Teacher
Three weeks passed since Vegeta's first English lesson, courtesy of Bulma Brief. She was rather proud of herself for putting together miniature lesson plans for her to use in teaching the homeless boy. She could tell he was picking it up quickly, but she still couldn't get him to use more than three words at a time, usually. When he did speak, he still had a thick accent that sometimes made it hard to understand him, and most times what he said wasn't very nice.
It was when he would snap at her with some snide, biting remark that she wished she hadn't taught him English. At least when he said it in his own language she didn't know what he was saying so it didn't hurt so much. But at least now when she talked to him she knew he could understand at least part of what she said. She finally got him to tell her that when she talked too fast he had a difficult time understanding her, so she made it a point to speak slowly and clearly when addressing him.
Vegeta learned the alphabet easily enough, but putting the letters together to form words was proving slightly more difficult. He knew what the words were; he could use them and comprehend them when someone else said them, but he wasn't taking to writing as fast. He was working hard to master it, though. Initially he hadn't cared, but his curiosity and propensity for learning was getting the better of him and now he actually looked forward to his daily lessons with the blue-haired girl. She proved to be a better teacher than he would have given her credit for at the outset.
But despite his interest in learning the language, he was more interested in focusing on the language that would help him achieve his goal of leaving the insignificant mudball as soon as possible. He tried to express this to the girl, but she continued trying to teach him useless words, like what different articles of clothing were called, or what the colors were. He didn't care if he was wearing a yellow t-shirt, he wanted to inquire about which metals were the best conductors on the planet and whether those metals were easily shaped into wires.
"Are you even paying attention?" Bulma asked when her pupil wasn't looking at the words she was writing anymore. His mind always seemed to wander when she got to grammar.
"No."
She sighed and put her pen down. If he wasn't going to listen, there was no point in trying to teach him. She was starting to get an inkling of an idea as to why her teachers at school seemed to always be so frustrated with her. She never paid attention and yet she knew the material perfectly. There was no point in teaching someone who already knew the subject in and out. Over the past three weeks she had come to realize that Vegeta was an incredibly intelligent boy. In fact, she wondered if maybe he really was as smart as her.
"What're you thinking about?" she asked.
Vegeta shrugged. Even if he cared to answer he didn't know how to say it yet. She hadn't exactly gotten around to teaching him the terms he needed to explain mechanics and physics to her without a substantial spattering of Saiya-go mixed in. She'd be just as clueless at the end of his attempt to communicate as she was at the present time.
That was another thing she had picked up about him. He acted indifferent to answering when really he didn't know how to answer. Of course there were times when she knew he knew how to answer and chose not to, but that was irrelevant. Knowing he didn't have the words to use yet helped her stay patient with him when their conversations became more one-sided than usual.
Bulma drummed her fingers on the desk and watched her houseguest as he crossed his arms over his chest and gazed out the window. He was clearly somewhere else mentally. She wished he would open up more. He never talked about his life before she met him, which was obviously the better part of his life. He was reserved, if not downright secretive. It bugged her. She was very curious about him and wanted to ask him so many questions she knew he would never bother answering.
"You know, if you get your reading and writing down, you could probably go to school with me," she said as she packed her notebook in her backpack.
He quirked an eyebrow and snorted. "Why would I want to do that?"
"My parents will probably make you go eventually. If you're going to live with us then they'll want you to get a good education. They already think of you as part of the family. If they make me go to school, you'll end up having to go too."
"Not happening." He stood up and cracked his neck. He'd been sitting too long again.
Bulma sighed. She didn't want to tell him that she was really hoping he would go to school with her. She was tired of everyone there being mean to her all the time. Sure, he was mean to her, but for some reason it didn't bother her. It somehow seemed to fit him, like it was his personality to be a jerk to everyone, not just her. In some ways, his gruffness was starting to become so familiar to her that she wouldn't want him any other way. She and her parents took him as they found him and weren't in a hurry to change him.
"Why do you always wear that weird belt?" she asked off-handedly.
