The DBZ nostalgia kick continues. I have to say, of all the stories I ever wanted to write for this pairing, a "3 Years" fic was never one of them. Might as well throw in my two cents anyway. The title is taken from the song of the same name by The Rescues.

Please note: I tend to portray these characters in a very realistic way. Their exaggerated traits work in the anime, but don't translate well into the written word. If that isn't your bag, I completely understand.

Each sentence is a single story. They are not in chronological order.

Warnings for: Sexual situations, implications of child abuse, and graphic ideation of murder.

1. Comfort

"Here," she says, pushing a steaming mug of something cloyingly sweet and thick into his still-trembling hands, Frieza still whispering words of death into his ears; he takes a seat at the kitchen table, across from her, and finds solace in the silence.

2. Kiss

The snap of bone beneath the heel of her hand fails to elicit a reaction, and she has never been less aroused than she is now: sitting among the ruins of the gravity simulator, tilting that proud chin up and covering his slack mouth with her own, forcing her breath into him.

3. Soft

The sheets the woman's mother dresses his bed in are softer than anything in recent memory, and he spends a truly pathetic amount of time rubbing them between his fingers and thinking I don't deserve this.

4. Pain

"You hit 500x Earth's gravity—that's amazing," Bulma says, eyes bright and proud, and when she places a soft hand on his shoulder he flinches.

5. Potatoes

He's been called all manners of names, but there's something about "small fry" that makes his blood boil, especially from the mouth of someone smaller than he.

6. Rain

Sometimes he ceases training and sits on top of the simulator, head tilted to the sky, and revels in how deafening Earth's weather patterns are, so very different from the sucking, silent void of space.

7. Chocolate

And when he finally crushes Kakarot's spine beneath his boot, he'll punch through the shattered vertebrae and wrap his hand around the still-beating heart there, tear it out, and feast upon it until it shudders once and ceases on his tongue, the sweetest treat one can know.

8. Happiness

The blue plus-sign doesn't change, but it does swim before her eyes as she sinks to the floor of the bathroom, clutching the white stick in her shaking hands and attempting to breathe through the terror that rocks through her like a wave, a bomb, a Kamehameha blast, and there is nothing to save her but for the small, unfurling joy—birds lifting into flight—just beneath her breast.

9. Telephone

"Okay, can I order twenty-four party platters, eight number 10's, three of everything from page two of the menu, um… twelve, no, thirteen pots of those meat dumplings with the… peanut sauce, right, thank you, uh, also eight dozen of the sticky pork buns (as big as you can legally make them), nineteen orders of the Autumn maki, thirty-six swordfish—grilled, not fried—plates, and a garden salad with light dressing?"

10. Ears

Even two floors up and on the other side of the building, the shriek of "WHAT PART OF 'BROKEN UP' DON'T YOU GET, YAMCHA, YOU ABSOLUTE FUCKING WALNUT?!" reaches him and he couldn't stop the grin that breaks across his face if he tried.

11. Name

"How about 'Vegeta'," her mother says, writing it down under Han, Trunks, and Asato, and Bulma gleefully scratches it out with a red pen, because, "How about no—I'm not calling the kid 'Prince Junior'."

12. Sensual

"Oh my god, this is painful to watch—stop, you heathen, you need to savor them like this," and she slowly dips the red, dimpled peak into the bowl of the treat called chocolate and presses it to the seam of her lips, tongue darting out to flick at the coating before curling around the fruit, and her eyes fall shut, lashes a dark smudge against the cream of her skin, and he has to look away before he loses his mind and does something insane, like reach out and touch her.

13. Death

She whispers, "come," and he explodes.

14. Sex

It starts with a fight; he has never been more aroused by another's rage, and it isn't until he has her up against the wall, thrusting into her roughly while she scratches new scars into his skin and begs him to go harder, faster, more, more, more, that he realizes this is a battle he could lose.

15. Touch

"Tell me about this one," she murmurs, tracing the long, deep pull of skin that stretches from shoulder to opposite hip, barely felt, and he shifts on his stomach to nestle into the pillow that smells of her flowery, chemical-laden shampoo, and comes apart under her fingertips.

