It's true that her opinion of him originates from two different women: the woman she was before, and the woman she is after. Or, like a date marking the turn of history in a text book: B.L and A.L.

Before Left and After Left.

The Bulma from the age of Before-Left, hair corkscrewed and fragrant as wild chrysanthemums, with a pure and starry gaze. What did her father call that blue, the clear, watery blue of her eyes? Aquamarine? Or the bolder azure? As pure as the mirrored reflection of the sky in the bowl of the ocean, the wind holding its breath at the spectacle.

She resents that Bulma.

That Bulma, Before-Left Bulma, she had guts, while After-Left-Bulma's insides are hollowed out. That Bulma was capricious as the sea, cloudy seagreen to furious bluebell in turns, and the shore endured her without complaint. That Bulma was beautiful without even trying. Charmed, entitled, thankless. That Bulma was impulsive, the wind her chariot, and wanted, wanted, wanted, and had yet to pay for anything.

And then, a Moon—

and a curtain of moody clouds drew back,

and the Moon turned its dark face in its orbit to her virgin seas,

and mesmerized, she bid the wind, "To Him,"

and was never innocent again.

But Before-Left-Bulma, for all her faults, at least felt her love sharp as thorns in her clutching hand, and true as the weight of his hand in her own as she wrapped it on the exam table. Despite all the flames she had carried in her teenage years, despite even her long haul with Yamcha, this was the overwhelming force of nature that was desperate, first love. For the first time in her life, Bulma felt deep as a woman who saw her future in the face of a man.

After-Left-Bulma envied Before-Left-Bulma her passion. That she felt an emotion other than just bitterness. But not her ignorance. Not her naivete.

But wasn't every woman guilty of falling hard, just once? Before-Left-Bulma, with a heart not yet humbled but cardinal red and pumping proudly—Before-Left-Bulma had been exhausted, wouldn't you know, at fiddling with the bow and arrow, of tempting fickle and lesser hearts to pounding, of the sound of her arrow sinking into soft flesh but her hand already at her quiver, searching again. That Bulma had yearned for a creature apart from the game. More. Above.

With slender fingers pale as moonlight, that Bulma inscribed her wishes into the wind and tucked her longings into the folds of her being.

And when she expected it least, there He was—a penumbra lighting his antlered helm as he slid through the silhouettes of trees, silky and predatory like some not-of-this-world pagan god.

She was the one who chased and hunted now, after the shadowed man whose touch could inflame that starved, subterranean pit of her who wanted, just wanted, and arched towards his looming fingers to urge his caress. He, the Aries to her Athena, causing her dogs to howl at the moon and milky white flowers to bloom with both joy and protest under his booted heel.

She should have known.

All the texts in the world warned her; all those songs, unheeded.

Her aching body under his roughened palms, begging, as the oldest story fingered the keys of her body.

And, sure, the ice in his black gaze thawed, revealing something searching, curious, amused. There's no lack for women who think they can change a man, right? But the gaze was still tortured, even more dangerous in its nakedness. And whether from instinct, or habit of circumstance, his jaw closed around her neck. She was sucking in her breath at its icy clamp even as she trembled in the need to meld every part of her to every part of him—even as he tore up and discarded every piece she handed him, as thorough in love as he was in gifting death.

And as her god of war closed his fist around her and crushed her, crumpled as the once-tender petals of a flower, she'd sagged, castaway from his palm into the sea and then washed ashore, a new incarnation. She was a Persephone, the enslaved queen of dead winter, cleaved from the spring maiden she had been before the god of the underworld had dragged her down, crowned her in the bones of his past, and left her to till and tend a barren world as he chased ghosts of memory.

Before-Bulma, After-Bulma.

But Bulma, today, running a brush through her straight, no-nonsense haircut, pulling a plain t-shirt over her soft belly, flipping through the day's task list with fine, pinched brows and a hard gaze in the empty silence of a pale white morning, a morning spent fielding memories as velvety as the waxy leaf of spring's heady magnolias and as suffocating as their scent.

Bulma, today, wasn't any longer just After-Left-Bulma.

That woman, too, was bubbling and reforming, rippling and churning in her cupped palms before she would slide right through the spaces in her fingers. And though she would never again be birthed in seafoam and opalescent pearl where the land married the sea, a perfectly molded, modern day Venus who wanted to be touched but could never be hurt by that touch... Still, she changed.

