Human Hospitality
by scoutergreen
Chapter 48
A Definite Hit
Watching the ceiling tiles and panelled lights whiz by overhead as a group of nurses followed by two surgeons pushed the wide gurney he'd been transferred to down a wide, sterile hallway and into a very cold room.
He could feel himself laying in his own blood. It was getting colder. His body was starting to cool down, he was sure of it.
In the simplest terms, the simulator had exploded. He'd been going full tilt at five hundred times Earth's normal gravity, each movement excruciating, the air so thick he swore it left him lightheaded within five minutes. Full of anger and directing all his rage towards the new battle drones, Vegeta finally discovered the limits of the simulator and made the choice to push beyond them.
He'd been working in the new simulator for all of three weeks. The minute it had been completed and wheeled out to the furthest end of the huge yard within the compound, Vegeta had done nothing but train obsessively. Nothing else, other than food and sleep, mattered to him. He cut off contact with everybody, only speaking to Bulma when a holographic screen would switch itself on and force him to converse. There was no way to shut off the communicator, which only made the Saiyan angrier, which in turn made Bulma angrier with him.
Once or twice, he could feel himself approaching a new high as he trained. Flashes of electricity would crackle all around him before vanishing the instant he noticed what was going on.
The morning had started simply enough: a huge breakfast at four thirty in the morning (left for him in the refrigerator) and on to training by five fifteen. He hadn't spoken to anybody, but his mood was suffering. Why couldn't he reach that next level? What was holding him back, and how could he possibly overcome it?
By eight fifteen, on the verge of exhaustion and seemingly stuck on the floor, he realized far too late that the punishing task he'd assigned himself may not only be impossible to complete, but kill him as well: he'd set the drones to continue attacking unless he could manually disable all of them within one minute, and if he failed to disable all of them, they would restart.
I'm going to fucking die in here, he realized as the drones hovered eight feet above his body and locked onto their target, laser guns rapidly charging up to full strength, it's now or never!
In a last ditch effort, Vegeta summoned up his remaining energy, visualizing it coming from every fibre of his body, managed to get to his feet and protectively crossed his arms across his chest before forcing all the energy outward. A saw a flash of gold, the ripple of a shockwave travelling through the heavy air, followed by a blast of intense heat and darkness. There was nothing for a while.
Bright blue sky. Strange vehicles, some bright red, and one that was boxy and white. People dressed in dark blue uniforms looming over him. Being stuck with needles and cut out of his clothing. He was naked and somebody was scrubbing him down and leaving his skin bright orange. The sound of a woman crying. That's Bulma, he heard his own voice outside himself. A blanket covering him, soaking through with blood. Screaming sirens. He tried to move his arms and reach out, but found himself immobile.
Blinding bright lights overhead. I'm dying, he thought, his voice somewhere outside himself, maybe this time I get to go towards a light... but it's so cold...
"Get that IV into his hand now! Tape down the other two! Don't get fucking sloppy!"
"We've got a weak pulse! BP is 81 systolic 56 diastolic and falling fast. Throat is clear. No major trauma to neck visible. Prepare patient for endotracheal intubation."
Cold, gloved hands straightened his head and tilted his chin up and his mouth was forced open. He felt something dry on the tip of his tongue and it was being pulled on.
"Get that tourniquet tight on the left arm..."
"Jesus Christ, the bleeding... how deep are these lacerations?"
"Shut up and start packing what you can see with gauze! Here!"
"BP is 58 over 39! Hurry up, we're losing him!"
"We've got more blood products on the way and two units of O negative for now. We're all ready for transfusion."
"Good. Let's get to work."
His eyes began to flutter, and the edges of his vision were going black. No, he struggled to think, not like this... I must... I must...
Vegeta was nearly unconscious the moment he felt somebody guiding a thick tube deep down his throat. He tried to speak and found himself totally paralysed. The last thing he saw was a person clad in green surgical scrubs depressing the plunger on a large syringe filled with a milky white fluid.
His vision went black.
It had been eight hours. Bulma's bladder was so full, she thought it may burst, but she insisted on simply crossing her legs tight together. She'd refused to leave the private waiting room the minute Vegeta had been admitted and taken back for emergency surgery for more than two minutes at a time.
She'd hitched a ride in the ambulance to arrive with Vegeta and provide his information to the nurse (it was a remarkable feat of lying on Bulma's behalf, who had cried the entire way to the hospital) and had been soon joined by her mother and Yamcha. Dr. Briefs came by two hours into the surgery, once all the emergency vehicles and first responders had cleared the compound, and had left after five and a half hours of waiting to pick up some dinner. Nobody knew when he would return.
"Honey, go pee. If somebody comes out, I'll make them hang around long enough for you to learn the news. Come on now," Mrs. Briefs gently chided her daughter, "no sense in suffering right now."
She practically ran to the washroom. After spending all of two minutes in the washroom, lingering just long enough to wash her hands properly and reapply some lip balm, she returned to the waiting room to find there had been no update.
