He remembers two broken fingers and two gorillas with mustaches shrubbed under their noses, glaring lime green polos, faces ugly as trolls.
"Two braces," he'd said over the din of the party, "let me in."
The bouncers with the mashed in faces look at each other. A second longer and Vegeta will quit playing nice and just snap their necks, but they nod indifferently, unaware of their very close call tonight.
Vegeta makes his way through the door and into the revelry, a churning crowd of dancing and laughter and clinking glasses, dragging his legs behind him. He doesn't much care that the nearest guests gasp and stumble over each other to give him a wide berth, bent crooked and soaked in blood, cutting a slow but determined swath through the festivities. The more space they give him, the better, and he limps to the one person in the whole blasted universe who can make this better. He needs her, even if she doesn't need him, as if she had drawn a line from his heart to hers and wheels him in whenever the whim strikes her. But at the moment there is only the taste of pennies in his mouth and the revelers, giving him a quiet berth as he drags his legs to the only woman in his whole universe.
Here comes the Prince, he thinks with bile, and this is the Prince's topsy turvy introduction as his court gapes, expressions of shock behind carnival masks.
The masks blur and he's falling before he can comprehend it, without the strength to catch himself on his palms, and his cheekbone cracks with his dead weight on the pavers.
He feels the woman before he sees her. Rolling him over, her face a full moon against a viscous black tunnel shivering round her. She's the moon he orbits.
"Two braces," he tells her, lifting his two crooked fingers to her line of sight, even as stars wink around her. His moon, the one he orbits.
"You need a hell of a lot more than two braces, you dimwit," he hears her snap, and he unwittingly smiles at her snarl even as it breaks unevenly with choked emotion.
He is lifted effortlessly onto a stretcher by the indifferent hands of bots, stomach rebelling against the heave-ho as he's jostled through revelers and down into the miracle she holds in the darkness, and he's not completely unaware that she holds his good hand as they make their way through the crowd.
...
He blinks awake in tawny light. Not sunlight, but lamp light, and he blinks and tries to sit up, but some muscle resists and seizes his lower back and he sucks in air.
"Idiot," he hears, and it's as if she's smoothed his fur, and he lays back down contentedly this time.
"What were you thinking? That if you chop yourself up into tiny little pieces it'd make you stronger more quickly?" The wheels of an office chair spin his way, and he sees her cheerful face above his, her mane of curls a halo in the lamp light. "Idiot," she says again, and bops his nose with her fingertip.
He catches her hand in his with breakneck reflexes and preens as her face droops with surprise. He pulls her out of the chair and on top of him.
"You're hurt! I'll hurt you! Stop!"
"You won't," he assures her, even as his ribs complain of her weight, and he tucks her hands between their bellies so she can't move and kisses her petulant mouth. The kiss has less finesse than he'd have liked, but still, her mouth opens to him without much resistance and they kiss in the tawny lamp light.
"You don't need to hurt yourself to have an excuse to come and see me," she grins, and he presses his mouth harder into hers as punishment.
"Seeing you is torture," he lies, using his good hand to sweep her hair out of their faces and take it in his fist possessively. "I would never."
"Play nice or I'll pull the morphine drip right out of you."
"I dare you," he says, nipping at her bottom lip, and as she laughs into his curling mouth, there's the sound of someone clearing their throat at the door.
Bulma jumps off him and stands at attention. "Daddy," she breathes, nervously. "What are you—Do you need—"
"Just seeing how our patient is doing," the old doctor comments drolly, as if he hadn't walked in on anything out of the ordinary, and Vegeta rolls his eyes, throwing his forearm over his eyes and hoping he'll fall to sleep in a medicated stupor immediately. It's not the first time someone has walked in on them, and though Vegeta could care less (unless it was her mother, who intimidates him), there's something about sharing her with other people that makes him irrationally angry.
It's not until she's prying his arm off his eyes and he's blinking up at her groggily that she smiles with mirth down at him.
"He's gone," she reassures him, wheeling away to replace his bag of fluids. "Just another hour on this thing and then you can escape. You're healing faster than it probably took you to wind up in this condition." She sends him a look meant to intimidate.
"Give it a rest," he growls, reaching out to yank the cords from his arms, but she prevents him by swatting at him. She tucks her fingers under him, pushing him up, straining to get him to turn onto his belly until he decides he's picked on her enough and helps.
