Happy New Year everyone, and welcome back! So, I'm doing it. I'm extending this story. Welcome to the sequel.
If you're reading this, you've most likely read the previous ten chapters, but if you haven't, I just want to again state that this story is an 'alternate universe,' and that my primary objective writing it is to have fun writing it rather than laying out some serious headcanon. It's not canon, and it's not perfect. Please take note of this if you plan on taking me to the cleaners over it.
The plot will be less tight because I plan on extending the sequel past just 10 chapters, so it may feel more slower going. And this first chapter will be slow as I reintroduce our characters.
And lastly, even though I don't like doing this (mostly because I hate to clutter up your chapter or step on any toes), I just thought I should reply to the guest reviewer who I think got a little upset over my dragging Yamcha through the mud, just in case anyone else was turned off by it, which is a feeling you are absolutely entitled to. Let it be on the record that I think very highly of Yamcha. He's loyal, he's brave, he's a gentleman, and he sung a song about cat food that touched my heart. And don't tell anyone, but I think Yamcha and Bulma made an adorable couple in Dragon Ball. But the reason I made Yamcha a jerk was much less because I fell into the trap of making Yamcha a jerk that is ripe in Bulma and Vegeta fan fiction, and more of a deliberate attempt to make him a stand in for the type of boyfriend many of us have endured when we were too young or insecure to know better of to leave. My Hookups and Hangups Yamcha isn't so much a reflection of the 'real' Yamcha as he is the ghost of those complicated relationships we have where we compromise too much of ourselves. As goofy as this story can be, I wanted to instill a sort of self-understanding in Bulma that comes from relationships throughout the text, and Bulma's past with Yamcha is informed by that, and that's why it's titled Hookups and Hangups.
Let's do this thing!
..:Hookups And Hangups:..
..:Part II:..
Whether it was the summer heat making her dog tired, or the long hours at the shop driving her completely nutty, she knew, without a doubt, that Goku had talked her into the impossible.
She let out a heavy sigh as she stared out over the car lot and into the late summer sunset, the sun perched atop the shimmering skyline to sink like a marble into molasses atop the horizon.
She didn't know whether to be offended or flattered that Goku would request her help with something like this. She was feeling something like bile in the back of her throat, mixed with a bolstering pride. Something...like...an agreement….
"Yes," she conceded, grimacing. "Yes. Fine. I'll do it. I surrender! Though you had to twist my arm to do it."
Goku pumped his fist and jumped for joy, causing Bulma to cringe reflexively as his six foot 200 lb-something frame landed beside her. The sun's ombre oranges lit his hair and cast its fiery monochrome over his features as the early Wednesday evening put its hot claws into the slowly approaching night.
"You're really testing me, Goku," she grouched, kicking the gravel a little before being swept into his side for a quick, rib cracking hug.
"You won't regret it," he assured her, letting her go with dizzying speed before sliding his phone out of his pocket as it alerted him obnoxiously of a call. He made an apologetic motion at her and stepped away, standing straight and briefly becoming the paralegal he was as he answered, before slumping and yelling into the phone, "Hi Cheech, my car broke down again," and causing Bulma and Krillin to erupt into giggles.
"You'll be taking him home, I guess?" She wiped the sweat from her forehead and turned to Krillin, who returned her amused smile with good-natured humor, wiping at his own beaded perspiration with the back of his hand.
"Yep," he responded warmly, pulling his body off one of the cars in her lot and shoving his sleeve up to check the time on his watch. "I've gotta get home and get ready to meet Juu at Sampson's by nine." His voice thinned with anxiety, prompting Bulma to unsuccessfully repress a smile.
"Krillin, I'm sure everything will go fine."
"Kami, I hope so," he prayed. His smiled tapered into almost a glum thing as he prepared for the worst, and then he made his way over to Goku, who was still yelling into the phone at Chi Chi with one finger plugging his ear, fighting a losing battle with poor reception. Krillin tugged on Goku's sleeve and nodded towards his car, before turning back around and giving Bulma a short wave as they headed out.
"Thanks, Bulma!" Goku bellowed into the phone, causing her and Krillin to break into a frenzy of giggles again as Chi Chi's eyes surely crossed and her eardrums exploded.
"No problem, guys. But you owe me one, Goku!" She wagged her finger at them dramatically. Goku gave her a thumbs up in affirmation as he continued trying to relay that he was on his way home to Chi Chi over the white noise of his ancient flip phone.
