Disclaimer: I don't own Dragon Ball, that privilege belongs to Akira Toriyama

Part I: Under Your Skin

Chapter 1 – Sturm und Drang

When he awoke it was dark, but it was not a darkness to which he was accustomed. The darkness he had known, that had covered him like an impenetrable cloak, was complete and absolute, a submarine cavern, too polar and inhospitable to support any life. That was not the darkness that now sleeved over him. This one had been tailor-made to be many sizes too small and had shrunken from the wash of death, where it had come out still wet and worse, dripping with life.

The scarabs of death, beetles with shiny black carapaces scuttled through the underground surf.

'I died,' he recalled with some displaced turmoil, the avoidance of which once being of paramount importance to his life. 'I didn't get to live forever, only this mortification is immortal. I was slain by my oppressor Freeza, my mutiny towards him gleaning only my blood. And now I lie in a shallow grave, or is this just the first level of hell? But who would deign to prepare a grave for one as I?' So many questions and all the time to meditate upon them.

If this was how things would be forever more then he had gotten off lightly. He was not some child afraid of the dark. If the gods had truly done their research, they would have known he feared the light and not placed him in the dark, no matter how different and unsettling it seemed, to suffer for all eternity.

'Also, if I have died, then why do I still breathe? Why are my ribs protesting against the accumulation of carbon dioxide ballooning in my lungs? I'm slowly suffocating, desperate for a breath of air but my mouth breathes in only soil. My hands still fist, my eyes still blink...my heart still beats, less than one beat per second, but it's still there. Somehow my body remains mine, I'm not just a spirit whose soul torn asunder haunts the living. But don't all sinners leave it all behind? Their bodies and their minds? Isn't there someone who judges me first? It is all so smothering whatever afterlife this is.'

This was his new spacious abode, not an onyx tomb nor a bed of nails. There weren't any crows to pick at his carcass bit by bit for all the juicy parts but warm earth fertile with worms. How he detested worms. Their bodies were slimy and phallic like Freeza's wandering fingers. Here his bones would become jellied and his face would become bloated by decomposition. Here regret would gnaw at his pride in partnership with the worms gnawing at his flesh.

"No one will forgive me for the things I have done, and I will never forgive myself for the things that I have not." That should have been all he heard, for death promised him many punishments among them timeless solitude with only his thoughts resounding on his own private frequency.

It was not still yet the wind was silent. There was a symphony of sound from somewhere high above, the clash of titans like the fabric of the heavens itself was being ripped apart.

All at once, he realized where he was. Namek. He was under the ground on Namek. Kakarot or Kuririn must have buried him there. Only the dragon balls could cheat him of his meaningless death, but no more wishes could be cast. The elder Namekian had died first. So how had he been brought back? The earth rumbled all around him, with a worm falling in a cold slide across his cheek.

The world revealed itself anew to him, but from the inside out. The demons above were Kakarot and Freeza, fighting in a parade of Armageddon. He couldn't wait here in this purgatory between being and nothingness for a breeze to carry him to the arena of their battle. He couldn't wait here while his lungs threatened to evacuate his chest with worms being his only accomplices. No, not him, not Vegeta, the Prince of all Saiyans.

That thirst to live drove his heart to the bottom while simultaneously lifting his pride to the top to reclaim his breath. The worms crisped from his body from the heat of his ki. His hands shovelled through the dirt until one hand shot through the surface of the earth like a baby's head crowning during birth. The dirt heaved violently around him until his entire body was removed from his grave and he became a revenant resurrected into a baptism of fire. The mossy sky of Namek had swapped to black that was paved by the flames of ki from the duel. Before he could charge over there, the entire planet passed away and he was transported to a field whose grass had already once borne his footprints.

...

Vegeta traversed the many halls of Capsule Corp. In its enormity, the compound was like an entire world sealed in on itself, mimicking the city-wide span of one of Freeza's ships. However, everything at Capsule Corp. looked horrible to him, for he had adapted to having an emptiness around him like a man without a shadow, with only a halo-free aura, but everything here at all hours of the day was vibrant and bustling.

A group of Namekians on a floor below were playing, their squeals climbing up to him jolly and uncorrupted by their recent episode with Freeza. It must have been so easy to live, safe in the knowledge that whatever mishaps came their way that their dragon balls would save them, would brush their worries aside as readily as a complex problem chalked onto a blackboard could be swept away. A life of constant do-overs and remedial lessons. Vegeta didn't know whether to envy them or to be disgusted.

He had indeed been wished back to life. The Earthlings had squandered their bonus wishes not on power but on flight. Using Earth's dragon balls, they had wished for everyone killed by the events of the uprising on Namek to be revived, minus Freeza's men. That was how he had returned to life, on only the slightest of technicalities, for his treason had made him no longer included as one of Freeza's men. The dragon had separated him from them as his own mercenary, as a last samurai.

The final wish had been directed towards the transport of all living beings, except for Kakarot and Freeza, from Namek to Earth, into that field with the grass that was so vividly green. He had been furious to have been teleported against his will from the fight that would determine the fate of the galaxy.

But that half-breed whelp, the son of Kakarot, had foretold the outcome of the match. Gohan had stolen a look at a Saiyan god, and although his vision should have burned away, he had survived with starry eyes to regale them with what he had witnessed, that Kakarot was now a Super Saiyan. A Super Saiyan. So Kakarot had done it. He would defeat Freeza.

And Vegeta was swamped in muck, feeling like the soil from his grave was being thrown over his head once again. Kakarot, not him, the prince, but Kakarot out of all possible Saiyans had ascended. That fact keyed across his mettle, leaving nothing behind. God, he would have to kill him. Kakarot needed to die and he had to be the one to do it. He had to kill the Super Saiyan, the myth of his people to hold on to his tattered pride.

But was Kakarot already dead? Killed not by Freeza, but perhaps by the explosion of Namek? Kakarot had no functioning ship, so would he be left to drift in the vacuum of space? That would not be a warrior's death. It would irritate Vegeta to no end that a Super Saiyan who could defeat Freeza would fall to the forces of nature. Super Saiyans shouldn't have to comport to those rules.