"Belt?"
She sighed dramatically. "Vegeta, I taught you the words for clothes. I know you know what a belt is."
"I'm not wearing one, you stupid girl."
"Yes you are," she said, reaching out to touch the furry brown belt around his waist.
He growled and backed out of reach. "Don't touch that."
"What's the big deal?" she demanded, standing up and putting her hands on her hips.
"It's not a belt!"
"Then what is it?"
Slowly, Vegeta uncurled his tail from around his waist and flicked it behind him a few times so she could see it. Her eyes widened and jaw dropped. With a smirk, he coiled his tail back around his waist. His smirk soon faded when she started screaming. He clamped his hands over his ears and shouted, "Girl, shut up!"
Bulma backpedaled away until she was pressed against the wall behind her. "You have a tail!" she screeched.
"You think I don't know that?" he roared over her screaming.
Her mouth snapped shut and she looked at him with fear in her eyes. She'd never heard of anyone having a tail before. Not a long, furry monkey tail, anyway. It was creepy. She knew there were some strange things about the boy, but she never thought he had a tail. She'd seen what she always assumed to be a belt around his waist. Never in her wildest dreams would she have imagined it was really a prehensile tail.
"Stupid girl," he muttered in Saiya-go.
Bulma managed to calm herself down enough to sit down in her chair and stare levelly at the boy who had a tail. He'd had it all along and she never noticed. 'Wow, I'm observant,' she mocked herself. In her defense, he never unwrapped it from his waist around anyone for them to see that it was a tail.
"Sorry," she murmured, "I guess I just really didn't expect that. Why do you have a tail, if you don't mind me asking?"
"I was born with it, idiot."
"Oh. Right." Bulma rubbed the back of her neck. She felt really dumb now.
Vegeta looked at the clock on the girl's bedside table and groaned. It was late enough in the morning that he wouldn't be able to leave to work on his space pod and make it back on time for lunch. The girl had wasted his entire morning with her frivolous lesson about subject-verb agreement and the names of furniture. Now he would have to wait until after lunch to go work on his space pod. Not that there was much he could do with it. So far he'd only been able to isolate the problems and make minor repairs with what little he had to work with. At the rate he was going, it would be a few months before he could leave. That fact left him feeling irritable more often than not.
'Well,' he figured, 'I might as well do something with my time before lunch.' He shrugged and sat down at the desk to continue his English lesson.
Still unnerved by the fact that her student had a tail, Bulma took a while to get back into the swing of teaching him, but soon enough she was so absorbed in her lesson that she'd forgotten her little scare. Through her experience with Vegeta she figured out that she really enjoyed teaching. It gave her a sense of accomplishment seeing another person's success that she'd never had before. So when her mother called upstairs to tell them lunch was ready, she was a bit disappointed because she knew he wouldn't want any more lessons after eating. He had a habit of leaving the compound for extended periods of time, so she would have to find something else to do on her Saturday afternoon.
Vegeta immediately shot up from his seat and raced downstairs for lunch. He was hungry and eager to find out what the crazy woman cooked. It was something new and fascinatingly delicious every day, and she had finally caught on to the fact that he needed an incredible amount of food to be satisfied. At first she thought he ate as much as he did because he hadn't been getting enough to eat while living on the streets, but after over a week of his voracious appetite she decided it was natural for him to eat so much. And, of course, she was more than willing to cater to his dietary needs.
As soon as he was finished eating his lunch, Vegeta left the kitchen and went upstairs to his room to grab the capsule with his tools in it and his ID card. He wanted to get to his space pod and resume work as soon as possible, but luck wasn't on his side when he walked back out of his room and bumped into the blue-haired girl.
"Where you going?" she asked, stuffing her hands in her pockets.
"Out."
"Where?"
"Away," he growled as he pushed past her. She was nearly knocked off her feet by the force of his shove.
"I can see you're putting my lessons to good use," she snapped. "You're so fluent."
