Human Hospitality
by scoutergreen
Chapter 45
What's Missing
Hands jammed into the pockets of his new leather jacket, Vegeta walked down the street at a swift pace and kept his head down, choosing to ignore any signs of life still visible within 24 hour diners and convenience stores he passed as he made his way into the city's core.
Underneath the orange glow of faintly buzzing sodium bulb streetlamps, the Saiyan felt oddly comfortable with the quiet city streets. He picked up the faint scent of restaurant exhaust fans pushing out vapour from fryers and grills, overheard a group of drunk women giggling and talking nonsense as they staggered towards a bus stop, and his eyes became fixed on a mountain range in the distance.
It took him two hours to reach the outskirts of the city, passing by a truck stop and totally ignoring a man's voice that called out to him from the parking lot. He pressed onward, the four lane highway eventually merging into a narrow two lane road.
He passed by tiny houses surrounded by bare fields. These are some Earthling farms, he recognized, I wonder how this place will look at harvest...
Sick of walking, Vegeta jumped up into the air and took off for the mountains. He kept flying until he reached a plateau high enough for him to look out across the entire landscape. Sitting with his knees drawn up to his chest and arms wrapped around his legs, Vegeta watched as the sky began to lighten, bands of deep green becoming brighter and turning purple and deep coral. Beams of soft light spread across the sky, highlighting wispy clouds as they stretched wider and wider.
Although feeling the cold by this time, even as he focused on raising his ki to offset the air temperature, Vegeta continued watching the sunrise. If Earth really had anything going for it, then it was its beautiful scenery and its nature. The landscape really was gorgeous, and there was something very grounding about spending time alone in the wilderness.
When his stomach finally growled loudly enough to force Vegeta to fully acknowledge his hunger, the Saiyan stood up, took one final look at the sunrise, and jumped off the plateau, effortlessly gliding down until he landed in the middle of a small cul-de-sac of modest houses. He spotted bottles of fresh milk sitting on doorsteps and silently approached a house, took the milk, jumped up to the roof, and enjoyed his cool drink. After finishing the full pint of milk, he put it back on the doorstep, and decided one more bottle of milk would be good.
At one point, he spotted a woman emerge from a house across the road and watched her pick up the bottle of milk on her doorstep, totally oblivious to the man watching her from a rooftop. She went back inside. The sun was rising up into the sky now, and soon the early morning sunbeams were warming the Saiyan's face.
A few minutes later, Vegeta finished his second pint of milk and decided to toss this empty bottle behind his back, not caring where it landed. When he heard it roll down an adjacent roof and smash onto a walkway, he took off, deciding it was time to head home. He'd been up for several hours by that point, and figured his mind had settled enough for him to go back to sleep.
The nightmares would probably never stop, and Vegeta begrudgingly accepted this. He usually forced himself to stay awake until exhaustion forced him to fall asleep once more, and in his early twenties had experimented with medications that induced sleep, only to realize it had a negative effect on his performance- which left him even more prone to receiving more of the treatment that left him with nightmares in the first place.
There's no easy way out in any aspect of my life, is there? Stuck on Earth, stuck at some level below Super Saiyan... although I don't know how far below... stuck with the eternal decision to sleep for as long as my body craves or to stay awake for as long as possible like my mind demands. What is missing to make me complete? What have I failed to achieve, acquire, or realize?
He flew slightly higher as he approached the city, painfully aware that flying people attracted a great deal of attention on Earth.
...and why the hell has Kakarot managed to surpass me so easily? What exactly has he caught onto? What's his secret? But I'll be damned if I actually talk to him... I can't fucking stand him. That traitorous piece of shit.
Twenty five minutes later, he landed on the back patio and went inside. Mrs. Briefs was already up, as he expected, but he didn't expect her to look at him with suspicion as he moved through the kitchen and stopped long enough to retrieve a bottle of water.
"Long night out, Vegeta?"
He scoffed and went upstairs to his bedroom. Bulma was probably getting ready for work, and Yamcha had already left the compound for a full day of training. Vegeta pulled off his clothing and crawled underneath the covers. He was asleep before long, and didn't wake up again until mid-afternoon.
For several days, as the weather continued to warm and the days grew longer, Vegeta brooded and avoided conversation. He was focused on figuring out the missing component in the Super Saiyan transformation, but always drew a blank.
One night, Vegeta opted to soak in Bulma's tub after they'd had sex in her bedroom. Her bathtub was the same as his, but she had cellophane bags of lightly-scented salts that actually pleased the Saiyan's sensitive nose, so he took advantage of the fact that she'd dozed off and ran a hot bath.
He lay back in the steaming water, knees bent to accommodate his torso, and engaged in another internal dialogue, hopeful he'd stumble across what he needed to do or acquire in order to reach the level his rival already had.
Eventually, Bulma woke up and realized Vegeta was still in her en-suite when she saw his clothing still folded and placed on the chair at her cluttered desk. She pulled on a t-shirt and went inside, finding the Saiyan laying back in the tub, his unruly hair floating in the water and his feet hanging over the edge of the tub. He stared up at the ceiling, deep in thought, and only paid Bulma a passing glance.