And her sullen god of war and death was, once again, its reason.

Bulma blew her bangs from her eyes and slouched further into the kitchen chair.

It wasn't necessarily that she thought the schmuck was right. It's not that anyone could assign a label to the alien prince who had crashed her party, or that she'd even allow the puffed up, tweed jacket wearing wannabe Don Juan from last night to judge said alien. Vegeta was much more complicated than some umbrella diagnosis, but still, that he might be, and that he might be enduring it alone—and then her surprising, visceral reaction to it—It had penetrated the fog of her anger.

She looked down, mystified, at the hands last night that had reached for him with a life of their own. She had urgently needed to know that he was still all there. Her hands would know it better than her head. And briefly, he had been in her embrace, solid and real, even if he sat with his arms against his sides, enduring it with polite formality.

Last night, Vegeta had suddenly become a man, capable of feeling.

Her Narcissus, her Sisyphus, who had gazed on from high and fallen low. But he was drifting, while she remained linear, constant, because getting up in the morning to go through the motions at work and pretending to be emotionally unaffected was self-preservation, at least.

Even if they had had nothing left between them, they now had something wholly new and only theirs again. It was a black and white film, its silent lead more phantom than soldier, recently returned from war, haunting the halls aimlessly as a curious resident turned clues in her hands and pondered. He was a man rebuilt carelessly from fragments of other people's tragedies, falling apart at the seams because Dr. Frankenstein had split. It was as if Bulma was the only one who could still see him, see him stall while everyone lived out their lives around him. Only she was audience to his quiet surrender.

It wasn't the man who she'd miserably had dinner with last night that was on her mind.

But Bunny wailed anyway.

"But he offered to take you to a tropical island, didn't he?"

"Why would I even be interested in that," Bulma groused. "Frankly," she complained under her breath, "I could make better use out of a reliable babysitter and a good night's sleep."

"Goodness gracious," her mother scolded, in a tone she rarely used on her daughter. "You have some high expectations. Just what exactly are you waiting for?"

There was a scuffle from across the room, and seeking its source inside the ambient light of the fridge's light, Bulma and Vegeta's eyes met.

Vegeta does not believe in heroes.

Not the way they're imagined in Earthling films, not the thing Kakarot embodies to the other humans: a savior, pure and undiluted. No, Vegeta believes there are no heroes. Identifies, rather, with the villains. And though she might have laughed, said, "why doesn't that surprise me," eyes alight with mirth and affection, Vegeta can't return her humor.

Heroes are an Earthling franchise, reduced to the formula:

past injustice + preternatural athleticism + altruistic nature = moral authority

copy pasted copy pasted copy pasted.

But Vegeta knows that most men don't want to be heroes, no matter what they get to show for it. Not the physiques, the women, the screen time and adulation.

Men, Vegeta knows, would rather take, than give.

Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Caesar. They're complicated and dirty, the way men really are. They're ruthless in a way that men wish they could be. They get the job done. They're never meek. Men harbor that quote, "Men's greatest joy is in crushing their enemies," and clutch it to their secret heart. They play competitive sports and follow the stock market to imitate the act. Then their loins ache because they can't fulfill it.

Vegeta thinks of the Romans and the Greeks, struggling for breath in those dusty tomes in the Capsule Corp library where he found himself lately interloping. Of how the Romans introduced a new god to their stolen pantheon: Janus, or Justice. The Romans realized that Justice could sedate the people. No longer could the people seek justice for themselves, but had to rely on the state to give it to them. Later, early capitalists coerced workers to give up the means to production so that they could exploit and commodify their labor. His twenty years in the barren womb of the Cold Empire is reflected back at him in the woman's forgotten books, the smell of aged paper tickling his nose.

Saiyans knew the truth, and even if he knows it's biased, Vegeta still believes it. Saiyans understood that the source of reward and punishment lived inside, not outside, of their bodies. That agency was power, and their marriage was the reward itself. That was what Saiyans referenced when they spoke of pride. Frieza had despoiled their agency, so he had stolen their means to pride. Frieza had eradicated personal gain within his ranks, and so had created a schism within the Saiyan's own spirit. He had made them mercenaries, when they were warriors. He had severed the Saiyans means of producing their very souls.