The tip of his tail twitched with his irritation as he stalked down the hall and went downstairs. He had no reason to explain himself to her. She was too nosey for her own good. Outside, he checked to see if there was anyone around, and, seeing no one, blasted off into the sky on his way to his space pod.
Bulma pouted when Vegeta didn't bother shooting back a clever comeback. It was a lot more fun talking to him when he was showering her with snide remarks than when he chose to give her the silent treatment. Her shoulders slumped as she stomped into her room. Now was as good a time as any to get her homework for Monday done. With that finished she would be free to design a new device that she could attach to the bottoms of her shoes that would spring her up so she could actually reach things. She was going to defeat her shortness one way or another.
Vegeta landed next to his space pod ten minutes later and circled around it. It was still untouched, which meant no snoopy humans had found it yet. That was another thing he was concerned about with the length of time it would take him to get it functioning again. Knowing the idiot race he was dwelling with, they would take too much interest in it and confiscate it or whatever and then he'd have to find where they took it and have a big mess on his hands. If only there was a way to put his pod in a capsule, then he could take it with him everywhere and never need to worry about anyone finding it. It would also save him the daily trips away from the compound. But he knew that wasn't possible. It wasn't built to go into a capsule.
He sat down in the space pod and pulled the control panel open to see what he could get done without new wires. He'd already taken care of most of the external damage since finding out what the best metal alloy the planet had to offer was. He cringed, remembering the horrible time he had trying to explain what he needed to the old man. He finally got the gist across that he needed something very hard and durable and was provided with small plates of carbon steel. It wasn't as hard as the metal his pod was made from, but it was sufficient.
Though, it had taken him several hours to get the metal hammered to the shape he needed, and by then he had to return to the compound for dinner. The next day he spent the whole afternoon welding the steel onto his space pod, which was made more difficult because he had to preheat it first and then cool it. Luckily, he was able to use a controlled beam of ki to do the welding, which simplified the process somewhat. Had he resorted to using the tools available, it would have taken him at least twice as long.
With the exterior of his pod patched up, all he had to focus on was the interior, which was where most of the problems were in the first place. It was also what he knew the least about, which was only going to make his task harder because he had to learn from the frazzled remains of the wiring. And, knowing his luck, it would be more than just short-circuited wires that were causing trouble. Most likely he would need to entirely replace some parts, and where he was going to get workable parts was a mystery to him. He would probably have to create them from scratch using the old parts as models. Electronics were not his strong point, so he really wasn't looking forward to seeing what all needed to be done before he could get himself back to a base planet and get a new, more reliable pod.
Vegeta groaned when he looked over the inside of the control panel. It wasn't a pretty sight. Several wires were melted together so he could hardly see which went where originally. The coordinate system was burnt to a crisp, so it would need to be replaced. He shook his head slowly, not even sure how to go about fixing that. 'What else could possibly have gone wrong?'
He pulled open a small compartment in the floor of the pod and growled when he saw the fuel line was damaged. Until he got that fixed, assuming he got everything else done, he would never be able to leave the mudball. Without fuel there was no getting the space pod off the ground. At least it wouldn't be a terribly difficult repair to make. He sighed. Things just seemed to get better and better…
'I don't even feel like bothering with this today,' he thought. He was a warrior, not a mechanic or computer engineer or whatever. He knew fighting, not computers. Not that he wasn't capable of learning, but he never cared to before and now he was regretting neglecting that part of his informal education. Informal in that he generally taught himself everything he knew through reading, observing, and experimenting. It looked like now he had a perfect opportunity for the experimenting method, but unfortunately the stakes were pretty high if he failed miserably.
Vegeta sat back in the seat and scowled at the bare wires. He sighed and rubbed his temples. He wasn't going to make any progress at this rate. He was completely stumped on how to go about making the necessary repairs. He picked up his scouter from the floor of the pod and turned it over in his hands a few times. It was broken too. And it was basically his only lifeline. If he could get it fixed, maybe he could contact a technician who would be able to walk him through how to repair his pod. Not that the technicians were ever very helpful. He knew they liked lording their 'power' over him by playing dumb and refusing to provide him information he needed. It was the only way they could make themselves feel superior to a mere child. At least he'd been able to get one last transmission through before he crash-landed on Earth.