Sufficient time had passed for Kakarot to return to Earth if by some miracle he had commandeered a ship, but whatever his fate, he could still be brought back too. The dragon balls only had a month left to recharge. Once Kakarot was wished to Earth, Vegeta could send him back to whatever hell he had been saved from. All he could do was wait, so wait he did.

His whole life now consisted of disjointed pockets of time where he would walk around Capsule Corp. to try to outpace the accidental byproduct of his continued being. The activity of his life slowed to a funeral march, so much so that he could observe it all, partitioned from it even though it was his own life, still by still, where any mute address and any minute movement seemed to stretch across an entire day. Imprisoned by his mind as he made his dreary rounds of the grounds, like past security patrols aboard Freeza's ship, he lamented circumstances that could not be helped. His subterranean existence of missions and purges had been replaced by the wildebeest stampede of light and noise, the laughter and murmurings of a happy home. It was jarring to be cast adrift in such a complete landscape, the surrealism of it compared to the blood-splattered portraits of his past.

As he chased after lost time, his lost youth, his lost ambitions, the hallway indoors merged into an outside path. He crossed the gardens unseeingly, not noting the orange ball, whose shape and size was almost exactly like a Namekian dragon ball, veer into his path and bounce across his legs.

A Namekian urchin ran into view, all smiles which froze into terror, when he saw that his ball had hit the murderer of that one village. The child's eyes welled with tears, he let loose a small yelp like a fowl having its neck snapped. The child started to cry afoul in earnest and a woman zoomed to him from behind some rose bushes.

"There you are, I found you," she exclaimed, "no one beats me at hide and seek. What? Why are you crying?" She looked across the trail, finally noticing Vegeta, and glared at him. "Don't be such a bully Vegeta-kun, give the kid his ball back."

Vegeta-kun, the same honorific she had used to address him that day in the field, that Freeza's soldiers would tease him with, that sounded like tongues or words spoken backwards when said by someone as weak as her.

"Why don't you come too, Vegeta-kun? It's not like you have money for a hotel."

That random invitation for shelter at her house, he had accepted it along with the Namekian refugees. The woman was Kakarot's friend, so when he returned, she would know, so in turn Vegeta would know too, as long as he kept close. That was primarily why he had accepted the invitation; it had been unexpected that Capsule Corp. had more than adequate lodgings and provisions to meet his needs as well.

That woman though, one minute fearing for her life as she saw him fight Zarbon, the next calling out to him in cutesy sobriquets and now bossing him around. Bulma was strange and terrible to him, maybe more than anything else he had so far encountered on Earth. She was a silk strand chafing against his steel wool, and was nowhere near as fragile as he had first thought. He never knew how to react to the changes in her moods.

Vegeta growled nastily, kicking the ball aside with the urchin zipping after it. Bulma gave him one last glare before running after the child, and he looked at her wildly worked hair that was curled into multiple whirlpools, that seemed to stylize her anger at him. Vegeta took a second to watch her whirlpooled hair current across the gardens into the clear blue sky and then he resumed his trek.

Earth's other name must have been the planet of misfit Saiyans. Kakarot had crash-landed there and had been raised there. It was also the site of Raditz and Nappa's dishonourable deaths. Would Kakarot and himself die here too? he wondered as he walked alone.

At night, the usual ache of cold would soften up his bones and chill his blood. And it was so easy to forget that light existed and that it was possible to be warm. "Where are you Kakarot? How did you do it? Why did it have to be you?" This was the hellish lullaby his mind used to sing himself to sleep.

...

The day had come where the dragon balls had reactivated and the dragon could be summoned. A Namekian had shouted the incantation in their language, and Vegeta had tried to commit the sounds to memory in case of future need.

Vegeta was behind the curved exterior of one of Capsule Corp.'s buildings, as he glanced out from the shadow of his black lethargy towards the bizarre scene in front of him. The dragon balls had been arranged in a circle on the lawn, and once the passcode had been spoken, the daylight sky had turned to midnight and a serpentine body had sprouted from the earth and into the clouds.

The dragon looked down imperially at the group of humans and Namekians like they were unbuffed pennies diminishing the shine of a pile of gold. Vegeta craned his neck to get a better look at the colossal figure. The dragon was a long green and yellow whip cracking across the dark sky with five-claws per hand and with razor sharp horns.

Vegeta knew the Namekian dragon could enact three wishes, and he was debating whether he should steal a wish for himself. Yet the wish for immortality, that he had not long ago so desired, had lost its lustre. Freeza was dead, an immortal wasn't required to achieve it, only a Saiyan on the lowest rungs of their species hierarchy had been necessary. Something bothered him that Kakarot had never dithered with wishes and chance like he had, but had banked only on himself, on his own strength.

The first wish was stated to return the spirits of Kuririn and Goku to Earth. And the dragon revealed that it could only perform half of that wish since the one called Goku was still alive.

Vegeta felt a ball of mildewed phlegm ride up his throat. Kakarot had survived? But how?

The Earthlings cheered that their protector was still alive somewhere out there, then chatted quietly together. What to wish for now? How to phrase it? There were no issues with restoring Kuririn to life, so they did just that.

Kuririn instantly appeared before them in armour that Porunga had so graciously mended. How extraordinary, Vegeta concluded even though he had already experienced it all firsthand himself, the wishes really can come true, they can bring back the dead.

Their final wish was to deliver Kakarot back to Earth, but there was a long pause for consultation between the dragon and an invisible body. "That I cannot do," he finally pronounced.

All the Earthlings muttered in disbelief amongst themselves, not used to the dragon not being able to solve every one of their problems. And Vegeta stared at the dragon with such rapt attention that could have burned.

The dragon elaborated, "The one you call Goku refuses to be summoned here, he says he is not yet ready to return."

The Earthlings congregated again, arguing about this change in the script to their carefully worded wishes.

