Human Hospitality

by scoutergreen

Chapter 40

In Sickness

Author's Note: Wow, forty chapters. THANK YOU for your support and comments, I really love the feedback. I'm having a ton of fun writing this. Hope you like reading about Christmas in August.

Bulma checked on Vegeta at eleven thirty, finding him fast asleep; curled up on his side and still fully dressed from what she could spot underneath the covers. Feeling for the Saiyan and what appeared to be his very first experience with a typical Earthling illness, she crept in and left a mug of water and box of tissues on his bedside table.

At half past three, Bulma awoke to the sounds of painful crying. She pulled on her housecoat and went across the room, tracing the noise to Vegeta's room.

She didn't bother to knock. She went in and found the bathroom door ajar, spotting one of Vegeta's legs practically wrapped around the toilet. He dry heaved, and it was obvious nothing was coming out of his stomach any more. He'd pulled off his shorts and underwear, down to an oversized t-shirt. Sweat dripped down his face and he shivered uncontrollably, teeth chattering.

"Can't stop," he gagged and spat out a wad of spit.

"Do you want help?"

"Help," he gagged again. More spit, more retching, and Vegeta spat out something Bulma identified as bile.

Before Bulma could ask him if he could sit up, the Saiyan had apparently passed out and crumpled onto the floor. Bulma took the digital thermometer he'd left on the sink and held up it to his forehead. His temperature had risen dramatically, to one hundred and ten point six degrees, becoming what the engineer could only guess was a dangerously high fever for a Saiyan if his normal temperature was around one hundred and three. She managed to rearrange him into a recovery position before running to her parent's room for help.

The following five minutes were a flurry of people being shaken awake (Yamcha was awakened via a text message that simply told him there was an emergency on the second floor of the house), a phone call to Capsule Corp's house doctor (she arrived eleven minutes later, her red hair twisted into a bun and her grey eyes heavy), and before Vegeta could object (he faded in and out of consciousness) there were five different humans in what he considered his private space. There were people changing the bedding while Yamcha sat on the edge of the bathtub and filled it a third of the way up with lukewarm water before picking Vegeta up and easing him into it. The doctor quickly washed her hands in the bathroom sink and started to pull supplies and medicines out of her bag; she prepared a syringe with a powerful anti-nausea medication and another with a fever-reducing drug.

Vegeta came to again after he'd soaked in the water for about two minutes, but he didn't resist or snap at anybody. He gazed up at Bulma and barely noticed that he was being lifted out of the tub again so the doctor could rub an alcohol swab across the bottom of his upper thigh before jabbing him with the syringe, giving him a steady intramuscular injection of a fever-reducer before delivering the anti-nausea medication to a site a few inches away.

"I want to take a saliva sample once he's asleep and comfortable," the doctor clipped a tiny heart monitor onto his fingertip and looked at Yamcha, "you keep his hands above water. I've got some extra equipment in my car, would somebody mind going downstairs and getting it for me?"

"I'll go," Dr. Briefs held his hand out, awaiting the doctor's car key, "what am I looking for?"

"Large, hard-shell case. Has number 3 on it."

"Why are all you people in here?" Vegeta's voice was weak and he managed to focus on the people in the bathroom for just a split second before his head lolled to the side. He dragged the hand without the heart monitor attached into the water and weakly flexed his fingers.

After another four minutes, Vegeta was pulled out of the bathtub and laid out on some towels. He still didn't object, in fact he said nothing at all. Still in his t-shirt, nobody was willing to pull his clothing off. Finally, Bulma threw her hands up, went to her bedroom, and brought over her extensive first aid kit. Using a pair of blunt-tipped scissors, she cut his clothing off and wrapped him in a towel from the navel down.

"You're going to be alright," she helped the Saiyan sit upright, supporting much of his upper body.

"The lines are moving, look," his eyes followed the corners of the bathroom walls and watched the lines move back and forth, "shimmer shimmery... was the wallpaper always silver?"

"You've got quite the fever, tough guy," Bulma wiped his brow with a damp facecloth, "the wallpaper in here is cream and gold..."

"Really?" Vegeta let out another giggle, sounding practically adolescent, "I'm on fire. Like th-" he yawned, "like... the-Idon'tknow..." he drifted off and his expression became grim, "am I dying?"

"Of course not." Bulma dabbed the cool cloth on his chest, but looked up at the doctor to see if she was about to express any doubts. She shook her head, a firm "no", and continued looking through her bag for medication samples to give the Briefs.

"I don'wanna die, not like this," he squeezed Bulma's arms, grip weak, "not to the dark. Keep the light on."