16. Weakness

The air rings with the last syllable of his vitriol, the terrible things that seem like they'd been created to roll off his tongue, weapons of mass destruction disguised as words, and he watches as she fights through the pain, the many wounds he's inflicted, and wins this battle with a quiet, devastating, "Love is not weakness, Vegeta, and if you really believe that then I… I pity you."

17. Tears

He pounds the soil of an alien planet and screams his heartbreak into the air, because it should be his, it is his, it was prophesied, and he will not see the legacy of the House of Vegeta burn to ash under the hands of a low-born nothing and a purple-haired abomination.

18. Speed

He hates this planet; it's too loud, too garish, too much of a reminder of his own downfall, and sometimes when he needs to fly, to maintain some semblance of control, he pushes himself to speeds that shouldn't be possible, should flay the flesh from his bones, until he the noise and the memories blend together into nothing.

19. Wind

There is a little black capsule that she keeps in her wallet, and sometimes when she needs to be one of them, to do the things they do, to be what she can never be, she ventures over to the wastelands and opens the capsule, slips the ki-flight generators she's been working on for years over her hands, feet, and belly; and she soars.

20. Freedom

"To Frieza," she says, lifting her mug with a drunken grin, "May the hounds of Hell tear the flesh from his bones forever, amen," and as he watches her drain her drink, the yoke that has been around his neck since childhood lifts and he nearly floats away with the loss of it.

21. Life

A trembling hand removes his glove and then places his palm against the flat of her belly, and he immediately feels it, the second pulse.

22. Jealousy

Yamcha has renounced his claim on her, and Vegeta has no claim on her, and yet he still hungers at the thought of tearing the moron limb from limb and feasting on his entrails when he so much as says hello to her.

23. Hands

His are stained crimson with countless lives—men, women, and children, and even the lives of her friends—but she has never felt safer than when she pretends to sleep and he pretends to not know she's pretending so he'll keep stroking his fingertips up and down the bare skin of her back, the gentlest touch she's ever known.

24. Taste

"It's just… you eat so fucking fast, Vegeta, and you should seriously congratulate me on my restraint, because it's all I can do to not stick a wrench into your dinner just to see if you'd notice."

25. Devotion

"You know who this monster is and still you willingly defend him," the creature says, backlit by the smoldering ruins of what once was a pretty impressive ship, and Bulma glances at Vegeta, who seems just as surprised as the alien, before hefting her gun—the Oppenheim 4L-EW, a gun with enough force to take out a mountain with next to no recoil (she hates bruising), aiming right for the creature with a, "Looks like," and pulling the trigger.

26. Forever

There are moments when all he can think about is killing each of them, slowly, with finesse, saving Kakarot's brat for last, before taking the locator device and finally, finally, finally getting his wish.

27. Blood

"Fuck," she hisses, jerking her hand back from the shaft of the servomotor; she shrieks as it's caught in a vice, turning to watch dumbly as the gash in her palm disappears beneath a warm, wet tongue and lips softer that are than they ought to be, and then Vegeta glances up at her through his lashes and it's pretty much all downhill from here.

28. Smile

She smiles at him, and it's more devastating than Frieza ever was.

29. Sickness

She presses her face into her pillow, shuddering through a cough that threatens to collapse her lungs, and shouts, "VEGEDA, I SWEAR TO GOD I WILL INVEND A ROBOD HAND AND STAB YOU IN THE THROAD WITH ID IF YOU DON'T SHUD THE FUCK UP!"

30. Melody

"Come on, dance with me," she calls, grinning, jumping up and down like an absolute moron while some castrated creature warbles Jungle life, I'm far away from nowhere, on my own like Tarzan boy, and Vegeta has never wanted to destroy this fucking planet more than he does in this moment.

31. Star

She presses her mouth against the worst of his scars and murmurs, "It couldn't have been all rape and pillage up there… you must've seen some beautiful things," and he pillows his chin on his folded arms and closes his eyes, breathing out, and the words come tumbling out, "I once saw a star being born."

32. Home

Just before he boards the pod he hears, "come back safe," and for a moment—less than—he thinks about turning around.