'Maybe the old man can help me fix this.' Vegeta clutched the scouter tightly in his hand and got out of his space pod, sealed the door shut, and took a few steps away before jumping into the air and flying back toward West City. He hadn't spent much time out that day, but he had a new plan of action that didn't require his absence from the compound.
He landed a block away from the compound and walked the rest of the way, not wanting anyone to know he could fly. He reached the front gate and swiped his ID card and went in when the gate opened for him. He headed straight for Dr. Brief's lab, hoping to catch him between projects so he might be willing to take a look at his scouter without being distracted. Not that the absent-minded genius was ever truly not distracted. He always had something on his mind. Or maybe his mind was just gone off somewhere else. Either way, Vegeta needed him to focus and figure out how to fix his scouter so he could get on with the repairs on his pod.
Vegeta found Dr. Brief tinkering around with an old robot in his laboratory and sighed. He was beginning to think the scientist never took a break from some kind of work. He walked over to where the man was hunched over the robot and tapped him on the shoulder to get his attention. He'd found out early on that speaking was not the most effective way to gain Dr. Brief's attention, so he had to resort to touching him.
"Hm? Oh, Vegeta, my boy! What do you need?" Dr. Brief asked as he straightened his back and stretched after being bent over for quite a while.
Vegeta held his scouter out to him. "I need this fixed."
"What's this?" Dr. Brief asked, holding the scouter in one hand and stroking his mustache with the other. "Remarkable. What an interesting device. I've never seen anything like it before." He turned it over in his hand a few times before laying it down on the work table and unscrewing the small plate that gave him access to the scouter's inner workings.
"Can you fix it?" Vegeta asked impatiently.
"I'm not sure," Dr. Brief replied. He grabbed a magnifier to better be able to see all the intricacies of the scouter. "It's sustained a lot of damage. Is this your dhastrot?"
"No. I can't bring that here."
"I see. Well, to be honest, I don't know how to fix this, Vegeta. Maybe you could show it to Bulma. She might be able to figure it out." He handed the scouter back to its owner.
Vegeta looked at the old man incredulously as he snatched the scouter back. "Why would I show it to her? That girl has fewer brains than a worm!"
Dr. Brief chuckled and shook his head. "Do you really think so? I wouldn't be lying if I told you she's smarter than me when it comes to this type of thing. I'm more interested in mechanics, but her specialty is computers. If she doesn't know what to do to fix that thing, then I'd say you're out of luck."
Vegeta frowned as he remembered the conversation that ignited his interest in Capsule Corporation in the first place. The girl the men on the street were talking about was supposed to take over the company eventually. She was a kid and a genius. Well, wouldn't it make sense for the president of the company's daughter be the brilliant mind they were talking about? Vegeta never would have guessed it was her even though the connection was staring him in the face. She was such a brainless girl, how could she be a genius? But then, Dr. Brief was a tad eccentric, he could easily be mistaken for an idiot rather than a genius, too. Perhaps it ran in the family to be so smart they were actually rather stupid.
"Very well," he muttered. "I'll go find the brat."
The boy stalked out of the lab and returned to the residential area of the compound, hoping to run across the blue-haired girl. She was nowhere to be found, which exasperated him greatly. The one time he actually wanted her around she was missing. Figured. He stopped at the foot of the stairs and crossed his arms over his chest. "Girl!" he hollered, "Where are you?"
Bulma was jerked from her thoughts when she heard Vegeta screaming at her from downstairs. She toppled her chair over in her haste to go find out what the problem was; honestly, it had to be important if he was bothering to yell for her since he'd never done it before. She ran to the head of the stairs and stopped herself before she fell down them.
"What?" she demanded when she saw him standing there scowling at her.