She folded her arms over her chest as the sun heated her dirty face for the last time that day. "Good luck, Krillin!"
"Thank you!" Krillin yelled back gratefully, before sliding into his car and starting it, creeping out carefully to avoid gravel thrown from the tires pinging his paint.
As they pulled away, Goku rolled down his window, and she could see his silhouette, crammed into Krillin's sedan, his hair splayed out against the ceiling, his oversized white tailored shirt screaming at the seams as he wrenched his body out the window to give her one last thankful wave.
She snorted to herself as she watched the car zip down the street and out of the neighborhood, careening toward the main highway that connected all parts of West City like an artery and which led drivers to its heartbeats, those lively parts of the city thrumming through it.
One small vein led in, rather than out, directing the sluggish traffic in and out of the West Side each day, where the once beautiful and vibrant architecture of historic West City was now a ramshackle and abandoned industrial park. Her side, slowly, modestly beginning to blossom and draw attention again, where her 'B's Dubs' sat gracefully on a long gravel lot, all blue and pink against the gray concrete of the empty industrial complexes of her street. Decades-old European relics rested around the lot, monuments to an old world of air-cooled engines. Maybe rusted, maybe busted, but with some TLC and an artist's vision, each one could be restored and rejuvenated. Or at least plucked for spare parts.
Bulma gazed at the sunset, now at the last dregs of its descent in the sea of clouds and hovering just above the horizon, a blanket of strawberry pinks and mango orange and sooty lavenders.
A decade had passed now since she'd earned her degrees in the fields of engineering and physics, freeing her to work on the most competitive and conceptual engineering projects in the world. And yet, here she stood, in the center of a junk yard in beat up boots and coveralls, trying to make bills meet and herself happy in the only way she knew how.
She gave a wave to her neighbor, who was locking up his own small hardware store, his old body hunched as he made his way slowly across the parking lot. His dog jumped into the bed of the truck and awaited their departure patiently.
Could she have ever anticipated that this would be her life?
A decade ago, she'd made a decision that had landed her here, of all places. A decade ago, she'd thirsted for the kind of dumb, self-absorbed, careless youth she'd been denied by her gifted mind, by the privilege of having a father who was a prominent voice in his field and who shaped the very policies of politics.
Bulma Briefs had been homeschooled all her life, although that was really a misleading description of the care she received under her absent-minded-professor-of-a-father and her free-spirited, optimistic mother. She'd been given room to roam the city, shake hands with diplomats, sit on the lap of philanthropists, and blow dandelion seeds with the children of activists. Her father's lab felt more homey to her than her own bedroom, and, in fact, her father had installed a cot just for her in the corner of it as late nights tinkering with him grew customary. She had more memories of falling asleep on that cot than playing with children her age, her father tucking the blankets around her small frame and his mustache tickling her ear as he kissed her good night, with the scent of ozone and grease that he brought everywhere with him.
She'd tested out of school at thirteen and had pursued a graduate program in higher education with all the stubborn energy of any teenager. At the age of eighteen, she held in her hands three doctorates from the infamous Peabody School of Astrophysics and Engineering and an award of $200K for her contributions to quantum technology.
And she chose to turn right back around and enroll as a freshman at the University of West City.
She'd loved working with her father, and his patronage had certainly helped her gain a foothold to flourish in their field. He'd been her whole world all her life. But as her peers entered the semi-adulthood that was college life, she'd wanted a piece of it worse than any algorithm unanswered. Newton and the theory of relativity could wait! But this, this friends!, and nights out on the town!, and...well, romance! She wanted to be in the thick of it!
Shockingly, university life was a disaster. She'd been socially awkward, and the undergraduate studies were so elementary that she had very little patience for them.
"Let's be real here," she'd informed her Biology 101 professor after he pulled her aside for her poor attendance. "You're threatening to fail me because I didn't complete a 500 word essay on 'What Is Biology?'" Bulma couldn't stop laughing, even as the professor's face grew blisteringly red.
The worst part about it was that she hadn't even made any friends.
