The hero had arrived; the maiden was saved. The woman's bosom heaved with anticipation; the man undid the stays of her dress to unpackage his reward.
Bulma threw the book on the floor.
She stretched, turned onto her belly, and pressed her pillow against her face as if to suffocate herself.
A raunchy romance book after a languorous bubble bath, candles strewn all about the room, and Trunksie with her parents tonight. The stars and the planets aligned, and all she wanted in the whole world was to be seduced by a trashy story.
And she couldn't even enjoy it.
What a sham. What a Hallmark card. The ghost of that sexy hero fantasy was haunting her very compound, and still these crooks kept making money off romance books. Bulma was unraveling and the man who held the string was deaf and mute and just kept walking away disinterestedly with the ties that held her together.
Just Bulma, a superbly erotic and badly written story, and her two fingers tonight, and she couldn't even suspend disbelief for one measly second. Vegeta had seen to that, she groused.
Ah, yes. The father of her child. How was he doing? Bulma was happy to tell everyone just how her baby's daddy fared.
Fine, to Bulma's fury. Just fine. He'd just taken off with his guy pals last week, Roshi and Oolong even, for some ill-conceived space adventure he'd taken less than a minute to jump ship for. Bulma's teeth had nearly ground into paste as he walked up the ramp of a stranger's ship without even looking back. Yeah, fine, go. Go have fun, boys. We women will just stay here to take care of your children and keep house and home, and we'll have dinner on the table for you when you get back, no big d.
The two weeks prior, he didn't show up for dinner, she rarely ran into him, and he had Trunks for every other day from 2-4, when he sat doing who knows what with Trunks in the gravity chamber (and it damned well better not be with the gravity engaged). They couldn't avoid each other, now that they were trying to do this parenting thing together, and yet there was barely any evidence a real flesh-and-blood man lived here.
Though Vegeta's definition of parenting was world's apart from her own. Real father of the year stuff so far. Son, hit this and try to kill it. You did it? No praise for you. Now give me a hundred push ups. Vegeta had already been educated on her opinion of his 'training' with Trunks, and he didn't appreciate it much for some reason. And evidently everything was hi-diddly-ho with him.
The boss bitch, streetwise A-type that lay under Bulma's skin understood that this wasn't a disadvantage. They had had a white hot affair, a child had been created of it, they had mutually separated, and now they were trying to take care of that child while leading their respective lives peacefully.
So why was Bulma so dissatisfied?
Bulma tore the negligee from her body and flung it at the wall, pacing.
Because. Because..because….Well, what did boss bitch say?
Boss bitch said she, she needed to be acknowledged. Because she wasn't over it.
Because she still had f-f-f-f-
-f-fffff
-ffff-feelings for him.
And, see, that was madness.
Bulma broke it down for boss bitch.
Vegeta was like an old-timey prospector. With a pickaxe in one hand and his meager belongings in a satchel behind him, Vegeta had come a'mining for gold when he'd stepped off her ship. Seeking that brilliant, elusive goal drove him singularly. He wanted to be rich, he wanted to be powerful, and he needed gold, gold, gold. All of his efforts and affects were to be invested in the dream, and everything was a piece to be played in a lusty, impatient game for gold out here in the wild west of planets outside the PTO's periphery.
Except her.
It was all good when she was doing his laundry and making him breakfast. But he had this thing called pride, and he had this thing called a mouth, and he couldn't just let her boss him around or smart mouth him, could he? Except putting her in her place was evidently Vegeta's favorite foreplay and had led to some pretty sweaty nights between the sheets. Nights which had been so Kami-damned hot.
That wasn't a part of the game plan. She wasn't part of the endgame. What use was she? She had no use. No functionality, no purpose in a world that was constructed entirely to accumulate gold.
Yonder prospector had certainly enjoyed her. But after having a malfunction trying to comprehend her presence in the game plan, logic seizing on 'pregnant: do not compute'—he'd thrown her to the wolves. Much better. Now everything could proceed logically and efficiently. Now nothing could thwart or slow his thrust for gold.
Except, now he had gold, and it wasn't what he expected. There was no parade, no fanfare. The currency was now defunct because there was no more competition. His success was as jarring as biting into tin.