"I require… help," he spat disgustedly. It was humiliating having to lower himself to ask for her assistance.
Bulma started down the stairs at a slower pace now that she saw he wasn't in desperate need of help. "With what?"
He waited until she reached the bottom of the stairs before he thrust the scouter into her hands. "Fixing this."
"Oh." Bulma held the strange gadget up and looked over it. "What is it?"
Vegeta hesitated in his answer. It seemed so natural to spout off the word he used for it, but she wouldn't understand. He shrugged. "A communicator."
She raised an eyebrow. "Doesn't look like any communicator I've ever seen," she mumbled mostly to herself. Then, addressing her guest, "Well, I'll see what I can do. Let's go to my dad's lab and we can see what's wrong with it."
He grunted his assent and followed her back to the lab. She sat down on a stool at one of the empty work tables and popped the scouter open so she could examine it. Like her father, she required the use of a magnifier to see what all was going on inside. "Wow, this is amazing. Where did you get this?" she asked as she continued her inspection of the broken device.
"It was given to me," he answered shortly. He wasn't about to explain why he was issued a scouter. It came with being a soldier in the tyrant lizard's army.
She seemed to accept his answer as she whistled when she saw the extent of the damage. She set it aside and sat back with her arms braced against the edge of the table. "Well, the good news is I can fix it," she said, watching his face for any reaction. She was disappointed as his carefully guarded features remained stoic. "The bad news is, it's going to take a long time. This is the most advanced technology I've ever seen and to top it off, it's tiny. But I can show you what I'm doing so if you need to repair it again someday you'll know how."
He nodded in agreement. If she really could do it, and she wasn't just bluffing, it would be good to know what to do if there was a next time. He didn't want to find himself in the same position of helplessness again. There was one thing that was bothering him though. "How long is a long time?"
Bulma blushed a little. "Around two months, give or take…"
"Two months?" he screamed.
"Hey," she yelled back, "I never said it was going to be easy!"
"You insufferable…" he trailed off in a stream of curses from as many languages as he knew. He knew he should be grateful that it was going to be fixed at all, but he had hoped it would take two months to fix the scouter and the space pod.
Bulma sighed and waited for his tantrum to pass so she could start with the repairs and walk him through it so he would have a firm understanding of how to fix it himself. Finally, after fuming for a few minutes and pacing back and forth through the lab, Vegeta returned to the girl's side and crossed his arms over his chest with a deep scowl.
"Stop wasting time, girl. Start working."
She rolled her eyes. "So sorry to hold you up, your highness."
'If only you knew,' he thought. He shook his head and pulled up a stool to sit next to her while she explained the basics: what the function of each part was.
The two kids spent the next two hours hunched over the scouter and by the end of it the only progress that had been made was identifying the parts and figuring out which wires went where and why. Vegeta was somewhat disappointed that they didn't get more done, but at least he was learning thoroughly. Again he was struck by how well the girl taught. She wasn't at all condescending and remained patient with him when she had to work around the lingering language barrier.
"I'm going to have to study this a little more before I can figure out what all needs to be done," Bulma said through a yawn. "I'd be able to get it done faster, but I have school so I can't spend that much time on it every day."
Vegeta grumbled a little but couldn't argue with her. He knew she was going to be able to do what he himself could not, so he would just have to be patient. He pushed his stool back from the table and slid off. If they weren't going to work on his scouter, then he was going to go find something else productive to do. Training sounded good. He could do that for the remaining time he had left before dinner would be ready.
For once Bulma hardly noticed Vegeta leaving. She was far too absorbed in what she was doing, completely fascinated by the strange device he brought to her. She may have been a technological genius, but her mind was blown by the technology set before her. 'I wonder who gave this to him?' She shrugged. There was no way to know, and he'd never tell.
Vegeta ran to the indoor garden where he had taken to training every morning before the others woke up. He was more careful so as not to blow another hole in the wall. The one he created was patched up in less than a day, so he supposed it really wasn't a big deal if it happened again if it was so easy to fix, but he still didn't think the Briefs would appreciate him blowing their home up even if they could afford constant remodeling.