"You're going to be fine," Bulma wiped his brow with the cloth, "the flu just makes you feel like you're dying. C'mon, we should get you in bed."

It took both Bulma and Yamcha to carry Vegeta, since he was both heavier than his build let on and started to struggle the minute he felt Yamcha's fingers make contact with his bare, overheated skin. Once he was back in his bed (and did it ever feel comfortable, it was enough to make him forget that he was angry about being carried) he accepted a clean shirt and lazily pulled it over his head. Bulma took his temperature again, and it had already gone down by two degrees.

"Well, I think you're running a regular high fever now, instead of a dangerously high fever."

"Mm," the medication was taking hold and Vegeta yawned and settled in, "sick of people touching me..."

Dr. Briefs returned with the large case, which contained a stand and equipment for an IV drip, a small tank of oxygen and respirator if needed, and two small mobile heart monitors. Vegeta didn't even flinch when the doctor inserted a thick hypodermic needle into a vein traced on the top of his hand and hooked him onto a slow drip to replace all his lost fluids, and to everybody's surprise he allowed the doctor to swab the inside of his cheek when she asked.

The last thing the doctor managed to do was give the Saiyan two instant-dissolve tablets of loperamide before he was truly unconscious. At five past five in the morning, the doctor was satisfied with how Vegeta had stabilized and said she'd be back in another eight hours to check on his progress.

"I don't think he's gonna be active for a while. Keep him quiet, keep the room cool, and try to take his temperature every hour. If it starts going up again, call me right away. We can't ignore the possibilities of complications or things getting more serious... this guy's never dealt with the flu before, has he? I'm worried what could happen if he were admitted into a hospital."

"He won't tell me his full medical history," Bulma rolled her eyes, "so I don't know what types of illness he's encountered before... but this just slammed him. We, uh, managed to actually make analogues of some medicines he was carrying when he arrived here..." Bulma paused to make sure the story was still in line but didn't reveal too much, and watched as the doctor's eyebrows rose, "but I'm not really sure how effective they're gonna be yet. He was doing just fine up until the late afternoon, when he complained about some muscle pain and seemed fatigued. Um... do you think there's a possibility he's gonna get worse?"

"Only time can tell. But for now, I can give you these medicines to manage symptoms and keep him comfortable, and I have faith that he will be in good care until I come by later. For now, however, I'm gonna go home to see if I can't catch forty winks before getting up again so I can get my kid fed and off to kindergarten."

Vegeta awoke just after one in the afternoon and immediately noticed the IV line in his hand and the heart monitor clipped on his fingertip. He recalled fragments of his night; being very sick multiple times, vomiting up the water Bulma had left for him, along with his own medications. Feeling like he was on fire. Water. A lot of cool water. People looming over him, their voices and faces distorted, and the idea they were all looking at him with eyes made of stone.

Walls of silver, and a creeping terror that he was going back into the dark and cold for good when he found himself surrounded by the water. It couldn't have been real.

He sat up and looked at the clear jelly bag hooked onto the IV stand and figured he must have been very dehydrated. There was still some fluid remaining, which meant he was stuck in bed. The IV may have to stay in, but this thing's annoying, Vegeta thought as he pulled off the heart monitor and set it on the bedside table.

Barely ten seconds had passed before he heard a yell from somewhere on the main floor, something heavy dropping to the floor, and a pair of feet running up the stairs, down the hallway, and into his room.

"Vegeta!" The door burst open, and Bulma took a few seconds to register that Vegeta was actually awake and sitting upright. "Uuugh! You scared the hell out of me! I thought you flat-lined!"

"Huh? You mean that thing on my fingertip?"

"Yeah," Bulma's voice still shook but she took the chair from Vegeta's desk and sat beside his bed, "it's a heart monitor. The doctor gave us two hand-held monitoring devices, so I was able to keep an eye on you from the living room. You gave us quite the fright last night, you know. Your fever was so high that we had to get the doctor to make a house call."

"Did you put me in the tub or something?" Vegeta looked at Bulma and started to wonder if one of the looming figures really had put him in water, or if he'd just been experiencing some vivid hallucinations.

She nodded. "Yamcha did. Ran the bath and kept an eye on you too. I mean, we had to! I'm sure you're mortified right now, and I apologize for that... but damn, your fever was unbelievable. We're talking on the verge of having seizures or brain damage. You had just passed out when we intervened."