Stomach rumbling, she opted to visit the hospital atrium's deli for another cup of coffee. She was going to take longer than two minutes this time.
Eight hours and forty three minutes later, one of the surgeons emerged to deliver the news. An older man with thick salt and pepper hair, a creamy complexion, and deep circles under his eyes, he took a deep breath before updating the worried friends of the strange looking man he'd just saved. It had been an exhausting endeavour, but the man had pulled through. If the man knew the Briefs, he must have been somebody important.
"The surgeries were a success. We've sent him through for an MRI to ensure there's no injury to the brain, so we're keeping him in a medically-induced coma for now, but... incredibly... it would appear all the injuries to his head are superficial. If things look alright, we'll bring him out of the coma over the course of a day. This way, he'll sleep through the worst of the pain. There's a lot of trauma in the form of deep lacerations, blood loss, several broken bones, bruising, deep second degree burns. It's remarkable he wasn't maimed, but how he actually survived, I don't know. It must be some type of miracle if I've ever seen one."
Bulma let out a huge sigh of relief, sinking into a chair, a paper cup of coffee threatening to buckle in her grip. "Oh, thank God! Did you hear that, everybody? He's going to survive! He's gonna be okay!"
"Let's not get ahead of ourselves, Miss Briefs. Mr. Vegeta faces a long road to recovery. Let's wait until he's fully conscious before getting too optimistic... I'm still dumbfounded as to how he survived, given the extent of his injuries and the type of accident he was involved in. That man either has one hell of a guardian angel, or he's not really human. That said, I'm just glad he came through. We'll have somebody let you know when he's been brought into a private room."
Nobody said much for a long while. Bulma stared up at the ceiling tile, unsure of what to say. Would Vegeta pull through and be the same?
"It's good news..." Yamcha offered, wary. He did not want to visit the Saiyan in hospital, but he was curious to see what Vegeta would look like in a medically-induced coma.
Finally, Dr. Briefs returned, carrying large paper bags filled with hamburgers, french fries and onion rings, condiments, and a tray of soft drinks. Everybody was quick to pull the food out of the bags and distribute it, saying very little aside from quiet comments about how it was nice to eat something hot and filling.
After so many tense hours without anything but coffee and cups of water, the hamburgers were practically gourmet. Bulma devoured two hamburgers and a large cup of onion rings in record time, only stopping to speak when her stomach was full.
"Once he's in his own room, I'm going to stop by and see how he's doing. Don't feel you have to hang around, everybody..."
"Um, he's in a coma," Yamcha spoke through a mouth full of French fries, "he won't know or care if you're there. Besides, even if he were conscious, he's in such bad shape that he's probably on a morphine drip and won't be chatting. C'mon Bulma, come home with us and get some sleep."
"I'm gonna stay a little while longer. See if I can't get some news on the MRIs. I'll call a cab if it's really late," Bulma snapped, annoyed by Yamcha's attitude, "and I'd do the same for anybody in this room!"
"Anybody up for a game of euchre?" Mrs. Briefs produced a deck of playing cards from her purse and slammed it on the table.
"Ugh, I'm getting another coffee," Bulma rose from her seat and left the waiting room. This time, she look a long walk through the massive atrium and chose to pick up a cup of coffee at a 24 hour convenience store across the road.
Nine and a half hours after the accident, with Yamcha, Dr. Briefs, and Bunny at home to get some rest and decompress from the horrible situation, Bulma waited in the room by herself, picking through the last large order of onion rings.
A nurse knocked on the door before entering. "Hi there. You stayed all this time, huh? He sure is lucky to have you for a friend! Well, the MRIs look good, from what we've seen so far. We've got him resting in a private room now. I can let you visit him for a just few minutes, alright?"
"Okay," Bulma shoved the remnants of her fast food binge into a wastepaper basket, "just lead the way."
A heart monitor beeped softly somewhere in the dim hospital room. Vegeta was in a coma, as Bulma expected, but the sight of the powerful Saiyan being sustained by what looked like a small jungle of tubes and wires connected to different monitors and jelly bags of saline and different medications was still shocking. His bruised eyes were swollen shut, and some small cuts to his burned cheeks and forehead had been stitched shut and covered with bandages.
"Vegeta..." she pulled a chair to his bedside and looked over his battered body, at a loss for words. He looked so small.
For twenty minutes, Bulma just watched Vegeta breathe with the assistance of a machine. She went home and found it impossible to sleep. At seven in the morning, she showered, changed into clean clothing, purchased breakfast and a cup of coffee from a drive-thru, and went straight to the hospital. Even if Vegeta remained unconscious all day, she intended to remain by his side for as much of it as she could manage.
Vegeta walked down the narrow path, dark forest to his left and a deep river to his right, and occasionally looked up into the sky. No stars twinkled, no moon glowed, no satellites blinked overhead. It was the strangest sky he'd seen in many months, and the longer he walked the more the sky turned from velvety black to a burnt grey-orange. A cold wind whipped around him, moving through his hair and brushing against his scalp like ghostly fingers. Fat flakes of snow started to fall from the sky and accumulated on the ground in no time.
