still on the couch, alone, with a blanket draped over him.
They never did find out if he could walk a straight line after a bottle of Absinthe, but she had made him the new battle droid anyways.