Time pressed on while Vegeta grit his teeth down hard into sharp points. Kakarot's delay was not due to death or some unfortunate consequence of a lack of transportation but was no doubt because he was training, getting stronger and acquiring new skills, although he was already a Super Saiyan and that should have been the ceiling to his success. Vegeta wasn't even a Super Saiyan yet but what had he accomplished in the past 130 days? Nothing. Kakarot was bettering himself while he dallied here waiting to steal wishes, to wish upon stars and mythical dragons when he could be getting stronger on his own, the Saiyan way.

Porunga made an impatient noise, "What's your final wish?"

That dragon casked in the dragon balls like a genie in a bottle, who always acted so superior when it couldn't even escape its prison on its own, didn't even appreciate or enjoy the few minutes of freedom it got. And here Vegeta had believed that all djinns yearned for freedom.

With a sudden stimulus, like a force applied too vigorously from brake to gas, Vegeta decided that his dream-like paralysis would tranquilize him no more, and he would go find Kakarot and fight him. Vegeta reversed from the dragon, not interested in the last wish and ran to a landing dock in the backyard where there was a ship, fuelled and ready to go for when Chi Chi herself had wanted to voyage to Namek to bring Gohan back to safety. It didn't take long for Vegeta to have the ship flying towards freedom, and as the ship sped upwards, the sphere reflected like a grey pupil in the red eyes of the waiting dragon.

...

Vegeta had returned to Capsule Corp after aborting his campaign to retrieve and murder Kakarot. He had scoured through space for him, combing over planets for signs of his presence as thoroughly as combing through hair for eggs of lice. But there were no traces, not even a golden hair, of Kakarot anywhere. Vegeta would have still been out there, maddeningly panning for Super Saiyan gold, but practicalities had forced him to return to Earth. His ship required maintenance, and he wasn't going to float adrift through space in a broken ship in the slim hope that Kakarot would run into him. No, he could do that more comfortably on Earth. Although waiting for Kakarot to grace them with his presence left a sour taste in his mouth, there was no other option.

But after his landing, he didn't have to wait long for Kakarot...along with an unexpected and most unwelcome guest. There was a second Super Saiyan. A teenager who was as unlikely a candidate in his appearance to be a Super Saiyan as Kakarot was in his demeanour. Yet he had appeared out of nowhere and had killed Freeza once and for all, with the finality that Kakarot didn't have, like it was child's play. That corkscrew of abasement twisted in Vegeta's stomach again.

The youth did not reveal his name or his origins, only that he was from the future and he prescribed to all of the Z senshi assembled there pre-packaged doses of humbling reality and words of warning. In three years time, androids would arrive on a nearby island. The androids would be perfectly engineered killing machines with the express purpose of enacting revenge on Kakarot for destroying their creator's army many years before. They would all fight and fall, Super Saiyans just fun little light-up toys in comparison to their everlasting energy - all except for Kakarot, who would not even get the opportunity to fight. He would succumb to a heart virus first.

Vegeta had predicted it, that nature would claim Kakarot before he ever could. But never fear, the boy from the future had taken measures to circumvent this and had given Kakarot an antidote to the virus. In exchange, he had begged Kakarot, and how wrong it was to see a Super Saiyan beg, to train, to prepare, to destroy the androids, to give hope to the future. So they all vowed to train to prevent that future from occurring.

More humiliation nailed into Vegeta, so much so that nails were being hammered into pre-existing nails. He would have the chance to fight Kakarot and win and he would most certainly not be offed by a machine. He would commence the very same training regimen that Kakarot had used to achieve the legendary.

From overheard scraps of conversation, he had figured out how Kakarot had done it. The ship that he had taken to Namek had been equipped with its very own gravity chamber. Kakarot had only trained under the force of 100 gs for one week, but that was all he had needed to ascend. That ship though had been left behind on Namek and had exploded along with the rest of the planet. But no matter, the inventor of that miraculous technology resided on Earth, in fact, he shared the very same roof with Vegeta.

"The gravitational device that you built for Kakarot, it had an upper limit of 100 gs, correct?"

"Yes, Vegeta-san."

"But it would be possible to increase the limit?"

"Theoretically yes, but 100 gs was already pushing the boundaries of what Saiyan anatomy could withstand. I knew Goku would be careful though and wouldn't abuse the gravitation."

"For Saiyans only Super Saiyan is the limit. You will build me another one of these gravitational ships that will have the capacity to reach 300 gs."

"300 gs? Oh dear, Vegeta, it would be unethical to build you something that extreme."

"And why is that?"

"Under the force of 300 gs, let's say that your total body mass was 50 kg, your body would weigh close to 15 tonnes. Hypergravity puts a massive strain on all of your body's functions...you would not survive 300 gs for long if at all."

"So you're saying you won't build it because I'm not strong enough?…"

Her father's quiet words of reservation traveled down the corridor to her office like the final drafts of a dying wind. On the other hand, Vegeta's words spun in a twister of sound as her father continued to gently refuse his request and he only became louder at the mention of Son-kun in comparison to him.

What's he up to? That cautionary tale that the boy from the future had told them, which forecast everyone's deaths, must have rocked him to the core. I guess he's coming up with some sort of strategy to avoid that.

Bulma went back to the day when she had suggested that Vegeta come stay at her house. The invitation had tumbled from her mouth, bypassing common sense, with an impulsiveness that was so typically her. In that moment, she had completely forgotten that he was a ruthless killer. She only remembered that he had provided them with an original wish to transport their dead's souls back to Earth first before they were revived. And under the shade of the baobab tree, he very much resembled a swashbuckling Byronic hero, who was scornful of everything but carried a heavy misery in his heart. Bulma was taken in by that tragic romance like a moth backwardly drawn to the dark and not the light. So he had come with her, this ticking time bomb of a man that everyone tried to avoid but that overtime she suspected had become inert.

They all knew he was a villain and he was completely unapologetic about it, yet he had done nothing so far to add to that villainy, which ran counter to all of their expectations. He had just been a brooding malcontent watching over them, developing images of life on Earth onto his retinas, hardly ever speaking, and when he did, his vocabulary had been almost entirely comprised of grunts and obscenities.