Finding himself clad in a long cloak of sleek, thick reddish-black fur, he drew it tighter around his shoulders and pressed onward.
In the distance, he saw the towering figure of his father, instantly recognizable even in the dark night.
"Appa! Appa!" Vegeta called out, breaking into a run, the oversize cloak billowing out behind him.
The figure faded away and vanished into thin air as he approached.
He was alone, between the forest and the river, with nowhere to go. All he could do was keep walking.
Where am I going, he asked himself, where do I go? I am lost. I'm lost! I'm so lost! Why won't anybody help me?
Pain began swell inside his chest and his eyes stung, but his attempts to control his breathing were in vain. He couldn't control his own breathing.
Why am I here?
He looked up at the burnt-orange sky. Would God ever answer him, or was he totally on his own?
Forty eight hours after coming out of surgery, the doctors who had operated on Vegeta agreed it was time to take their patient out of his coma. Aside from Bulma, he had no other visitors.
Bulma was present as the first of the tubes were removed and Vegeta finally breathed on his own. The powerful drugs keeping him under were taken away and his body began to eliminate what remained in his system. A heart monitor was kept on, and his heart continued to beat, steady and strong and healthy.
Scarcely breathing and her eyes wide as saucers, Bulma watched as Vegeta's fingers occasionally twitched. He cleared his throat on his own and grimaced for a half second, making her giggle softly. She gently stroked his hair, and he almost stirred, movements impeded by the cast on his left leg and foot, the heavy braces immobilizing his wrists and forearms, and the neck brace holding everything above the collarbone mostly still.
After six hours, Vegeta's eyes opened slightly, just wide enough so Bulma could spot those inky irises in a sea of fading bruises.
"Oh, Vegeta..." Bulma stroked his hands, avoiding the fingers wrapped up in splints, "thank God you're awake..."
"Where... mmm..." his voice was like dried leaves blowing across concrete, weak from not being used and throat still raw from the tube, "...'ulma..."
"The hospital," she continued stroking his hand, "you had an accident."
"...'dis morning?" Vegeta looked away from Bulma and up at the ceiling, recalling a glimmer of similar ceiling tiles immediately after the explosion.
She moved her hand back up to his hair, "I'm gonna get the doctor, okay?"
"Don'leave..." he croaked, not realizing there was a call button hooked up to the railing of his bed.
"I'm not gonna leave. They're coming to you, your highness."
He let out something resembling a chuckle and his eyes shut for a few minutes. "How long... been here?"
"Three days."
"Nooo," he tried to move his head and grimaced at the realization he was wearing a neck brace, "no way..."
A gentle rapping at the door before one of the doctors entered, much more energetic and relieved to see the strange man awake. He seemed to be more alert than most patients already, only making him just that more remarkable.
"Good afternoon, everybody! Well, Mr. Vegeta, you truly are my miracle patient... it's good to see you're awake," the doctor pulled up a chair beside Vegeta's bed and took a look at his eyes. He seemed aware of his surroundings and grew more alert by the minute. The strange man was able to follow his finger tips, gave his first name and his age (thirty two, apparently), and was capable of responding to simple questions.
"I don't know the exact details of your, ahem, incident, Mr. Vegeta, but we had a very delicate situation on our hands... your life certainly hung in the balance for a while. I'm thrilled to say you came through the surgery and have already had a chance to recover for two days. When you're feeling a bit more awake, maybe after a good meal too, we'll talk about your recovery plan, alright? We can do that tomorrow."
"So I nearly died," Vegeta avoided his gaze and his voice slurred, "is what you're saying. I've been dead once before. Not a nice place. It's so cold down there."
The doctor struggled to keep his mouth shut. Finally, he cleared his throat and continued speaking: "I'm sure you've realized you're wearing some very stylish braces and a cast by now, hmm? Don't worry, we'll be removing the neck brace later today. Your spine is in great shape! We think you'll be able to sit up comfortably by tomorrow."
Vegeta didn't respond and shut his eyes. Assuming his patient was still feeling groggy, he took Bulma aside and began to speak with her: "I really don't know how he survived the trip to the hospital, let alone the operation. His heart briefly stopped during surgery due to the challenge of just... getting enough blood into circulation, to explain it in simplest terms. Miss Briefs, uh, the reason why I'm speaking to you know, to be perfectly honest, is because I've never seen anybody with a body like his. You say he's an employee of Capsule Corp? Because the x-rays... the blood work from this morning is unlike anything I've ever seen... and his teeth! Oh my God, his teeth! And that hair! Unbelievable!"
Eyes narrowing, Bulma looked at the doctor with suspicion: "what are you trying to get at, doctor?"
"We ought to meet for coffee, Miss Briefs. I want to talk with you about the recovery plan for your employee..." the doctor's eyes narrowed, "and that conversation is going to take some time. Say, three o'clock tomorrow? We can meet in the atrium."
"That's fine. Three o'clock. We'll talk. So when can he start eating regularly? My Mom's been cooking up a storm in anticipation for a feeding frenzy."