Vegeta let her words sink in for several minutes. The human called Yamcha had done something very noble. Vegeta didn't like the idea of being that out-of-control against his own will; he knew that being so weakened by illness meant Yamcha could have just as easily drowned him, and in spite of all the animosity between the two, the human had apparently helped him without a second thought.

He didn't exactly like the guy, but Vegeta was going to remember what Yamcha had done for him.

"Wow," he finally mumbled, "I must have been in bad shape."

"You still are, tough guy. Why do you think there's a needle in your hand? The doctor thinks that your body is currently battling a type of virus called "influenza" right now, and unlike a cold, the flu, as we call influenza in colloquial language, is more serious than a cold. She took a saliva sample. You were, um, surprisingly cooperative."

"In-fluh-ehn-tzah," he sounded it out, "how bad is it?"

"Let me put it to you this way, Vegeta," Bulma rose from the chair and adjusted the curtains to let a little sunlight in the room, and then turned on an oscillating fan on the desk, "after a massive, devastating, four-year long war that spanned the entire globe had finally started to come to an end, a strain of influenza rapidly spread across every continent and it killed tens of millions of strong, healthy, young adults with good immune systems. There are different strains of the virus and it continues to kill, year after year. What's worse, the virus spreads so easily that the chances of us pinning down exactly how and where you picked it up are slim to none."

Oh fuck. Earth is just teeming with potentially dangerous diseases and I'm probably vulnerable to a ton of them.

Vegeta distinctly recalled wondering aloud if he was dying when he'd been in the tub.

"Not dying," he reassured himself, "I'm just really fucking sick."

"You aren't dying. The doctor's coming back in a little while to check on you. She'll probably give you some more shots too, just so you keep fluids down."

"Shots of what?"

"Different drugs, which are injected into your muscle. We usually use the buttock or thigh. One is to so you won't be throwing up constantly, one to keep your fever down, and one more to, well... two little tablets to keep you a bit stopped up, if you catch my drift."

He did. "This virus is bullshit. You know I tried to take care of myself," Vegeta shifted his weight on the bed and watched Bulma pull fresh clothing out of his dresser drawers, "but so much for that course of action." She was getting a bit too close to one small box that contained several vials, some of them containing substances he was certain she'd disapprove of.

"How did you manage to do that?"

"Because I have my very own personal pharmacy in case of things like this, but I didn't expect to come down with something that would make me vomit up my own medicine thirty seconds after swallowing it."

"You have a what?! Holy shit, Vegeta, a pharmacy? Are you some kind of intergalactic drug dealer?"

"No! I've moved drugs as part of busine- errr, when I was looking for Kakarot," he sighed and internally chastised himself for speaking without thinking when he was obviously incapacitated, "I made a point of collecting medical supplies and medicine whenever I had the chance, and so I picked up a lot of medicine. As many kinds as I could find, considering I'm going to be here for a while and got the feeling something would happen to me, sooner or later. Anyway, at some point in the night, maybe just after midnight, I woke up and knew things were getting worse. First I had to vomit, so I did, and went back to bed. Twenty five minutes later, I was up again. I've been ill before, but this virus is a new one. The first thing I did was take a drop of a compound called C-2 mixed with water, because that what Planet Trade members usually turn to when they're feeling sick, but all it did was make me throw up again! Then I tried taking a pain relief tablet, dry, and once again I threw it up. Then I realized how hot my head felt, so I tried a fever compound and went to the washroom intending to take a cool shower... that's where things got weird, and I was seeing shit that wasn't there."

Stunned, Bulma processed Vegeta's near-admission to what sounded like recreational drug use and finally choose to take it for what it was and nothing more. "I'm impressed you tried to take care of yourself first. You obviously do take care of your body, but maybe your medicines in their current forms aren't effective against what you're currently fighting? Do you... um... is there such a thing as "the flu" where you're from?"

"No. We have viruses that go around, especially if you're stuck on a transit ship, but this is unusual. Even the viruses that PTO soldiers tend to pick up in close quarters aren't this devastating- at most you throw up once or twice before taking a pill and forgetting all about it."

"You mind if I take some samples of your medicines? Later, of course. Um... I'm glad you're feeling talkative today! I like talking to you. I like you, Vegeta."

"Mm," the Saiyan was still totally exhausted, "I'm thirsty. And a bit hungry. Wonder if I can manage without barfing it all back up, hmm?"

Bulma brought the thermometer to his forehead. His fever was down to one hundred and six degrees. "That's a promising sign... alright, the deal is this: when humans get the flu and barf everything back up, we start with little bits of bland stuff to avoid overwhelming a sensitive stomach. Once the doctor's been around, maybe we can try a bit of soup. So... you want some saltines, or a piece of dry toast?"

