She wasn't really sure how to handle this right now, but here her mother sat anyway, beaming at her, legs crossed ladylike in the chair in front of Bulma's desk, head bobbing slightly with happiness like she were at a really good concert, trying to talk to Bulma—about all things—dating.

"Mom, I really don't have time for this right now," Bulma groaned, fingers chatting over the keyboard.

Trunks sat in his exersaucer, the little bouncy chair with toys strung all around, spinning all around and smacking the colorful rattles with gusto. Bulma was thankful, actually, despite the asinine songs and animal sounds erupting from the toy every second. He was pretty distracted by the mess of toys in his line of sight, and at this point in her life, this level of audible chaos was just white-noise anymore.

"Of course you do, honey! A girl always has time for true love," her mother crooned with optimism, winking at her daughter.

"Ugh." Bulma's hands fell heavily onto her desk, palms up in appeal, and she, finally, turned her full attention on her mother.

"Don't give me that look, Bulma," her mother's high pitched, ooey-gooey voice chided her. She loved her mother, but sometimes it was very clear they were not cut from the same cloth. "This is important. I want you to look through that stack of papers and give me at least twenty of your favorite profiles by tomorrow. Then leave the rest to me!"

"Mom." She gave her mom a heavy stare. She was completely unamused. "I am not interested. Maybe someday I'll be, but I have way too much on my plate right now than to even consider dating at the moment."

Her mother's face fell a little, but just as her glossy red mouth parted to argue with her, Trunks hopped a little too enthusiastically, overcome with excitement by the plush monkey that hung from a toy banana tree, and slipped, knocking his head against the row of toys.

He looked to Bulma with teary eyes, mouth trembling.

Bulma dragged her body across the desk to slick his fine hair back from his face and cooed at him. "Aw, it's going to be alright, kiddo. You're gonna be just fine." Bulma beamed encouragingly down at him.

Trunks, subdued by his mother's attention, found his thumb, and after a moment of comfort from it he began cautiously bopping the plush monkey again.

Bunny stood, smoothing her short skirt. "Well, I guess, like usual, I can't make you do anything, dear. But I really think you should think on it. A girl like you will get bored before long!"

"Bleck." Bulma made a face.

"I'll remind you tomorrow!" Her mother called as she shut the door behind her, her face still hovering between the doorjamb and the door.

"Yeah, yeah," she muttered as the door finally clicked shut.

What was wrong with that woman? Bulma's fingers briefly hammered out the rest of her email, before she sighed, and put her hands in her lap.

Her gaze drifted to Trunks, who was staring up at her expectantly.

"What's up, bud?" Bulma leaned forward again and swatted a toy, which burst into song, and waited for his reaction. All it earned was a small hop, and he was staring at her again. She sighed. "Alright. You're right. This is lame. Let's blow this popsicle stand." Bulma stood and moved around the desk, drawing him from the exersaucer, but not before giving him a few tugs and kicking it lightly before it finally gave him up. "Damned...exer...thing," she groused.

Her heels clacked against the marble floor as she exited her office and didn't even bother slowing as she passed her secretary. "I'm going out to lunch with Trunks. If anyone calls, send it to my voicemail!"

Used to Ms. Briefs' eccentric and erratic behavior, her secretary was already nodding, setting all calls to forward to her voicemail, watching Ms. Briefs small frame exit the room before returning to her Solitaire game.

Bulma rolled her eyes once again as the flash of a camera caused her to blink. She did her best to ignore it, spooning cake into Trunks' grubby mouth.

The little guy was nearly conked out, sweet potato smeared across his face and full belly moving slowly up and down with his tranquil breaths.

Bulma wiped his face delicately with a napkin and brushed the stray hair from his eyes. Offhandedly, she wondered at its fine texture, at the wispy, pale lavender tuft that was growing fastest on the top of his head and finding its way more often than not into his eyes. What were the chances that Vegeta's spawn wouldn't get his obnoxious, tell-tale hair?

We see whose genes are truly superior, she sneered.

Trunks was officially passed out, soft, pale lids shut fast.

Bulma sighed with a mixture of relief and, oddly, regret. She understood a too-rare nap from Trunks was like stealing time, but now, she just felt kind of alone.

Her fork cut through the cheesecake smoothly, and she pulled at it with her teeth before licking the fork clean. There was another flash, and Bulma bit the fork hard, reigning in her anger. Well that's going to look real good on the front pages, she chastised herself, although a separate part of her wanted to turn around and strangle the paparazzo behind the hedges of the restaurant patio.

Younger Bulma would have preened for him. She would have stretched out her long, shapely legs and flipped her hair over her shoulder with a smoldering glance. Younger Bulma wanted all the attention, younger Bulma considered the front page a trophy.