"Where is your dress," he comments, face down now in the pillows, and she surveys his back, wide shoulders that whittle down into a lean stomach, white scars squirming against sandy skin.
"Didn't want to get it bloody," she explains quietly.
"Bullshit," he declares crassly, though it's muffled by the pillow. "You like it."
She pinches his side in rebuke, and then her thumbs press in between his shoulders, massaging, earning his smothered cry. "I never like it. It's always your blood."
"Would happily make it someone else's," he suggests, earning a reproving poke before her hands are kneading out his shoulders again.
"There's no need for a dress like that when you're operating on a man," she explains sullenly, and something deep in his back pops, and a relieved gush of air escapes his lips. She knows, always, just where to push.
"Go back to your party, Bulma," he commands after a quiet moment, staring at the white tiled wall in the low light impassively, though he feels the familiar slink-slink of his grinding teeth.
"Don't wanna." The butt of her palms press into his lower back and are again rewarded with a pop and a deep sigh. Her hand rests on the curve of his shoulder. "I...I'd rather be down here."
Vegeta remembers this is as close as they get to telling each other the truth before an innocuous plus sign on a pregnancy test.
Vegeta is cagey because she's walking him up to his room.
While their rooms are separated by only a few dozen feet, she hasn't set foot this far down the hall since he left a year and a half ago. The hall is silent. It's a few hours from dawn, Vegeta can feel it. Her shoes on the hardwood place surely and softly down the hall. Vegeta wants nothing more than a shower and to fall into bed, but he's piqued by her quiet presence by his side. He watches her sidelong, wondering at her angle, what she's thinking.
She's the one to reach out and turn his doorknob, walking in before he can protest and heading straight for the bathroom, leaving him standing in the doorway in dumb befuddlement. She's back before he can puzzle her actions out. He hears running water now. She leads him to the bed, and he's so tired, and empty, and aching inside with the emptiness that he does not protest.
It's the first time she's really touched him since they learned of her pregnancy almost two years ago, nervous gestures in her sitting room not withstanding. As she pulls his top over his head, Vegeta finally snarls weakly, but she yanks it off defiantly and callously pushes him back into the pillows, surveying the gash above his hips, chewing her lip in quiet horror at the deeply mottled bruise on his side.
"Just who were you fighting this time?" She doesn't bother waiting for a reply, answering it caustically. "Yourself?" His flesh peeled back from the gash, puckering, already blushing red with infection. He doesn't miss her jab.
Because he's tired, he quietly endures it, though he knows faintly that this is against her rules. Sensible rules. No touching. No going into the other's room. No more late hours working on bots and gravity chambers. No more patching up or surgeries. She had retracted her grace.
He's staring at the ceiling, watching the fan whip clockwise above him. In the back of his mind, he's trying to remember why this feels so natural when her fingertips slide down the ridge of his abs as she threads the needle and he tightens involuntary.
"I'm sorry, did that hurt you? I have some numbing ointment I left in your drawer." She leans over him to grab it, and he barks "No," roughly, and doesn't want to examine the disappointment he feels as her brows clash down and her lips thin.
He's in and out as she works on him, and because they've done this many times, he resists flinching as she sews him back up. She tapes an ice pack to his blackened side, and then he feels her fingertip slide across his brow, split but no longer weeping blood into his swollen eye.
With breakneck speed, he catches her hand in his, staring hard at her.
"When I came back you said you would no longer be taking care of me." His exhaustion is laced with dry humor.
Her hair is different than it was before he left. Straight and short now, her face harder, less prone to crinkling with laughter and salty rejoinders.
She glares, trying to extricate her hand from his own and failing.
"The rules still stand." She scowls. "You just look like shit tonight." She shrugs, trying to appear desensitized and tough. "You helped me, so I helped you. It's instinctive. It's etiquette. Anyone would have done it."
"No," he argues, tugging on her hand weakly, though rough enough that she falls and catches herself on his bare chest, and her eyes widen with panic and confusion. "Not just anyone."
He remembers the woman sobbing into her bloody hands as he pushes past the lab doors, and he remembers the woman laughing down into his mouth, and he pulls both women closer so that they cannot look away.
"You did, idiot." And he looks at her hard, willing her to understand.
She pushes herself off his chest with her palms, turns the bath off, and heads for the door.
"Like hell I'm going to take your boots off for you," she snaps snidely, and as she slips out, Vegeta unwittingly smiles.