Saiyans had understood that nothing was done without personal gain. Saiyans knew that a man fights for something he cares for, but fights even better for something he thinks he deserves, and that inside them a whole universe was theirs for the taking.

Her ancestors, Vegeta thinks, were not sons of Achilles like his own, but of the Tuffles, of the Romans, of the Colds, gifting the earth not just civil engineering or organized warfare but devious, abstract, cool complexity.

Saiyans had understood justice wasn't a concept but simply the modicum for survival that was contained in a man's two fists, the very tools Saiyans used to create themselves, their pride. And it's this that Vegeta loathes most about Kakarot. Even in death he profits from the hero fantasy, when Vegeta knows what drove him was bloody and hungry, the very same thing that rode, and condemned, Vegeta.

With his forearms resting on his knees and his back against a bookcase, Vegeta feels a reanimated, acute hatred. Not for Kakarot, not for the woman—who, like a stray pin in a suit that jabs and irritates but can't be found, urging him to relax his grip on revenge, to give up his own means of self-production, his own two hands—not hatred for them, but for Frieza. For the sabotage and subversion of an identity that is now so twisted and tangled he can never make sense of it.

He flies listlessly toward the house, the camber of the sun painting the world in dawn's pallor and white washing the compound.

It's not that I hate you, Vegeta wants to say to her now that Kakarot's gone, her back turned to him not in the trust that once was but cold dislike as she makes her morning cereal. It's not that I wished to suppress or reject that thing that makes you you. He cannot say it, but still she begs to hear it. She doesn't understand that words expose him.

He had wondered how she escaped destruction. How did she shield what she loves, how did she keep even a tiny piece of herself? Was it simply chance, like a single building left standing among mortared rubble or a house serendipitously skipped in a tornado's path? How had she remained so whole?

He'd wanted to protect it. He'd wanted to own it for himself.

Instead, he'd destroyed it.

He is highly competent.

Sometimes they're here, at her home, and Vegeta, who orbits her flight path throughout the compound and who listens silently to her speak, he stays his distance, glaring in resentment when they steal her from him. Vegeta mocks them silently, because acknowledging or speaking to them would make him feel dirtied.

They're reminiscing about Kakarot, making corporeal their virtuous defender fantasy.

Did you know, he thinks at them from against the doorway where he leans, that "work" is derived from the Earthling Middle English werk, from the Anglo-Saxon werc, from the Indo-European werg and from the Greek ergon, and all of it means work in the way that you use it today, except in Greek it refers to what men did in battle.

Did you know, Vegeta continues as they laugh in their grief for their loveable, late Saiyan, that the word "charm" was taken from the Greek "charma," which meant "source of joy," and is best translated today as "combat"?

Or "cock," that vulgar, colloquial description of his organ, "cock" has been used to denote "male" on Earth for the last thousand years, but it once meant "arouses another from slumber," and "a minister of religion," once meant "leader, chief man, ruling spirit, victor," once meant "one who fights with pluck and spirit"?

That it also meant "war"?

That, in order to avoid blasphemy, it was once a substitute for "God"?

Vegeta dismisses their hero worship with a throaty snort before leaving them there, because he knows why Earthlings think that the Spartans were righteous and cool and then condemn the selfishness and aggressiveness of Saiyans in the same breath. Vegeta is part of a hierarchy that has no meaning on Earth. Order here is reversed.

There are no heroes. There is no such thing as goodness or a selfless gift. Right and wrong and a moral Cartestian coordinate plane are figments of these Earthling's imagination, and what exists are simply actions that lead to unique consequences, without any 'good' or 'bad' accouterments. In the womb of space, the blankly staring, cold reality, men fight, not for justice, but to live. Villains, businessmen, Saiyans, soldiers, those who live by their nature rather than turning it inside out, they see reality for what it is. It's sadistic. But like a river, its aggression can be diverted. They shape it to survive. They do it for themselves. Taking is survival. Survival is winning. Living feels rewarding. And common men, even if just in the throbbing core of their beings, they still recognize that primal logic.