Thirty-something Bulma had become a bit too much like Vegeta and was now entertaining the idea of murder.

She put down the fork, resting with a light clink on the delicate china, and leaned back in her seat, running her hands through her blunt, blue bob before folding them behind her head and watching the clouds scutter across the late afternoon sky.

Who was this new, more mature Bulma, and what had she done with younger Bulma?

She couldn't believe her mother was pruning through online dating profiles to match her up with some hapless guy.

Well, yes, she could. Her love life was a shared space with her mother, and always had been, and Bulma had spent quite a few years avoiding being at home to sidestep it. ("Are you there, Prince? It's me, Bulma.. Let's meet at your place, not mine. Mine is being...fumigated.")

What puzzled her was that she had thought her mother wanted her to continue trying to make it work with Vegeta. Had her mom caught on that they just were no longer a thing? Bulma bristled. Knowing her mother, it probably had nothing to do with feeling defensive of how he'd treated her daughter. Her mother would forgive the guy anything; she doted on him. The platter of pancakes she'd left on the counter for him as Bulma had left for work was a testament to that.

Bulma stared hard at the sky above, birds trailing from one beautiful Japanese maple to the other and sketching across her purview.

Were they really no longer a thing? Part of her, the hard, jaded part of her, yelled "Hell yeah!" But there was a quieter part of her that seemed more hesitant. Let him go, girl, the jaded half spat, to which the other half of her stuck out its tongue.

Was she maybe just still getting over him? These things took awhile, right? Recovering from him, like a train that crashed into her heart, with no one else but her to dampen the fires and clean up the rubble?

She didn't like to think of herself as bruised by him. She considered herself self-sufficient and bulletproof. Bulma sniffed and folded her arms over her chest this time, frowning lightly. Okay, maybe she was being a little unrealistic.

It wasn't that she was angry with her mother for all the...help. Really. Her mother was very hands off with parenting, much more of a friend than a parent. Just the way Bulma had liked it as a teenager. Except when it came to men And then she was very hands on.

Bulma wasn't frustrated with her mother's usual antics so much as just frustrated with the idea that a man was the Elmer's glue for all this mess. Bulma didn't need a man as a financial caretaker, because Bulma was a rich heiress. But she also worked hard for her money, now that she was filling in for her father, who was slowly and quietly retiring from his company. She also didn't need a man just because she needed to fill a hole in her heart, or to give her something to do. She didn't need another chore, courting some money hungry, starry eyed sap, with absolutely no lash-quick tongue and razor-sharp mind like Vegeta's. She had Trunks, she had her parents, and she had good friends...Even if the Androids and the Cell Games had really put a damper on their time together, she thought with some melancholy, thinking of Goku.

Bulma picked up her fork, frowning deeper, and sliced through the soft cheesecake with yearning.

Part of this was just growing up, maybe, and maybe she just needed to come to grips with getting older. She really didn't mind the physically-getting-older-part. She had always pictured herself getting only more glamorous with age, and that hadn't changed. High heels, pearls, a commanding air, several covers of Vogue, a fashion icon. It was just...what bothered her about it all, it was only...just...

Why couldn't she get over Vegeta?

Was it just that she wasn't ready to leave him behind yet?

She thought she was over him. She really had. He'd left her for a year without a care in the world, left her while she was pregnant with his child!, and then ignored them completely when he'd returned! If that wasn't a sign to get the hell out of the relationship, she didn't know what was.

But since their chat last week...though he was probably loathe to even remember it...she'd felt less sure, and more ruminating. Damnet! It was stupid. His staying at Capsule Corp wouldn't change anything, wouldn't change the fact that he didn't want or wasn't capable of being a team member with her in this let alone learn how to have an emotionally healthy relationship with someone. And yet, STUPIDLY, like a daydreamy teenaged girl, she was entertaining the question, "What if?"

She had to be real with herself.

And if she were real with herself, she'd admit that the man she found desirable when she was a teenager living in a daydream did not have the qualities that were up to snuff in a real, grown up relationship. A man who was tall, dark and handsome, the kind of man that women loved to feel like they could 'fix,' a real tortured, emotionally neglected, damaged type, was not conducive to her life anymore.

So, she fell for haunted bad guys. Okay, she could admit that. But what girl didn't like a bad boy? She suddenly imagined Vegeta in leather, and snickered. And then shut up, because he was kind of hot in all that leather.

But her mom was right...Bulma didn't have the patience for good guys. They were white bread, they were dull, they were a snooze. Regular guys, once in her presence, were doomed. Ill-fated, star-crossed, and destroyed by her stiletto heel and her sharp tongue. By the time they'd sat down and ordered a glass of wine, she'd figured them out, and was just oh. so. bored.