For the duration of his stay at Capsule Corp., Vegeta could be typified by a mortal slowness. The world in which he lived had been gutted, and the innards representing the unforgiving manifesto of his youth had been left to rot. He had responded to all those life changing events with a loss of stasis. Something had failed to compute in his mind that Son-kun was now of a higher rank than him; thus, two conflicting worldviews coexisted in an unresolvable inconsistency in his mind where he tried to make sense of the nonsensical, of a destiny and vengeance denied.

Bulma had noticed the cumulus hanging above him, but it had scattered ever since the day the dragon had been summoned. He had rigged himself to some new vision that would strike oil, where eventually the black gold of a Super Saiyan would shoot up from his body, and his body alone, in splendor. That motivation had only intensified upon learning of the impending arrival of the androids and that there were now two Super Saiyans not just one to contend with.

She had been curious about what he was going to do, since none of them had opted to take her very sound advice to wish for the death of Dr. Gero so that the androids would never be created. So his solution was gravity.

She tapped angrily away on her computer, not noticing that she had left the cap locks key on and her text was all capitalized. They were all battle hungry maniacs, fight junkies who didn't care about the Earth or even worse, about her beautiful privileged self, and that she might not get to live all of her dreams because they wanted a good fight. Kuririn had tried to placate her by reminding her that Piccolo and especially Vegeta, were unpredictable and there was no telling what they would do if they didn't have a common enemy to unite them. And now they were bringing her father into the mix.

She was brought back from her thoughts by the sound of a chair scraping across the floor, and then she couldn't hear her father or Vegeta anymore. That couldn't be good. The daddy's girl in her came out to defend. She saved the document she had been typing on her computer, and raced down the corridor from her office to her father's lab.

Bulma came into the open doorway of her father's lab and was greeted with a startling scene. Her father's computer chair was overturned and he had his hands up over his head in the universal symbol of surrender. Vegeta was marching towards her dad, outfitted once more in his villainy.

Bulma stepped in between them, her tone matching a strict, no nonsense school teacher. "What is the meaning of this? You don't just get to order people around Vegeta."

Vegeta took her in, with an initial reaction of no more Vegeta-kun then? But he cleared the thought from his head. He pointed to Dr. Brief, "The old man is going to prepare a gravity machine for me, just like the one, no, better than the one he made for Kakarot."

"You've already stolen Capsule Corp. property. You took our ship for months on end and brought it back in awful condition too. I think we've done enough for a space pirate such as you Vegeta."

Vegeta was about to offer his rebuttal, when Dr. Brief spoke up timidly.

"It will get done Vegeta-san. A ship with the capability to reach 300 gs..."

"Daddy no," Bulma protested, "don't let this alien push you around."

Vegeta gave a smile of a scoundrel, proven right once again that you could achieve anything with the threat of violence. But that smile quickly inverted as Dr. Brief finished his statement

"….and Bulma will design the ship for you."

Bulma regarded her father like he had lost his mind. The mind of a genius always teetered on the brink of madness, maybe her father had finally fallen off it. "But daddy," she whined, her voice rolling back the years to a childish tantrum.

"Bulma," he said rather sternly, "you know how busy I am right now. Vegeta-san is your guest, you invited him here, and your mother would be so upset if she found out that you weren't treating a guest kindly."

Her father must have learned that line from her mother's mouth because proper etiquette was her mother's forté.

"You did ask me for a project the other day too. Now I have an investor's meeting to attend, which you told me you had no interest in, so help the young man out. Your mother also informed me that Vegeta-san helped save your life on Namek, so you do owe him."

Owe him? Bulma thought angrily, an eye for an eye to make him blind, that's what I owe him. Leave it to her ditzy mother to construct her own dime store narrative of her daughter's misadventures on Namek that had not even an inkling of truth in it. Certainly, nobody would have corrected her fiction with the facts about Vegeta's murderous exploits, and now her mom was poisoning her dad with her misinformation.

"But, but," Bulma sputtered, as she watched her father shuffle from his lab with his oversized lab coat brushing against the floor. She couldn't remember the last time he had made her do something she didn't want to do. It was so unfair and it was all Vegeta's fault.

Speaking of the devil, she'd have to spell it out for him in terms that even a dumb monkey would understand, that she wasn't going to do a thing for him. Bulma turned to Vegeta, and he had a rather odd look spread across his face, unused to anyone, not even a loon like Bulma's mom, erroneously giving him the title of saviour.

He saw Bulma's cheeks puff up with all the arguments she was going to offload on him, so he beat her to it, his demands were far more important than whatever baseless objections she had.

"You will convince your father to build the gravity ship."

"Huh?" Bulma muttered, with her blow-up imploding back in on herself. "Neither me nor my father are making you anything Vegeta."

"You?" Vegeta came a bit closer to her, rating her critically, from her permed hair down to her tight striped dress that was visible from underneath her unbuttoned lab coat. "You are not capable. I want a gravity adaptable ship not a dollhouse."

First Bulma was struck with the insult of his misogyny. Did he not find her capable because she was a woman? Yes, she was a woman, but don't let my beauty and clothes fool you, that's just a superficial surface, underneath that I'm much more formidable. You'll see that soon enough Vegeta. But then she realized that he wasn't aiming a general disrespect to her sex, it was a much more personalized slight to herself. And that did wound her vanity a little.

What bothered her even more though was that he wasn't launching an attack on her from some outdated Saiyan way of thinking, but from his silent watch he had crossed her out as insignificant. And worst of all, she had wanted to haughtily dismiss him as inferior to her, but he had beaten her to it, in the tortoise sprinting past the hare fashion.

She didn't realize that she had also moved closer to him as she began to strike back. "I'm not building any dollhouses unless I have you as a doll to play with. I have a shrink ray ready just for this that can bring you down to size. And you better believe the dollhouse will be hot pink just like that shirt."