After checking to make sure no one else was in the garden, Vegeta crouched down in his trademark fighting stance and began another round of his kata. He refused to let his techniques get rusty while he resided on the peaceful planet. He couldn't tell if he was getting any stronger since he had no one to test his strength against, but he was sure he wasn't getting weaker. With the amount of food he was eating, he was sure his body was probably benefiting since he hardly ever got sufficient nourishment while working under the lizard. The tyrant made sure he was always unsatisfied so he would work harder to earn more food as a bonus. Besides, he was easier to keep in check when he was weakened by malnutrition.
'Damn him,' Vegeta growled to himself, 'I will kill him someday. I will continue fighting and growing stronger and one day he will pay for what he has done to me.' He kicked and punched the air furiously, imagining his fists and feet mercilessly beating his master. The one responsible for his life of misery. The one who took all meaning and honor from his life. The one he lived to kill.
"I will not rest until I have your blood on my hands, Frieza!"
Mrs. Brief, who had been on her way to water her plants in the garden, stopped when she heard her young houseguest inside. She cocked her head to the side and nearly dropped her watering can as her hand shot to cover her heart. "Oh my," she said sadly, "Was that Vegeta? I've never heard someone sound so angry."
Vegeta immediately dropped to the ground and stared at the intruder when he heard the doors to the garden opening. He never seemed to be able to get any peace around the compound. Someone was always prowling around wherever he went. He relaxed when he saw that it was the blonde woman. She was highly irritating but mostly harmless aside from her bloodcurdling voice. It never failed to set his teeth on edge.
"Vegeta, honey?" she asked when she saw him standing in the garden looking in her direction.
"What is it?" he asked in response.
She took a few steps into the garden and set her watering can on the ground. "Is something bothering you?"
He turned his head away and shook his head. "No. Nothing."
Her normally cheerful smile turned down into a frown. She didn't believe his answer one bit. She walked over to him and gently took his chin in her hand and turned his head so she could look into his blazing obsidian eyes. "Don't tell me nothing, sweetie. Who is Frieza?"
His eyes widened momentarily before he forced himself to return to his stoic façade. He didn't want anyone to tell how he was feeling through his facial expression. How was he supposed to answer the idiot woman? She could never understand even if he was willing to tell her who his tormentor was. How could he tell her that he was actually an alien from another planet, that his trade was purging planets, that he was the slave and play-toy of a sadistic monster whose favorite game was seeing how far he could push him toward death without letting it happen? How could he tell her that he feared this monster, that he loathed him, and that he was afraid he was becoming just like him? Rage boiled through his veins as he pulled away from the silly woman. He couldn't answer even if he wanted to.
He shook his head and raked his fingers through his hair. "No one. It doesn't matter."
Before she could protest he ran out of the garden and went upstairs to his room. There had to be somewhere he could go where he wouldn't be bothered for a little while. He locked the door for good measure and sat down on the floor with his back leaning against the bed. He didn't want to think about the lizard. He wanted to forget his past, forget the shackles that bound him to his service against his will. He'd rather die than be his slave, but he couldn't die without avenging his people first. He had to live to kill Frieza.
Mrs. Brief watched the boy leave and clutched her apron in her hands. She was terribly upset by his strange behavior. A boy so young shouldn't carry such rage and hatred. He hadn't said a word about this Frieza fellow, but she could see all she needed to know in his eyes. They spoke volumes when he chose to remain silent. She could see so much hurt and hatred in them. Feelings no boy should ever have to live with. Feelings even no adult could hold onto without going mad.
But the question remained: Who is Frieza?
A/N: Seems Vegeta took it surprisingly well when he found out Bulma was the genius he was looking for all along... Another chapter written! I'm totally excited about it, too. I think it's one of the most emotionally-packed chapters I've ever written. Just wait 'til you get to read it...