But whether in the dark heart of space, or in bed, the sleeping woman once curled into his side, when Vegeta has to do this or that dutifully whether to fulfill orders or a prophecy, and he shoulders the weight, without question, without looking back, because a Saiyan Prince pays for things, he fights and exchanges his life to create himself, and his pride—

so when he enters a dark tunnel, and it costs him himself—

if should there be a break of light, a slant of sun through grave dirt—

because you are not the same, because to those who have never been inside, the tunnel can't be described, it's a way of being, and no one can, wants, to talk about it—

but suddenly

a breath of fresh air once in awhile

and a glimpse of blue

seems like something

you deserve.

Bulma made a face. "No way!"

"Don't say I didn't warn you!"

The screen door smacked the door frame with a pop as Chi Chi followed Bulma outside.

"I'm not ready for that," Bulma admitted sullenly. "He's not even one yet. What am I going to do when he starts talking back?"

Chi Chi wiped her hands on the apron at her waist, small, bony, pale, but exceptionally strong. "He'll need a firm hand."

The women shared an uncomfortable but companionable silence. Their realities palpable before them. They were both women doing what they could, doing it by themselves.

"Stay strong," Bulma called out before the jet engines began to turn over.

"You too," ChiChi mouthed over the noise, waving before placing her fist on her hip. She would go back inside a house that was missing one person. Indefinitely.

Bulma had to keep telling herself that it wasn't so bad being alone.

As the jet ascended smoothly over the mountains, Bulma watched the sun set. She wondered briefly if Vegeta might appreciate the view on his own flight home from whereever he'd been spending his evenings lately, in all its sprawling peaches and dusky lavenders. She jerked in surprise, immediately clamping down with self-loathing. She had to keep reminding herself that she wasn't supposed to think about him, no matter his bizarre behavior. Why bother wondering if he'd enjoy a sunset? Vegeta didn't appreciate anything that didn't advance him. That's why she'd opted out of the daily repairs on the GR, even if it burdened her father. She wouldn't be used any longer.

She exhaled deeply in the empty cabin.

She hated him so passionately, and she never wanted to stop.

It was all she had left of him.

He flies in the rain.

He does this most nights, ducking in through the window around 3. At first the nights are cold and sharp with the wet winds of spring, and sometimes he's soaked to the bone, though he doesn't seem to notice. His grip is tight on the windowsill as he slides inside, and he paces the room with an agitated gait as he strips.

As the weeks pass and the days grow longer and golden and languorous, he grows calmer too, and on his face a look of brooding, hard-won peace takes root. But still he continues to wander after midnight. Silent, alone, sharp as broken glass that you instinctively reach for and pick up but cuts you.

If she could accuse him once of being a vampire holding her in thrall and bleeding her dry, then what now would the nature of their relationship be?

Was she now one of the walking dead? If she was dead inside, how could he hurt her? They might, if anything, find companions in the other again, dumbly stumbling together, dirty projections of who they once were.

Coming home in a foul mood from a failed blind date was sunny compared to this new, thick fear. It was ripping nails while clawing at a crumbling edge. It was the belly flop when the floor dropped out from under. If he wasn't simply the object of her acidic resentment, than he became More. He'd be flesh. He'd be three-dimensional. He became a person. His actions would be complex, and only human in their selfishness. It was now that she realized how much of the identity she had forged when he left hinged on his alienness and on the impassioned conviction that he had no heart. It was the encroaching terror that one day the thick curtains erected in her memory would peel back, and she would like and respect the man that they revealed, and then she'd be subject to that free fall all over again. She was already neck deep in restrained emotion; to accept what was forcing its way into her field of vision would be to swallow water. Bulma had worked hard to shut herself up tight after he left. She couldn't afford to fall to pieces again just because he had returned. Mostly she couldn't bear the thought of Vegeta rejecting her again. She could not be vulnerable again. She could not afford him becoming human.

He's not interested in Shakespeare's Othello, but Iago, Iago who isn't simply part of the plot but makes the story. The workings of Iago's own mind rewrites history.

Vegeta is as raw as Cassio, who declared,"Reputation, reputation, reputation! Oh, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial."

He is reminded of watching the snowfall from her window, the flakes in their synchrony, her hand in his.

Or, as Iago said of Desdemona,

"She loved me for the dangers I had pass'd,

And I loved her that she did pity them.

This only is the witchcraft I have used."

