She didn't know when things between she and Vegeta had petered out, but, somewhere between him walking in on her on the toilet, pregnancy test trembling in her hands, and his slapping the 'LIFTOFF' button on Capsule 4 before the sun even had a chance to set that very day—certainly his proudest moment, she'd grumbled—well…petered out it had.

At one point, before her body had gone and released one teeny-tiny rebellious egg against both she and her contraceptive's wishes, Bulma had loved the drama between them, craved the build up imbued in their every moment, the spark in their whole deliciously ribald relationship. Wouldn't any girl?

The excitement of each pause between notes of their heckling, her breathlessness as the crescendo of their baited passions carried her forward into the unknown between them. Was it like a high drama opera? A tragedy in its typical, classic formula:

Girl meets boy, girl falls for boy, boy is hopelessly in love with another (in this case, himself)...

...girl gets knocked up, boy checks out, and then, after a terribly awkward crying and self-immolation scene—it's lights out, curtains drawn.

An end that everyone knows is coming, and yet one the actors, inevitably, are blind to.

Or, perhaps, instead of that morose and cliché swan dive, instead of a dismal end to a pretty sorry relationship, what they had had was more of a caper, hosted, rather, in the deliberate swing of her twenty-something hips, his fingers tracing over them as he stalled stalking past her in the hallway, his hooked smile cast in her direction at the dinner table informing her that he may just be topping off supper with her tonight. So maybe it was more like free form jazz? Spontaneous, passionate, reckless, daring, and completely inscrutable. Seriously. Who gets jazz?

Maybe it was! Say, she would be the clarinet, then! She'd always wanted to play the clarinet. That beautiful, throaty woodwind instrument, its lowest registers hauntingly seductive and velvety, just like her own-well, sometimes.

Vegeta, that arrogant, frustrating bastard, had to be, undoubtedly, a brass instrument. Yes, he was the brass instrument that sometimes made everyone's eyes cross with its take-no-prisoners volume. While the clarinet had a completely different tone—could sometimes be silky, beckoning the listener with its rich control, carrying uniquely in a sea of soft woodwinds. And other times—most times, who was she kidding—the clarinet just wasn't played right and it was shrill, shrill, shrill.

Vegeta, she decided, was a saxophone, dark, intimidating, and alluring, almost created just to set the listener on edge with either frustration or sensuality and with complete and enthusiastic disregard for how the listener feels about that.

And yet, he was no one trick pony, her sulky, jet-eyed saxophonist. He was a whole range of sounds, even if no one else could pick it out of all those sharp tones but her.

Sometimes she could pull from him those coarse growls from the back of the throat that made her tremble like she were some naive, moon-faced maiden watching some wild, bucking musician in the back of a smoky bar. Sometimes she'd conjure up his bluesy history, pull from him memories he'd long thought dead, and she might, just might get to hear a new song, vulnerable in its history...Many times he was the kind of artist who played with infuriating wit and aggressive, challenging overtones, causing her head to spin like she was in dire need of an exorcism because she wasn't sure which cutting insult of her abilities she should start spewing bile at first. He was all control, and stamina, had the grit of a true musician's diaphragm, his imposing timbres butting up against her more floaty woodwind. He was always playing two songs at once, it seemed, and she never knew quite where he stood, except it was never still, that was for sure.

And, sometimes, the saxophonist's heated cadences butted against her walls and, instead of fortifying the barricade she'd built masterfully around her to keep him out, she surrendered, she succumbed to that flutter-tonguing of any masterful musician against the most intimate parts of her.

Her private parts, more specifically.

So how goes this uptempo death scene? Well, the clarinet goes first in this lark, and it has to have its solo, right? Its voice has to be heard.

The clarinetist informs the saxophonist several times just to relax, and that the clarinet's voice is crucial when it comes to the rules and atmosphere at the seat of Capsule Corporation. But, of course, the saxophone thinks the damned score is written all for him, and that it's acceptable if the foundation is shaking beneath them when he is playing.

The score evolved quickly from a disagreement of principles to a battle of wills. Of course, the clarinet has a more elegant, refined sound than the saxophone, and for that reason it might just organically end up taking a little more time with its solo, which the saxophonist disapproves of. The saxophonist does not want the clarinetist to lead.

And soon the saxophonist and clarinetist have no patience for the other's tone a second longe, and—welp, here they were. Not even in separate dressing rooms, pouting in front of those cool, moody vanity mirror lights. No, they were not even ignoring each other in the same damned city. The musicians had moved beyond thoroughly loathing each other into a special, skillful kind of complete disregard sometimes literally planets apart, that both were quite content with continuing.

No slowly paced, quiet decrescendo of a relationship here. Just a roaring fight, a plain ol' "I'm out of here," and a walk out the door to find new things, better things, or just space-y things, seen from the inside of the concave windshield of a spaceship's cabin.

And that was where they were as a couple as the fate of the world was being decided by a motley bunch of martial artists and a gaggle of robots.

No, she couldn't put her finger on the exact moment, couldn't draw her finger over the calendar to rest contemplatively against the number of a day which birthed the exact second things had fallen apart irreparably between them.

And now, NOW he was back in her house. Having tumbled into his old bed after their final battle with Cell not unlike some smelly, couch surfing, pointy-haired leech. But this was no common moocher, oh no—complicated didn't even begin to describe the man presently sleeping face down, dead-weight crushing into his pillow and, even now, still stubbornly alive.

She didn't know when things had gotten beyond control between them, fled right out of sight, sorely incapable of being dissected under her microscope. The thing between them was as obstinate and inexplicable to her prodding as they were to each other.

All that positively remained of him in her life was the occasional frowny face from her bright eyed, amazing baby boy who was his own little force of nature. And, of course, the question that she was doomed to answer, over and over again...The Question, which always went something like this:

"Oh, he is just so sweet! And where is the father?"

Eyebrows furrowed with concentration, fingers ticking off bullet points and mutters not unlike her father's as she tried to piece together a not so smart-alecky explanation for what the heck her life was like as a single parent, and it never really got easier, every time she got The Question.

No, she couldn't put a finger on just when the dance between them surged in energy, set them ablaze, and then flared furiously with new intent until it burned their passion for the other into a crisp. The End, if it could really be called an end now that they had a burping, farting, giggling little monster between them. It had been a forte of screaming matches and drumming fury—How dare you just ignore me when I tell you that I'm pregnant—How dare you get pregnant—How dare things happen that are beyond your control—How dare you have feelings, How dare you have goals, How dare you be breathing, and so on. Not one of those calming, pan flute type albums you pick up on the fly at a whole food's store. But understand it or not, the enigma, the migraine that lay on her parent's guest bed right now that was so emotionally unavailable and self-involved that she could just stare death into him right now with the frustration that was building in her just looking at his backside-

He was back, and as always with him, it was just something she had to deal with. Their finale, evidently, had not yet come.