No longer a flesh and blood man, but as hollowed out as she, and they drifted through the compound at night when everyone was asleep, through their ghost town, deaf and dumb and just moaning for that very thing that had been the fall of them in the first place. Gold, howled Vegeta. Vegeta, she cried.
What a couple'a dumbasses, boss bitch tsked.
She blew the candles out and pulled her overalls over hips no one would ever appreciate again.
Her lab fluorescents hummed on. This was real, this bot atop her desk and the sautering iron in her glove. The metal rod as close to a man's affections as she'd get tonight.
Her man had been hot to the touch once; he'd left a burning ember flaring with his every departure and arrival. White-knuckled grip on the sautering iron, it was cold and smooth, contrary to her man, who'd been rough and hot, his mouth at night as generous as it was withholding by day. Her man had been flesh and blood and now he was just a memory, and she could travel his insides, run her fingers through the roughshod architecture of his ghost, feel the whip of the dry breeze and the tumbleweeds tear against her shins as they bumbled by. Here, she could feel, here he'd been, the scorched bot under her fingers. And here, too, her belly, still flat but softer. He had made a ghost town out of her, too, and she could see through her own insides to the map of his fingertips that led right to her fall.
She was tired of grieving for what could have been and for the woman he'd hurt. She was a new woman now, had evolved into a different, harder species, and she was as solid as the wrench she put to metal.
No helpless maiden here. She cranked the wrench, the bolt loosening with her strength. No woman in need of a man to make her whole. She thrust her body weight down onto the wrench, the bot shivering with her effort. She didn't need no stinkin' knight, the one who'd rode up on a white stallion (her ship) in gleaming armor (her armor) and a crown of roses (her friend's blood). She'd been naive once, and thought he'd saved her—roughly up against the wall, spread over his bed with her head banging on the side, or ass on the beeping cacophony of (her) ship's console. And she'd spread her arms for him wide, her noble warrior, and she was his steed and he rode her hard and only later did she realize she was but a tool to get him somewhere and not the purpose itself. Women in romances were the prize but her prize for loving a man like that was a hole in her heart that the wind sang through as she limped along after he left. Her hand slipped and the wrench clacked to the floor, the momentum causing her to fall forward and smash her cheek into the bot, tearing open flesh on peeled metal before she caught herself on her palms.
She flung herself into her chair with her head in her hands and tried not to cry with incredulity. And failed.
Her stupid cheek stung but who gave a damn, who gave a damn? Who did she have now that Goku was gone, now that she'd left one discontented/discontenting man for another? She had to be solid for herself and for her son, but here she sat proving herself a real traitor, sobbing into her shredded palms and kicking the secondary office chair away with her heel belligerently.
She distantly heard the chair she'd kicked groan with the weight of somebody and her file drawer open. She didn't need to look up to know who it was. A shanty with slipshod poles, chin on his busted knuckles and an eyebrow leaking blood steadily over a black eye. Legs spread with exhaustion, he pulled out a wad of cotton and a roll of bandage tape, handing it to her silently.
She took the supplies without bothering to look up and turned to her desk to douse the cotton in antiseptic and antibacterial cream. She cleaned the broken skin on her cheekbone, blood swelling in the gash, grimacing, splicing bandage tape from the roll with her teeth and patting it over the gash.
She toed the floor, sending her chair to the small fridge where her ice packs waited. She plucked two from the freezer, put one to her face, and tossed the other in Vegeta's direction. He caught it without looking up, resting the ice on his brow with a dull expression.
The shared silence wasn't heavy but companionable as they slumped in their chairs, ghosts gazing at the past. He was as familiar a piece of this room as the furniture, because he'd once been a prospector, digging for gold here. She turned to the bot, solid as she was solid, and there was something soothing about sitting here with the specter of her last three years, something almost wholesome as he drifted on the banks of the dead. Standing by the river Styx as always when he was present, and hearing, not the regrets or the ripping keens of the dead, but the hard, glacial, glaring reality of living.
The ghost hovered in her vision, watching her, unheeded. A prelude—hard, glacial, unmoving, like the knight, like the machine, like her.