She'd finally been rescued from a year of loneliness and confused anger by chance, embodied in a girl with chic, straight bangs and the wardrobe of everyone's envy, a math whiz whose thick black hair lay perfectly straight against the side of her shoulder, tucked neatly behind her other ear like a drawn curtain around a determined face. One fine day, Chi Chi's roommate just happened to fly past her into the wall as Bulma nearly knocked her teeth in for calling another girl in their dorm a slut. Bulma was known for being weird, curt, and pretentious, and it was painfully clear to her that everyone could sense her Otherness. Yet for some Kami-forsaken reason, Chi Chi had dragged her along to the bar that night with her tagalong friends Launch and Eighteen and never looked back. Bulma had probably gotten Chi Chi into more trouble than she'd ever anticipated—a bar fight with a whole sorority surfaced to memory—but the girls had uncannily connected.
They'd slept in each other's beds, they'd picked the toe jam from each other's toes to the other's giggling horror, they swapped lingerie and they'd wrapped their arms around each other supportively as the other sobbed into her neck with abandon. But it just couldn't last. Chi Chi was studying law, and Bulma dragged behind her. Chi Chi, highly motivated and actually interested in law, spent more and more time single-mindedly absorbed in her chosen path. And so Bulma filled the gap Chi Chi left by spending more time with her new boyfriend. Things seemed like they were progressing normally from the outside looking in, but Bulma had never felt so empty. She was unhappy in her relationship, unhappy with how her life had slipped from her control, how something throbbed inside her, unfulfilled. And she was unhappy because no one else seemed to notice.
Bulma remembered the moment things changed with painful clarity. She'd been picking up her boyfriend's clothes from around the house when she'd heard him laughing on the phone behind their bedroom door.
She'd straightened, stared at the closed face of the door.
She'd understood, numbly, that he was talking to another girl, and that the conversation wasn't innocent.
Then she'd simply bent back down and grabbed his dirty underwear and socks where he'd thrown them by their bedroom door to carry them into the wash.
And an insidious, evil idea crept forward.
She didn't want to live like this. She didn't have to live like this.
This didn't have to be her life.
After only a second's indecision she'd dropped the clothing on the carpet and walked to their bedroom, throwing back the door and filling a backpack full with her stuff. She'd regarded his confusion and anger with the hard, emotionless disapproval of a school marm towards a disruptive child. "Where are you going?!" "I'm leaving." "What do you think you're doing?" "We're over." "You can't just leave me." "Watch me." In that moment, when she finally disconnected with that girl he thought she was, she finally felt truly herself. She had respected her own needs. It felt wonderful.
She'd left law school shortly after, to the shock of her girl friends. The young, two dimensional alias she'd created of herself in college had finally been compromised.
Yes, she was Bulma Briefs, she'd sighed, heiress and daughter of the revered head of Capsule Corporation, a company for whom the sky was the limit and the market was burst wide open under their stead. Yes, her parents were loaded, yes, she wasn't an idiot just because she was failing out of school, yes, she liked to work on cars. She was guilty of all of this, and she would no longer let herself feel guilty about anything.
Bulma was stubborn and dreamy and impulsive, but she was also fiercely independent, and so she, again, struck out on her own, into man's realm this time, where automotives and entrepreneurship melded. It was Volkswagen's air-cooled engines that drew her fascination, their basic yet even-still sophisticated engineering reminding her of the rockets of Capsule Corp, simply on a smaller scale.
Now here she was, earning a broadening, solid respect from the import car culture of West City, a business owner and entrepreneur, just past 30 and not yet hard on the eyes, she hoped. To her left sat her toaster on wheels, her '67 Bus, lowered on air bags and shining with new red and white paint, its chrome VW symbol winking at her from its flat nose. The cream leather bench seats gleamed from the wide windows, and she thrust her fingers into her curly teal hair with a sigh as her gaze dragged toward the other vehicle to her right, where an early model Ford Escort glared at her, rusted through, seat covers frayed down to the cushions, rode far too long on a rear driver's side doughnut. Sullenly awaiting her care. And smoking.
How had Goku talked her into this again?
Bulma let out one last frustrated sigh and turned to close up shop just as her cell vibrated in her jumpsuit pocket. She put it to her ear as she walked into the muggy shop, moving to pull down the garage door as she answered.
"Hello?"
"You're late."
Bulma let out a sigh between her teeth, and the garage door came down with a shuttering clang. "I had a visitor."
"Oh?"
She slid the garage door lock into place and made her way toward her back office, where her car keys had spent the day mocking her. It's Friday, they'd teased, and you won't get out of here before nightfall.
"Yes." She couldn't quite get the admission out of her tight throat. "...Goku."
A rare burst of laughter met her from the other end, and she scowled, snatching up her keys before shoving her fist on her hip. "What's so funny?"