Vegeta's jaw jutted forward angrily. He hated that pink badman shirt...yet he still wore it on occasion. He assessed her again, coming to the conclusion that she was every bit as superficial and trifling as she was trying to disclaim. "Convince your father to construct it for me...or else," he said dangerously.

Bulma knew she should defuse the situation but with Vegeta acting so entitled, she decided to escalate things instead. "Or else what?" she countered. "You try anything and I'll have Son-kun on your back in the same second."

In a millisecond, her back had hit the wall, her feet were suspended from the ground as her own worldview escaped out from her in a gasp, to be replaced by abominable treatment the likes of which she had never experienced before. Vegeta was holding her by the neck against the wall, all he could see was red.

Was she really so craven that she would sound the alarm for Kakarot to save her and that she actually believed that Kakarot could do anything against him? He had somehow expected more from her. He thought she had a little more gumption than that. In his rage, Vegeta momentarily forgot that Kakarot was currently above him in power and he had no memories past his first trip to Earth.

"Did you know," he whispered, his voice dripping with disdain, "that Kakarot has never defeated me in battle? That Kakarot, his brat, the bald one and that coward who cut off my tail all banded together yet they still couldn't defeat me?" Vegeta relaxed his grip on Bulma's throat, so that she could respond but her reply was not to his liking.

"But you didn't win?" she coughed. "Didn't you end up retreating though? Didn't Son-kun beg Kuririn to spare your life?"

Those friends of hers talked too much. What had happened to the warrior code? She wasn't supposed to be arguing with him but should have been silenced into submission. "Can't that puny brain of yours understand that I wasn't the loser in that match? Kakarot didn't win!" he yelled.

"You didn't win either." Tears spontaneously watered from her eyes from the stress of her cut off breath. "It was a stalemate, so as a result, anything you try to do to me will be cancelled out by Son-kun."

Vegeta toughened the hand around her neck, drawing closer so he could see the fear in her eyes that went beyond her impudent words. "Are you sure about that? Where's Kakarot to save you now? Not quick enough, not perceptive enough, not caring enough to come to your rescue. Please tell me, give me one reason why I shouldn't choke you to death right now."

His eyes were deep and dark and merciless, just like the darkness under her bed that she had been scared of when she was younger. Those eyes belonged to the monster under the bed, to that voice from beneath the pillow. But such monsters didn't actually exist, there was nothing to fear at all, just like with Vegeta. She just had to remember to keep telling herself that. She was superior to him and she would demonstrate it right now.

"Because if you had had me on your side," she said in an uneven breath, "you would have become immortal and defeated Freeza yourself." The red in Vegeta's face drained to white as Bulma continued.

"I am the inventor of the dragon radar, while you hopped from village to village on Namek trying to find the dragon balls, I already knew where they all were at all times. With my help, you could have collected all the dragon balls before the Ginyu force even arrived, before Freeza even knew what hit him. You could have even taken the dragon radar for yourself, but no, Gohan told me you mistook the radar for a watch! Of course, you wouldn't have ever thought that Earthlings would possess such sophisticated technology."

Vegeta dropped her to the floor, that had the impact of powerlessness.

"Everything could have been different, the wishes could have been yours, if only you'd had me. You wasted the chances you didn't even know you had. What do you think?" She stood up right in front of him, on the same level. "Pretty impressive for just a doll," she ended, as Vegeta seemed to crumple like a paper tiger beside her. Hands on hips, she asked, "So are you done throwing stones when you live in a glass house?"

Vegeta assessed her differently this time under an unfogged lens. "Earth woman, you will build me the gravity ship, except you will make it up to 500 gs now."

And then it was Bulma's turn to smile with villainy as she had got him to reconsider her. In the end, everyone submitted to the power of her intelligence and danced her dance. She rubbed at her throat. "Oh yeah, I don't think so. Who do you think you are anyways? You can't just manhandle a lady like that and expect to receive anything in return."

He snarled, stretching his body higher until he was taller than her. "Vegeta, Prince of all Saiyans. And who are you to defy me?"

"I'm Bulma, Princess of Earth. This is my world, you're just lucky enough to be living in it."

He stared at her unconvinced.

"Yes, I'm Bulma, and you will call me by my name, I know you know it." That was the respect she commanded.

"Bulma," he said her name as if it were a stubborn piece of dirt stuck to his boot. "No harm shall befall you during these three years if you do exactly as I command, it's simple really."

"And after those three years?" Bulma asked astutely.

Vegeta didn't respond but she saw his cheekbones rise like the blade of a guillotine in malice.

Bulma headed for the door, she'd worry about that after the three years were up. "Ok whatever, small fry," she said as she pushed past him to leave the room.

Vegeta's cheekbones crashed down without a victim to behead. Who was she calling small fry? What was that anyways? Was she making fun of his height? She was just as short as he was!

"What's a small fry?"

She turned back, regarding him snobbishly from head to foot. "Just a bottom feeder."

Somehow he knew that she was insulting him, he just didn't understand the exact context.

"Remember 500 gs," he reiterated, unable to think of a more threatening comeback.

...

A monkey with a tanned muzzle that faded into a coat of white scampered wildly across Bulma's desk. It then sprang upwards and wrapped its tail around an upper support beam and after it lowered itself cheekily by its tail to peer back down at her.

"You certainly are agile, monkey, but that's because I made you that way." Bulma called the monkey down to sit obediently on top of her desk.

This was just one of her newest and zaniest creations. She had recreated the spitting image of a capuchin monkey all out of inorganic materials. At first she had just wanted to see if she could make a cute companion but she was seeing a further use towards the replacement of living service animals with mechanical ones.

"Ok, monkey, now go fetch me a pencil, I got a flowsheet that I have to draft." Bulma beamed at the robot as it not only brought her a pencil but had freshly sharpened it too.

She hadn't been working on her diagram for long before she heard a commotion and a loud banging, like something was being pulled from its hinges near the front entrance to the labs, which was followed by shouts for security.