He arrived at the compound late in the furnace-like heat of a July morning. He stood his boots neatly by the bureau, tossed his shirt with weary effort into the hamper, before falling into the crisp white sheets. Vegeta stretched out both his arms and crossed his naked feet. His eyelids closed heavily, and in the morning light, the iron set of his jaw and the heavy weight of the back of his hand against his brow made him appear older, bone-weary.

Vegeta's mouth softened gradually, but the hard yellow sunlight confronted him through the window, making the room stifling and starkly bright. Vegeta turned heavily and covered his eyes with his forearm. Here, in the pool of warm light, he was nobody but himself as he knew him. Just Vegeta, his two fists and his quick tongue and all that he'd ever truly had, whose company he would always keep: loneliness.

From a sleep that was more like a held breath he roused as if swimming up through glue, and with deeper breathing his eyes came to open and find her sitting there, blue head haloed in the afternoon rays, gazing at him.

Vegeta blinked, crossed his arms above his head, stretched his legs stiff and straight, and then with a deep, rumbling sigh, addressed her.

"Why are you in here?"

The razor's edge in his voice was only faintly dulled by sleep, but Bulma recognized the curiosity. She stole her opportunity. Her voice was contrarily sharp and accusatory in the sleepy, afternoon heat.

"If you sleep, you're wracked with nightmares."

He watched her, unblinking, under sleep swollen lids.

"So you don't sleep. You fly yourself around until you're so exhausted there isn't any room to think. And this—" she gestured at his grizzled face, his gritty, red eyes— "is what passes for sleep."

He grabbed the edge of the sheet and pulled it up over his round shoulder, turning his back to her. He heard her sigh through her nose with annoyance, flinched at the familiar prick of her tone.

Then stiffened as her legs shot purposefully under the blanket and she wriggled under the sheets. She flopped around to get comfortable before stilling, her breath hitting his back, carefully keeping her limbs to herself. It was an intimate act that only Bulma could execute so casually, because she didn't have a bone in her body that could just follow the fucking rules. Their own goddamned rules. She never could take a hint. But then again, her defiance and her refusal to be intimidated had been part of her charm. She never backed down. Not even after he broke her.

"Vegeta."

Her voice, husky with sudden seriousness, curled longingly against his ribs. He tried to exhale it, but held it tight instead.

"Do you wish you had died?"

His ears rang distantly, likely the result of so many blasts endured at short range. His fists clenched in the blanket, but the white wall across from him gave up no answers.

What makes a man? What makes a man want to walk away from his mind? If he could express it, then she could decipher it, but then the whole thing they were trying to construct would unravel between them. What they'd slapped together to continue functioning around one another was built of dissembling and silence and rejection of themselves or of each other, and it would only hold up if both of them participated in keeping it erected.

What makes a man want to spend his whole life behind a disguise?

This morning, he'd stood at the coast of the East Sea, where, like old friends, it grumpily battered the rocky shore. The icy spray and the roar of the unyielding surf had enveloped him until it was all he could see and smell and feel and hear and he'd become it. He'd watched the sun rise, its fingers of light casting shadows on the sea. Gulls shrieked distantly, the stars pale silver in the deep sky. And he had felt the familiar insignificance and meaningless that had been his only companion since the Cell Games.

He was a man who had always been driven by a purpose, with no room for anything but maximum efficiency in pursuit of that goal. Now there was nothing.

The mood had been interrupted. Eclipsed, by Her. Not so much the thought of her, but a sensation, like the warm, companionable relief of a campfire. The feeling was simple, knowable. Trusted, life-giving.

Those were not words he'd intentionally use to describe Her. The sea spray had dampened his hair, and, weighted down, it had clung to his cheeks.

The image his subconsciousness had chosen was disjointing. Fires were tools of survival. Only she could make something faceted with purpose. Only she could be both pleasure and advantage, when those categories had once been mutually exclusive. Only she refused to be limited and defined, by her society, by her friends and family, by him. Even he had not succeeded in that. She was better than him. But it did not put her at odds with him. The campfire did not compete with him. It made certain he survived the night.

And he'd thought, quick and startling and packed with uneasy implication, that she might enjoy this view.

And the vast ocean and infinite sky and cutting wind hadn't seemed as contrary anymore. Just extensions of himself. Simply partners with their own strengths in a complex world.