"I knew you'd cave."
"Is that right?" There was nothing funny about this.
"He talked all damned day about coming to see you after work. He didn't get any work done because of it."
Bulma growled. "His car is beyond repair. To be fair, he only asked me to fix the overheating issue. He even ventured to ask me—quite politely—if I would mind making the windows roll up again. Like he wasn't even aware of the nine zillion other things wrong with the damned thing. The car doesn't have a muffler, it doesn't even have a radiator. How long has he been driving it like this?!" She whispered frantically. "How did Chi Chi, of all people, allow him to drive this piece of junk?!" She flicked the shop lights off, and the fluorescent buzz suddenly ceased, only the dim glow over her desk remaining, in stasis, to greet her exactly this way early Monday morning. "I've got to hand it to her," she mused as she approached the front door in the darkness, "it must have taken enlightened levels of self-control."
She heard a snort that she knew meant Vegeta was finding everyone else's pain quite amusing.
She opened her mouth to warn him she would work on it in his garage if he didn't shut up, when he interrupted her.
"Lock up and get over here already," he demanded. "I want out of my work clothes," his voice turned dangerous, "but I want you to take them off me."
Her mouth clamped closed. "Yes, sir."
She heard him "hn" smugly before the line went dead, and she shoved the phone into her pocket and completed her task, grabbing her keys and heading out the door. Leaning against the doorjamb and pulling the doorknob upwards to close the old, swollen wood door securely before moseying across the parking lot and sliding into the driver's seat of her bus, Bulma grew a smile that curled over her face with eager anticipation.
Bulma woke up with the sun spilling onto her face, and she didn't like it one bit.
She turned her head and buried it into the pillow, nuzzling it with a groan, when she heard a sound she couldn't deny: the coffee pot gurgling. Her eyes cracked open, and as she squinted into the clean morning light, disoriented with sleep, Vegeta's spacious bedroom greeted her.
She noticed that he wasn't in bed, given that she was sprawled sideways across it. That wasn't unexpected. He often woke up at the crack of dawn to work out and get a head start on next week's work. On her one free Saturday a month, nothing was going to get her out of bed before noon. Well, maybe the smell of coffee, but then it was right back to bed with her.
She lurched out of his bed and made her way clumsily around it to the master bathroom. Both his bedroom and his bathroom were military-tidy. The slate gray paint, the dark wood furnishings, the clean white fixtures and crown molding all had a bit of an unsettling effect on her. They made her anxious, worrying she'd get her fingerprints on something or put something back facing the wrong direction. She'd been through this kind of neurotic, unnatural tidiness with Chi Chi, and she understood that clean freaks had a system that couldn't be broken without them meting out unmerciful punishment. But so far, Vegeta had yet to complain about her greasy hands on the faucet or her clothes pile by the bed. Granted, she was on her best behavior. Her most slovenly behavior was reserved for her bedroom at her parent's house, where she was living most of the time anyway. And her clothes were only ever strewn around on the floor after he'd ripped them off of her. He couldn't really complain.
She brushed her teeth and ran her fingers through her bedhead before pulling on her extra set of clothes, loose, cuffed jeans and a shrunken, aged t-shirt. The bedroom door was ajar, and she padded down the dense, soft cream carpet until the hallway opened up into the front room, quiet and empty. She frowned and headed towards the kitchen, sure that must be where Vegeta was hiding, and at least where the coffee pot trickled. While Vegeta woke up in the most excruciating way—with exercise—that wasn't her style. She woke up the old-fashioned way: with several cups of black coffee. But he wasn't in the kitchen, either.
She wandered on bare feet back into the front room, leaving cool hardwood for carpet to stand inside the warm light cast from the skylights, before being drawn to the wall of windows. She gazed out past the parking lot and the expansive, landscaped lawn, observing the sprawling park across the street, where families and students playing frisbee golf already lazed on this balmy Saturday morning.
She felt his lips on her neck before she heard him. Grazing over her skin with his slow, even breath and soft, parted lips, he gripped her waist, his hands working their way under her shirt to cup her breasts. A smile spread on her face, and she turned her head to look at him.
"Have you been working all morning?" She chided.
"What does it matter? You've spent the entirety of it sleeping."
Her mouth slanted. "It's the weekend. Take a break."