"What's up, sexy? C'mon, talk to me," Bulma sat on the edge of the tub and dangled her fingertips just above the surface of the water.
He pushed himself up into a seated position, thick hair heavy with water and hanging long down his back, and shut his eyes. "I need more power in that simulator. It's still not enough..."
"Vegeta, this simulator business is getting ridiculous. That thing can already produce a gravitational pull three hundred times what the Earth naturally produces. How the hell you're ever tolerating that environment, I can't even begin to comprehend, but I'm getting really worried. You hurt yourself all the time as it is!"
"So? Your athletes sustain injuries all the time! Do you know I just learned about this sport you people play by mounting blades onto large boots and skating across ice while carrying huge sticks and trying to take control of a heavy little puck? Some poor bastard had his throat slit when one of his opponents fell over and took him down in the process."
" I know what ice hockey is," she rolled her eyes, "and I knew about that incident. He was immediately taken to the hospital and survived. You, on the other hand, might accidentally seriously, perhaps morally injure yourself in there, and there will be no way for us to access you until I shut off the simulator from the central computer in my lab. And what if nobody's at home? What if I'm asleep? What then? I can't and won't remotely monitor you while you're in that thing, Vegeta. You're pushing it."
"Pushing what, exactly?"
"Your luck..."
"Oh, come on," his voice had an edge of annoyance but he smirked at Bulma, "I need you to do this for me... if I get hurt or die, then it's my own damn fault..." he took the woman's right foot and started to massage the sole, gently pressing into the arch with his thumbs.
Damn him and his touch, she thought, he's gonna try anything to manipulate me into building him something new...
She sighed and pulled her foot away from Vegeta's hands. "I'll have to see what my schedule permits me to do. I'm already under some deadlines as it is, and there's no way I can put my work in progress aside. So for now, my answer is a soft no."
The Saiyan leaned back into the water and huffed. "Fine. I'm going to be on your ass about this, so don't think you're off the hook."
"That's fine, seeing as you're admittedly fond of my ass. Enjoy your soak, Vegeta. I'm going to sleep now."
The Saiyan sunk back into the water and grumbled.
Three days later, when all of Bulma's attention was devoted to her upcoming project proposals at Capsule Corp and she suddenly became a rare sight around the compound, Vegeta decided he'd waited long enough for a definite answer from the woman and would simply demand her father to build him a new, more powerful simulator. If he couldn't charm the old man into doing his bidding, he'd simply intimidate him into doing what he wanted.
When Vegeta approached the man in the conservatory as he pruned an experimental fruit tree they were growing, Dr. Briefs seemed to already know what the Saiyan would ask of him and immediately denied the request.
"Why? You aren't as busy as your daughter. Build it."
"Son, you won't be able to physically handle it. I just can't do it."
"That's bullshit and you know it! And I know you're capable of creating a more powerful gravity simulator! You can have it up and running in two weeks!"
"Vegeta, no," the elder scientist pulled a fresh, sweet drupe from a branch of the tree and inspected it, "it's simply not possible. You're already flirting with serious injury or death as it is, going full tilt at three hundred times Earth's gravity. I don't even know how your body is managing to keep up, to be honest!"
"But it's not enough! I need more! More!" Vegeta's teeth were bared and his voice was rising, growing crackly and sharp, "and I need it now!"
Dr. Briefs sighed and told himself to stay calm. Vegeta's hot temper could sometimes be cooled off, if one remained cool-headed and didn't react to the Saiyan's needling. "Would you like to try this fruit? It's delicious."
He handed the Saiyan the drupe, who immediately threw it clear across the glass-walled conservatory and shrieked, his anger flaring: "fuck your fruit! Build me that fucking simulator! Starting today!"
"I'm not going to argue with you," Dr. Briefs's voice shook, and it was all that Vegeta needed to begin getting angrier and violent.
"Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck this place!" The Saiyan grabbed a heavy iron patio table by one end and threw it into the air. It crashed, in a heap of metal and shattered glass, into an indoor pond. He stormed out of the conservatory, ripping the door off its hinges and tossing it aside, and began kicking and punching the walls as he moved through the hallway, breaking clean through the drywall in the process.
Two minutes and twenty six seconds later, with six serrated steak knives plunged into the wooden kitchen table, three doors ripped off their hinges, the sliding glass door leading out to the patio totally missing, and another table thrown off the patio (crashing through a greenhouse filled with tomato plants), Dr. Briefs finally conceded, screaming as loudly as his voice would permit: "fine! I'll build the goddamn thing! Just stop doing this!"
Panting, Vegeta set down a chaise-lounge he was preparing to throw onto a nearby street, and sneered at the old man. "Was that so fucking hard?"
Now that he had the old man ready to begin working for him, Vegeta felt it was time to take off and cool down. Surely there were bigger, better things for him to destroy outside the city. He took off into the air and vanished from sight in an instant.