33. Confusion

He barges into the living room and opens his mouth to demand the bitch fix the air conditioning unit inside the gravity simulator when—he pauses and stares at the countless equations that cover the entire stretch of the wall, and the woman turns away from the numbers and letters she's currently inking into the drywall to regard him with exhaustion-glazed eyes and slur, "I ran out of notebooks."

34. Fear

Her throat feels like it's going to crumble in his grip like tissue paper; the wall is unforgiving against her back and she struggles to drag in air, fingers scrabbling against his knuckles, but she doesn't show a drop of fear when she rasps, "If you kill me then you'd better be prepared for the unholy firestorm I'll rain down on you from beyond the grave," and he laughs, genuinely amused, and releases her.

35. Lightning/Thunder

Bulma stands in the front yard with her head tilted to the sky, soaked to her skin, her clothing a mere formality, breathing in the buzz of electricity as she's limned in blinding light, and from where he watches in the doorway of the simulator Vegeta sees Henbane, the goddess of sky-based warfare, and he can do little except bow his head in reverence.

36. Bonds

Vegeta is thirty-two years old the first time he does not pray for death when his wrists are tied to a bed frame.

37. Market

"Tell me more," Bulma says, grinning, naked, and her fingers dance over his chest, and he can't help but grin back, comfortable for the first time in a long time, and he tells her of the enormous marketplace on the planet Pecsekk, its incredible symphony of smells and spices, fancy cloth fit for kings, and food so divine that even the gods of old would weep having tasted them; he does her the kindness of leaving out how quickly it burned when he destroyed it.

38. Technology

She finds him seated against the back wall of the gravity simulator, a broken droid in one hand while he uses the forefinger of the other as a laser gun, a thin line of ki welding its insides back together; he looks up at her and mumbles, "I don't need you bitching at me about breaking another of these children's toys."

39. Gift

He stares down at the tiny holograph of what looks like his home planet before its destruction, the crimson-violet ball rotating on its severe axial tilt, and he wants to reach out and touch it but doesn't dare; he spends an hour trying to figure out just what it is she wants in return when he spies the small note beneath the holograph recorder that simply says happy birthday.

40. Innocence

Maybe, once.

41. Completion

She feels it, the phantom rush of heat and fluid deep inside her, pushed there by muscle and tissue and passion and power, and it's like an explosion, like a bullet being launched, like a promise, and she closes her eyes against it, arches her back, and comes with a soundless cry.

42. Cloud

"My little prince," Bulma whispers, smiling down at the wonder of creation, the product of two worlds, and reaches up to flick the cumulonimbus mobile that hangs above the crib into motion.

43. Sky

The planet's sunrises and sunsets are not all that different from those on his home world; sometimes he goes to the poles and stands alone on mountains encased in ice and snow and watches the sky erupt into fire.

44. Heaven

There are countless planets out there that follow countless religions with numerous gods or just one, and each have their creation tales and their purported rewards in the afterlife, and he's never believed in any of them… but lying in the dark with her, listening as she regales him with the story of the time she once toppled an entire army and relaxed under her soft, stroking fingers, he can almost see where they're coming from.

45. Hell

It was boring as fuck.

46. Sun

Her body glows where it's stretched out on the soft, perfectly-shorn grass of the back lawn, and her extended belly reaches up toward the sun like a flower would, his child already stretching toward the sky.

47. Moon

"So, the Namek blew up your moon, and the planet somehow suffered no harmful repercussions for it… I hate this fucking planet; it makes no sense."

48. Waves

He stands at the shoreline of a planet with no name, and the water is the second-most spectacular shade of blue he's ever seen.

49. Hair

"It defies all logic… kind of like the rest of you," she says with a laugh, running her fingers through the strands at the nape of his neck, and he leans down and nips at her shoulder in retaliation, unable to stop a grin at the shriek his touch elicits, unable to stop the thought that it would take next to no effort to tear her throat out if he's not careful.

50. Supernova

He reclaims his birthright at the edge of the universe, the fiery end of all the stars in the black, and as he stares down at his golden hand, there, at the end of all things, he thinks, Finally, I am me.