That could only mean one thing. Her most charming Saiyan guest needed something. "Monkey," she ordered, "go open the door for that other monkey before he tears this one down too." The robot obeyed, easily opening the doors, it being much stronger than it looked, just like Vegeta. It was just in time too, because Vegeta was right there as the door opened.

He scowled at her and Bulma had to cover her mouth from laughing because today he really did resemble a grumpy dwarf.

Vegeta caught the monkey peeking at him from behind the door with disturbingly human-like eyes.

Bulma explained as she saw Vegeta completely baffled by her invention. "It's a helper monkey, you know to do chores and other stuff around the house."

Vegeta looked even more annoyed at this explanation. Was Bulma mocking the oozaru with this fluffy travesty that she was using as a monkey butler?

That reinforced his anger about why he had even come to her lab in the first place. It had been a week and as far as he could tell no work had started yet on his gravity chamber. It should have already been completed by now. He was being too lenient with these Earthlings.

He opened his mouth to speak but was interrupted by Bulma's phone ringing. Bulma ignored Vegeta as he practically ignited into a blaze of rage and picked it up.

"Everything's fine here," she told her secretary, "I'm just having a small pest problem but I can handle it. Just get someone down in construction to install a new door to the labs, thanks." She put down her phone, and regarded Vegeta with a syrupy sweetness. "What can I do for you today?"

Vegeta tried to speak but his words first came out as a biting growl before he remastered his speech. "The gravity ship," Vegeta hissed. "Where is it? Is it done?"

"Oh that," Bulma said blithely, "it's in the pre-production stage."

"Pre-production? So that means nothing's been done?"

"I wouldn't phrase it like that," she put a pensive finger to her cheek considering, "but effectively yes."

"Why hasn't it been completed?"

"I've been busy."

They both saw the monkey stop in front of them to perform a little dance.

"Doing what? Making dancing monkeys?" Vegeta raged, a vein twitching in his forehead.

"Haven't you had enough buffoonery from Kakarot?"

"Ok," she conceded, "because I didn't feel like doing it." She looked up at him, batting her long bambi eyelashes, as if she were going to ask for forgiveness, but then her mouth turned up cruelly and her eyelashes took on the form of black spider legs. "I don't take kindly to threats."

"But I'm the Prince of all Saiyans, you will do exactly as I say, the androids..."

Bulma reclined her chair, letting herself become more comfortable, it would take a while before Vegeta tired himself out. Bulma's eyes glazed over as Vegeta layered her with tiers of embellished threats. A device that she had monitoring the progression of her nanocrystal synthesis dinged on the other side of the lab.

Bulma got up from her chair as Vegeta was in the middle of his diatribe, and walked over to the row of fumehoods. She turned off the heat and removed the boiling flask from its oil bath. Perfect, she thought as she inspected the white product.

"Are you listening to me?" Vegeta growled from behind her back.

Bulma turned back towards him, she had a few minutes to kill before her product would cool down to room temperature and she could work it up, so why not goad Vegeta until then? "Barely. You're the Prince of all Saiyans, you need to train to defeat the androids, Kakarot, revenge, blah, blah," she echoed dully. She then flashed Vegeta the most vomitous smile.

His voice took on the texture of velvet wrapped around metal, as he approached her. "Remember Bulma, I can kill you anytime I want."

Bulma's eyes rolled back so far that she could see her own thoughts. She approached him too. "There's nothing you can do to me."

Her eyelashes were too long, like the feelers of creepy crawlies that were reaching out for him. Vegeta remembered the worms gliding up his body as he lay in his grave.

In that same sweet, honeytrap voice, Bulma said, "You remember what that boy from the future said? That a virus would have ended Son-kun? It would only take a virus nestling into his heart to kill him, who's to say a virus wouldn't do the same to you? You're a Saiyan just like him. I could replicate that virus, manipulate its genetics to make it more lethal and produce a vector to transport it into your body so that it could infect all of your cells. What could you do against that? Do you know how to combat something on a microscopic scale?"

Vegeta looked at her quizzically but didn't respond so Bulma steamrolled ahead.

"I thought not. You're only effective when something big and scary is right in front of you, and even then..." her voice trailed off derisively, calling up pictures of Freeza. "You may be master of the macroscopic, but I am master of both the macroscopic and microscopic. I know exactly who you are Vegeta. There's always at least one of you out there. You're just an anachronism, a cosmological constant, something arrogantly lauded, like you're the divine answer to everything, like you're the best bet, but just plain wrong. You're attached to a classical view of the world when a superior theory is available."

Vegeta was unsure of what to make of this little speech. Was she comparing him unfavourably to Kakarot in a very convoluted way and was she also threatening him?

"And I'll be here to disprove you and to point out all your weaknesses. I'm smarter than you are strong. I'm already at the top of my field, so you better learn to not threaten me."

Vegeta finally grabbed her, hooking his hand across the back of her skull, and letting her voluminous hair fall against his rough hand. "Oh? What good are your smarts when I crush your skull and your brains shoot out?"

Bulma touched him lightly, with just one finger on the arm that was clutching her head. "How do you know that I didn't just kill you now by transferring a virus to you via nanobots on my fingertips? How do you know that I didn't just sign your death warrant with a long sickness or something short and painful? You don't, only I'll know, and I won't tell," she announced in a whisper, putting her index finger to her lips.

Vegeta scratched his arm agitatedly. He had been taken aback. "I would force your father or some other scientist to reverse it."

Bulma shook her head. "Vegeta, you don't get it. They wouldn't be able to help you because I'm smarter than them too. By the time they'd figure something out, you'd already be dead in the ground."

"I don't have to eat anything you provide; nor will you touch me again."

"Ahh, Vegeta," she poked him in the bare chest without him making a move to stop her. "But you can't prevent yourself from breathing, and all I need to kill you is one breath. Although, maybe it would be better to accelerate the aging process in you. Saiyans are freaks. You stay youthful until a ripe old age so that you can stay in your prime for battle. But what if I remake you as a 30 year old with the body of an 80 year old? I could make a mutagen that could go into your cells and shorten your telomeres that would result in advancing your old age, to make a sort of Saiyan progeria. Wouldn't that be fun? Wouldn't you feel so very strong?"