Vegeta was not a regular guy, but it also wasn't exactly emotionally healthy to even be approximately ten feet in his diameter.

Vegeta was a guy who, when confronted by his own emotional instability—like, every day—it was her fault that he wasn't progressing, that he wasn't making gains, that his focus was slippery. Defined in a completely ass backward way, because, if anything, he brought the crazy, and she brought the stability. It was always her fault he couldn't live a practical life like a Kami-damned adult. Everything would just be normal and right once he had his boot heel on Kakarot's neck and the masses were chanting his name. That was normalcy to Vegeta. That was the dream—not her.

There she'd been, after the hot nights sweating against each other, pulling at lips with each other's teeth and tugging at the other's hair slickly, but here comes the sun, and suddenly, there she was, messing up all of his plans.

There was no future in that. That was one-night-stand stuff, that was get-the-hell-out-of-there-quick stuff. Because what happens with guys like him? Smart, sexy, tortured guys? Flash ahead, five, ten years into the future, he's still going to film school and working odd jobs while she's working nights to hold it all together. Then he decides one day that the industry is bullshit, so now he's getting a PhD in philosophy, theoretically. Except mostly he just smokes pot and speaks in abstractions. And theorizes. And analyzes. And criticizes. And she is in her thirties and would very much like to think of having a family but he says he needs to be in a very, very different place in his life before he even considers such a wild and crazy far-away fantasy world.

Reality to Vegeta: such a wild and crazy far-away fantasy world.

If Vegeta were remotely human, that's the kind of self involved sociopath he'd be: as realistic and future-focused as a plastic bag that floats around in advance of a snowstorm for fifteen minutes straight, and then just sits on the ground getting soggy the rest of the time. He'd be no good for anything real life. He does look really beautiful, floating around. But still. For Vegeta, floating—or being self-absorbed—started out as a way of finding himself and feeling in control in a pretty crappy situation. It was sexy when he first got to Earth! But now floating is just a giant excuse for not settling down yet. It's an excuse to blast off from a relationship the very first second he feels vaguely dissatisfied and never giving his own issues a second glance.

Back when they were seeing each other, even if it was behind closed doors, he was needy, even if she was the only one who could see it. And serious, and future-thinking in his own way, and maybe she felt like someone that could help him. (Help him clean up all his shit, apparently.) When a guy is serious, and intense, when there's friction and passion, it's like lady catnip, but really that kind of guy is just a self centered overly-obsessive slithering self-adoring sea monster.

The beautiful eyes, tortured family life, moody morsel of perfection that was the man she'd wound up with one way or another was totally impractical. Now that she was a mother, now that her father was handing her the reigns to his corporate giant, she saw the world through different eyes. And mature Bulma knew there was no future in that.

If she had learned anything with Yamcha, it was that she had expectations in a relationship, and that it was okay to have expectations. For instance. She learned that she expects her man not to be a philanderer, and that's a totally legitimate expectation. But she also learned things like, when to call it quits (although that took a long time to figure out), when to stand up for herself, when they were better off as friends, when the romance had died out and all that remained was the shell of what once had been. Some boys were looking for a woman like they were looking for something to hang on their wall, like they were an interior designer seeking not to have a valuable relationship with a customer, but only to add to their portfolio.

She sighed, realizing she'd started to wax real morose. In response, Trunks sighed in his sleep, shifting his little balled up fists next to his head and resettling into sleep. The corners of her mouth turned up softly. She pushed the plate to the side, finished, and as if on cue, a server appeared at her side and silently removed her half eaten cheesecake.

As he turned away, Bulma stopped him.

"Sir?"

The young man halted, looking cowed. "Yes, Ms. Briefs?"

Bulma threw her thumb behind her, gesturing at the paparazzo hovering in the bushes not-so-stealthily.

"Get him out of here."

"Y-y-yes ma'am. Right away."

As a group of bodyguards spilled out from the cafe, the restaurant used to fielding celebrities, and advanced on the snoop who was already trying to dash out of the bushes, Bulma sipped her glass of water, the lemon wedge floating between ice cubes and the glass slippery in her fingers with the summer heat.

There was all sorts of potential for chaos with Vegeta staying with them, and asking him to stay maybe wasn't that practical of an idea. But she'd had a gut reaction, a hunch as he sat there fuming in her office chair, and Bulma always followed her heart, even if it led her to stupid, dangerous places, even though she was mature Bulma now, and should know better.

There was scuffling behind her, and Bulma lit a cigarette even as the sound of a camera thudded dully on the ground.

She didn't care if he was the Prince of all Saiyans. She didn't care if maybe she wasn't over him. She didn't care if maybe he was permanently dysfunctional. This time she was getting what she wanted, and by Kami, she would have a partner in this stuff somehow.