She lay behind him. He knew, if he spoke, if he cleared the cobwebs with the palm of his hand and invited the truth in, her brows would knit with that mixture of concern and frustration, her gaze inward but sharp as she pondered all the ways in which she could repair him. Everything and everyone was an algorithm to be solved and a tool to be improved on. He used to feel insulted by it. But now he feared that he was incapable of being improved.

His fear protected itself with silence, a deafness and dumbness imposed on even their bodies as they lay beside one another, miles apart.

What makes a man want to break a heart?

What makes a man?

A man may get stitched back up, but he was never the man he was before, the whole man. Vegeta suspected that everyone who had eyes could now see his every failure and inadequacy, writ like a docket of sins on his skin. But he didn't deserve to be repaired by her. To refuse to heal meant preservation. It kept him feeling alive. With his wounds untreated, at least he was able to feel something. At least pain was something that filled the void.

But now, without a real night's sleep in months and her in such close proximity, he thought he might tremble into pieces, unable any longer to stubbornly hold himself together. It was becoming clear that it wasn't working. They weren't working. The muscle memory of the other's skin was too real, the call and response of pain and comfort between them overpowering. Even when they inflicted pain on the other, instinctively their bodies sought to remedy it. To answer her out loud was to answer that seductive call. To, with profound relief, loose control.

She was cold and distant since he'd made landfall, and he bore it, because he deserved it. He'd felt it a stalwart strategy to keep them safe. The bigger the wound, the better they were protected.

But he and Bulma had something that made the stuff of storms. Every word between them was electrically charged. Standing with her in the same room was enough to cause his ki to skip across his spine. They could never be as she and her Scarface were, just friends, just occupying the same space in an uncomplicated partnership. The thought hurt. He hurt.

"I sometimes think," his deep voice rippled as he sought to control the monster surging in his chest, "that I should have just stayed dead."

He flinched as her hand splayed against his broad back before caressing the plane of his spine.

It had been so long since he'd been touched comfortingly. The sensation was foreign and jarring, and he walled himself off from it before it could be taken away.

Her forehead, riotously, then, pressing and lolling in the crevice of his back, and tentatively, squirming her arms under his heavy, compact waist to squeeze him close, his abdominals flexing beneath her in discomfort at her nearness.

Bulma, the rule breaker.

"I'm glad you didn't," she finally murmured, her breath warm. "If you hadn't—"

there'd be no Trunks, she could have said, but instead said

"—I wouldn't have gotten to know you."

It was a cipher for all that lay between them, and he felt more composite and solid with her admission.

What makes a man? The man himself?

Vegeta had fiercely thought so, but had proven himself wrong. His ancestors and their genes had helped mold the shapeless clay, and Frieza and two decades of infantry life had fired it. But that wasn't him. This was him, this thing that didn't feel or dream, because there was nothing of himself left to feel. The Vegeta before had been a product, churned out on a military assembly line and puffed up with importance, only to come face to face with his own limited abilities as his son's body bled out. He, and no one else, had made the loudest mockery of himself all these years.

She scooted up the length of bed, briefly unclenching him to bury her nose in his hair. He smelled like the salt of the ocean and the musk of wild things.

He had doubted once that the opposite sex had anything to offer a man. Except this woman had been different, very different, as if she'd been made just to prove him wrong. With her, it had been talking for the first time to someone of his likeness, his caliber, an equal apart from a system composed entirely of subordinates and superiors. It had been practicing his own voice.

They were fire, and their bodies had tried to fan, suffocate, and translate it to a language their minds could comprehend.

Here he was, at the bottom, staring at the basest part of himself. The truest. And she remained.

He fell asleep, the speckled golden light, screened through ficus leaves, warm against his eyelids, and in her arms, with her forehead pressing at the base of his neck, there was just himself, remaking a man.

"Quit lying," Before-Bulma laughs, and captures his lips in her own. "Tell me the truth."

"Make me," he baits, his chest rumbling under her own huskily, and despite that a prophecy awaits him, he rolls her thighs in his hands and smiles into the place between her breasts. "Make me."

With him, she floats, suspended beyond the here and now and anchored only by his rare smile, the one that crooks on his face now.

With him, she is legless and free.