Bulma's hand joined his on the back of her skull. "Now don't stand there and tell me that any of your murders were half as creative as that."

"You wouldn't do that, you're good just like Kakarot."

"Am I?" she challenged.

Her voice that had all this time been sweet turned burning hot. She dug her nails into his hand that somehow only made him loosen his grip upon her. "Don't underestimate me, don't say you could murder me in cold blood when I could just as easily do the same to you, if you displease me that is. My death for you won't be all bloody and crude either, it will be a stab in the back from a faceless assassin."

Vegeta was momentarily dogged into silence by her, so much confidence, and they called him arrogant.

Good monkey, maybe you do know when to back off after all, Bulma thought triumphantly.

But Vegeta couldn't let her win just like that. She had her weaknesses too, they were scattered all around her, not just in her weak body but in trivial things, in objects that were worthless but had meaning to her. Vegeta recovered, and with a cool calmness he said, "So I'm only effective when it comes to things on a large scale?"

"Pretty much," Bulma confirmed, "you have no subtlety, no nuance, no substance…"

"How's this for a large scale then?" He tossed everything off her work bench, with the mass spectrometer and her electrophoresis chambers crashing to the floor. He snatched the capuchin monkey and squeezed it until its anthropomorphic eyes burst.

"My prototype," Bulma said outraged.

Vegeta headed back to the fumehood where her nanocrystals were cooling. Oh no, he wouldn't, it had taken her weeks to optimize that reaction. She ran to the fumehood, beating his slow, assured gait. "Don't even think about it Vegeta," she warned as he joined her, with his hands lifting up the sash.

Bulma desperately looked for a weapon and then she spotted the Erlenmeyer flask of aqua regia sitting in the fumehood. Aqua regia, royal water, what she had been using to clean metal residue from off her stir bars but was also a strong enough acid to dissolve gold, and would be absolutely perfect to coronate a prince into a king. If Vegeta continued, maybe she'd dump the entire flask over him...

Vegeta reached for her nanocrystals and Bulma reached for the aqua regia. She tried to pour it over his head but before she could, with a small flow of ki, Vegeta had vaporized it all back into its separate components of nitric and hydrochloric acid. She saw the yellow orange liquid transform into colourless fumes that were eaten up by the ventilation in the fumehood. And Bulma was reminded of Vegeta's power, of all he was capable of, just from his fingertips too.

She felt it then, the reuptake and release of adrenaline coursing through her, as she shivered yet sweated, with her brain pounding the message, help, help, run, run as fast as you can, but she stayed firmly in place.

Vegeta gripped her again, he sniffed the air and detected something wonderful. Fear. Bulma's fear. He could taste her fear, the one that makes your tongue feel like it's encased in mud, that coats your mouth in that metallic fretful taste, that enlarges your pupils, that paralyzes your muscles and that gives you that sensational anxiety-driven panic attack. But her fear didn't smell like any other fear. Oh no, it was better, much better. Hers was a fear alloyed with defiance. It was a kind of fearless fear, a fear in spite of itself that although she had grown out of it, still reared its head under duress like a twang in her speech or a lisp, a fear that was only expressed as a reflex from a history of being prey, while her more evolved mind tried to convince her that there was nothing to fear. He sniffed her again, some merchant could make a fortune bottling that smell. There was no better smell than an enemy's fear.

Bulma wasn't sure what he was doing. "What are you, a dog now Vegeta? Go sniff up someone else's ass. I'm still not doing a thing for you. You'll have to at least give me some sad puppy dog eyes and kiss ass first."

He held her closer with his eyes looking down into hers from beneath a web of black silken threads, as he whispered to her with sanctimonious joy, "You're scared of me." The little genius was scared of him, so he'd be able to make her do as he pleased.

"I'm not scared of you," she denied, even though her voice wobbled as she said it.

"You're scared of me," he stated matter-of-factly. Vegeta kept one hand on her and the other around the boiling flask, ready to throw it to the floor. "So will you agree to build it now?"

Bulma couldn't bear to lose the fruit of her labour. She nodded slowly at him.

"What was that? I couldn't hear you," he said as he dropped the flask lower to the floor.

"Ok, I'll do it you monkey bastard."

Her forced obedience was the nicest thing for him to hear, and he had hardly had to put in any effort to earn it. "You have one week," he said, as he reclamped her flask back to its stand.

Vegeta exited the lab while Bulma's eyes emitted charged particles of gamma radiation at his back. Here she was, lady bountiful, taking him in like a stray cat, and this is how he repaid her, by destroying her lab? His smug voice after getting her to agree was like shards of glass down her throat. But she wouldn't swallow it, she wouldn't swallow that he had won this round. She would keep her word, she would build the damn gravity ship for him. But unlike her father, she didn't have any ethical objections about it. In fact, she hoped the gravity chamber would become his coffin. She just had to get Vegeta back somehow and have the last word. She had been wrong to try to combat vitriol with vitriol. She knew how to neutralize strong acids and it wasn't with an olive branch but with something more basic.

It had taken Bulma five days to complete the new ship, and Vegeta had remained inside it, foregoing food, drink and sleep for just as long. Despite her prolonged refusal to even start this project for Vegeta in the first place, she had annoyingly discovered that she actually enjoyed building the ship for him and was motivated by the challenges it presented, such as, how to control high gravity in such a confined space and how to reconceive the ship's engine so that it outstripped the one she had made for the trip to Namek. Contrary to what her father had said, he had assisted her in the construction of the ship and she had even shanghaied him into explaining how the different components and programs worked to Vegeta so that she wouldn't have to. Bulma was still smarting from how Vegeta had so underhandedly outsmarted her into doing his bidding and she didn't want to face him again until she had a game plan in motion.