Over the course of a very long week, Vegeta gradually recovered to the point where there was no longer a risk of complications arising from his bout with the flu, but the illness did not leave him quickly. He slept often, was rarely talkative, had little appetite, and seemed quite depressed.

After nine days, Vegeta could keep down a solid meal, occasionally asked for second helpings, and while he moved around the house much more often, aside from some gentle stretching done in the privacy of his bedroom he did not expend much energy. He didn't even discuss training. Over the course of the second week, he struggled with chest congestion, coughing up a thick but clear mucus, and he cursed every time he had to take another teaspoon of a foul-tasting decongestant that reminded the Saiyan of a pungent, corrosive tree sap he'd once encountered on a purge mission- he'd accidentally touched an injured tree with a gloved hand while making his way through thick bush, only to have the sap dissolve the material in under thirty seconds.

When he woke up early and sat down for breakfast one morning, still recovering and still reporting fatigue, Mrs. Briefs noticed the Saiyan had lost a significant amount of weight. His complexion was a bit sallow again, and there were circles under his eyes. The Saiyan poured himself a cup of coffee and dropped into his chair, not noticing much of anything.

"I hope your appetite is returning, sweetie, because there's a lot of food on this plate..."

Over a plate filled with eight oversize pancakes, along with a large bowl of fruit salad and two ramekins of thick cream, Vegeta noticed there were shiny little decorations placed around the room; Red and white candy sticks displayed in jars, flickering candles, tinkling silver bells hooked onto pantry handles, tiny twinkling lights had been strung up around the perimeter of the kitchen window, and glittery, cheerful figures of fat little creatures Vegeta had never seen before had been placed in the centre of the table- why hadn't he noticed those when he'd sat down?! Had he really been that out of it before the food? He became aware of the smell of something warm and sweetly spiced baking in the oven, and realized there were several wire racks of cookies and cakes cooling on the counter.

"Alright. This is new," he looked around the kitchen warily, "what the hell is this stuff?" He picked up a figurine of a sweetly-smiling snowman and scowled at it. Why was there a carrot in the middle of its head? Was this figure a representation of some mythical creature? Why did it wear a scarf?

Bulma finally came down to see Vegeta staring at a snowman figure. Things were, in a very odd way, getting back to normal.

"It's almost Christmas, honey! You're going to love it," Mrs. Briefs took Vegeta's cup of coffee and topped it off, "and I think you'll love all the yummy treats I'm making for the occasion."

Vegeta looked at Bulma and raised a brow. Explain now, his expression commanded.

"Major holiday coming up, big guy! Good thing you're getting better in time for one of the most famous celebratory feast days on the planet. Our family celebrates a holiday called "Christmas", which falls right around the time of winter solstice. Different cultures and religions have their own celebrations and feast days which occur around the same time, and based on what I've experienced, all of them are a lot of fun."

Vegeta took a forkful of the thick whipped cream and placed it on top of third pancake. So humans marked the solstice as well- he'd seen other races celebrate seasons (rainy season celebrations were very common) and had been invited to their feasts (one of the perks of taking on otherwise dry diplomacy missions). "I see... I'm presuming this is the sort of thing where I'm expected to participate in a ritual or ceremony?"

"If by ritual you mean maybe receiving a few gifts... but only if you want to, that is. And eating and drinking. But you don't have to do anything you don't want to. We're not really religious or anything, so we just invite friends over and serve a lot of good food and alcohol."

"Hang on," Vegeta set the figurine down and made a point of turning it away so he didn't have to see its face, "so you're telling me you people have a holiday dedicated to eating, drinking, and giving people gifts, and it just happens to fall around winter solstice?"

Eh, he'll be into it if we go with that...

"Pretty much. Don't worry about finding me a present, though," she winked at him across the table, "just focus on getting better."

Vegeta dragged a raspberry through the cream, "even if I did have money, I wouldn't know what to spend it on. And it appears that you already have two of everything..."

Bulma laughed. "At least your sense of humour is finally returning," she lit a cigarette and winked at him, "I was starting to worry you'd purged it."

His face went a bit red and he focused on his breakfast. If he could manage to eat four or five pancakes, he'd go into the simulator and perform some deeper stretching and controlled movement with the gravity programmed to produce an environment similar to his home world.

If can I get through some training at ten times Earth's gravity, I'm at least getting back on track, but it's obvious to me now that I'm slipping back into feeling too comfortable around these people. Even if I can't leave the planet, it may be time to look into isolating myself for my own good...

To Be Continued