His lips at the corner of her own were a definite manipulation to get her to stop harping at him. Their eyes met, nose to nose, and his gleamed impishly and dark, contrasting with his uncharacteristically pale yellow sweatshirt. He was so often dressed like he stepped out of the front cover of GQ that she was always pleasantly surprised when he dressed like a normal human being. It made his relaxed attire seem much, much sexier than it should have been.
"I made you coffee." His tongue breached her parted lips. He tasted clean and warm, and she pulled him in deeper, her smile making their mouths fit awkwardly.
"I sense scheming. It's not even noon yet." Was he ready to go again? Kami, they'd barely gotten any sleep last night. She at least needed a coffee break.
"From me? Never."
She ran her hand over his smooth cheek and allowed him to palm her chest like a teenage boy, noticing halfway through his kiss that a smear of grease from last night still graced his temple. She smiled and opened her mouth to tell him when she was interrupted by a knock on the door. Vegeta growled softly into her mouth and gripped her harder, wrapping his tongue around hers defensively as if it would prevent him from having to answer the door.
The door endured a barrage of bangs and the doorbell rang spastically.
"Someone's at your door," she enlightened him.
He disengaged from their kiss, giving her a weak scowl before stalking over to the front door and throwing it open.
"What do you want?" She heard him snarl.
Bulma meandered over and poked her head over his shoulder, and was met with the dour grins of Raditz and Nappa.
"Is that grease on your face?" Raditz asked Vegeta loudly before gasping playfully, a smirk curling at the corner of his mouth. "I do believe someone's been boning."
Raditz' arm shot out to hold the door open before Vegeta could slam it in his face. "Wait! We need to talk."
"It's ten o' clock in the morning, shouldn't you be passed out in the gutter somewhere," Bulma quipped from behind Vegeta. Raditz gave her a searing look.
"The time should be an indication that this isn't just some horse shit house call. I've got some important news. Vegeta? Let me in. Vegeta. Come on." Raditz implored him with rare seriousness.
Bulma began to retort with a crack about Raditz and Nappa 'expecting' when the snippet died in her mouth, and she stared at Raditz with wide eyes. He looked genuinely somber as he awaited Vegeta's answer. Well, this was unexpected.
Vegeta growled lightly and stepped to the side to let them pass.
As Raditz stepped over the threshold, he graced her with an approving once over. "Niiiice, Bulma. No bra?"
Her eyes narrowed to slits.
"Vegeta, we need to talk." Raditz wasted no time. "Alone. Sorry, B."
Neither Raditz nor Nappa looked sorry as they stared at them with worried, bloodshot eyes.
All this and she still hadn't had a cup of coffee.
She'd been hammering for an hour. A full hour.
"Dad," she growled. "This has got to end."
Dr. Briefs, slumped over a console and wiring its insides from a sprawl on top of it, puffed on his cigarette serendipitiously in response.
"There's no other way, dear daughter. Solid fuldroxaline thymalyde responds only to force. I'm afraid there's no other way to get that bolt off the prototype except by old-fashioned means."
Bulma continued hammering, although swiftly losing graciousness about it as her scowl grew more and more frightful. At first, helping her father in the lab had seemed like a great way to relieve the frustration she'd felt at being kicked out of Vegeta's by Raditz and Nappa. Vegeta was nice enough about it, insisting she meet him for dinner, even nodding respectfully at her as she waved wanly at him and reluctantly slid out his front door.
Her phone vibrated against her thigh, and she plucked the thing out without bothering to glance at it, staring piercingly up into the bowels of the wires at the loathsome black bolt and answering through the rubber gasket grit between her teeth.
"Hello?" She asked a bit waspishly, spitting out the gasket and tapping on the cylinder before it erupted, slinging gunk. "Ugh!" She blinked through a slew of oil. The bolt was still there.
"H-hello?"
Despite the sludge sliding down her face and seeping through her coveralls, Bulma froze.
"Hi." She replied dumbly.
"I'm sorry, am I calling at a bad time?"
"Well," she sat up, careful not to bang her head on the console. She wiped the grease from her cheek bones and frowned down at it. "To be honest, I just busted open a cylinder on one of my dad's projects and now have a little bit of a mess on my hands. Literally," she muttered. "But otherwise, no. What's up?" She schooled her voice to be casual, even as the contents flopped around in her stomach and her mouth dried. She couldn't believe this was happening. She had knew it had to happen sometime, but...
"I was just wondering," Chi Chi cleared her throat, "If you'd like to meet for lunch sometime."