The ship was now stationed far into the backyard, gleaming in the sunlight like a fabergé egg with sophisticated interior compartments of wiring and design. Once the ship had been finished, Vegeta had surveyed it with all the aristocratic hauteur he possessed and finding no faults, he had booted her father back onto the lawn, slammed the door to the ship in his face, and without a word of thanks or any further pomp or ceremony had raised the gravity to 100 gs and had forced his body to adapt to the heavy atmosphere ever since.

And now Bulma was in her office, with the patience of a predator in wait, as she studied Vegeta from the live feed of the ship's security cameras. She watched the graceful clockwork of his katas and the aerial torque of his body as he made his body suffer through grueling exercises. As she watched him, she considered her options. She couldn't just kill him - even if it was just incidental that he would aid them in the fight against the androids. So biological and chemical warfare were out, and although she had so readily threatened him with that prospect, it wasn't really her style anyways. She didn't want him dead, she wasn't a murderer, but she was more of an agent provocateur and total psychological destruction of Vegeta's psyche had a dark irresistibility to it. But how to go about it? How to thoroughly unbalance this man whose existence was unmolested by the trappings of a soul and who didn't seem that attached to life anyways?

Bulma propped her legs up unladylike onto her desk as she sunk into her bonded leather chair, lit a cigarette and pondered. She had entered evil movie villain mode and all she needed was a monocle and a white persian cat on her lap to complete the picture. The answer came to her cold and factual. Attack his pride. Vegeta's pride was the only thing that mattered to him. He carried his pride around selfishly like the skin of a greying lion. Mushroom clouds of smoke clustered around her head as ideas like spores populated her mind with their destructive possibility.

Vegeta's pride was tied to his strength. His body was a compact capsule of unlimited energy and seemingly non-biodegradable parts that he was just cramming more and more power into. But what if she made it so that he thought that he was becoming weaker instead of stronger and that he couldn't surpass his limits? That would definitely push him right in front of the high-speed train of madness.

She could start small too. Just as a trial run, she would tamper with the controls of the gravity chamber. The gravity level was currently set to 100 gs, but she could remotely increase that without the reading changing in the ship. She would watch as Vegeta struggled to adjust to the growing gravity that he thought he had already mastered during these past five days. He wouldn't understand as his body collapsed under the pressure until he would be forced to admit that he was weak. It was so diabolically perfect, the perfect crime, and Vegeta wouldn't even know it was her doing it since she'd be far removed in her office, which gave her the perfect alibi as well.

She minimized the window of the security feed and opened the application for the gravity controls on her computer. She located the gravity gauge and increased it by 5 gs. It was just a small amount to test the waters and that he probably wouldn't notice. "Vegeta, you shouldn't have messed with me. I'm going to make you swirl down a drain into a septic tank of despair."

She steadily increased the gravity from 110 gs, to 120 gs, to 130 gs, to 140 gs and to 150 gs. There was nothing. No reaction. Vegeta still performed the same stunning, death-defying visuals with acrobatic precision. The runt really was strong, much stronger than she had given him credit for. Bulma blew smoke onto the screen that she imagined hitting him in the face instead. She was antsy now, she forgot about her incremental attacks and just ramped the gravity up to 200 gs. He couldn't just remain unaffected by that.

The series of backflips that he had been doing with superhuman ease fell out of sync and he staggered and tripped onto the floor. He roughly picked himself up with a growl and tried to continue his routine, but he kept smashing into the floor. Bulma giggled to herself as Vegeta crashed down again, with much more severity this time. She was just waiting for him to accept that he had overexerted himself and that he needed to get some rest while he would be bedeviled with questions about how he had suddenly become so much weaker.

As Bulma observed him, the cigarette burned low between her fingers, but he didn't get back up. His body curled into itself on the floor, and he looked small and dismal, like a mouse who had just been fronting as the king of the jungle.

Bulma felt some guilt ripple through her, she had just wanted to cause him some distress and to deflate his arrogance a bit, she hadn't intended to actually hurt him. "Vegeta, get up," she chanted to herself. But he didn't, he didn't move, he didn't resist at all as the gravity waves smacked into him. Bulma saw his leg twitch like the last motor reflex after death before rigor mortis sets in. After that, he was still.

"Vegeta?..." Bulma asked her empty office. A minute passed with no changes. What had she done? She had just been playing so haphazardly with someone else's life. She clicked the gauge of the gravitation down to 1 g, and started running out to the ship. That idiot is probably just unconscious she tried to reassure herself...

Inside the gravity chamber, Vegeta's body had the same death-like appearance that she had seen on the monitor of her computer. Bulma circled around his body, unsure of what to do, she wasn't in the business of dealing with corpses. Could a Saiyan have really been broken by her sticks and stones attack? He couldn't handle that little extra gravity?

"Vegeta?" she asked hesitantly, nudging him with her foot. No response. Bulma shifted down to her knees, and positioned her ear to his mouth - no breathing. Her hand went to his jugular - no pulse either. "Shit, shit, shit," she cursed. "You were supposed to be stronger than that Vegeta."

His body was still alive with heat though, like someone had spilled water into a vat of acid, and the exothermic reaction was now refluxing through his blood. But weren't corpses supposed to be cold? Bulma bent down to his face, flitting her hand across his cheek, that seemed to warm her up from the ice cold horror of what she had just done. "Poor guy," she said sadly, "to come back to life to just die again like this."

"Who said I was dead?"

Bulma let out a scream that could have awoken the dead. She would have leapt up from fright, but two very much alive hands locked her in place.

Vegeta's eyes opened, his black irises were two giant vaults that held more corpses than a common grave and he was just going to add her to his body count. "What were you going to do with me, Bulma?" he questioned with black humour.

"I was just making sure you were alright," she stuttered, "you haven't left this room in almost a week."

"So you're here because you care about me, not because you want to destroy me?" He squeezed her hands, and she felt red hot pain and the embarrassment of exposure sink deep within the cavities of her bones.

He had known what she had been up to, her covert operation had been naked for him to see. She had thought herself a sniper but Vegeta had outsmarted her once again and had lured her out into the open so that she would be vulnerable to attacks.

No longer under any pretexts, Bulma asked him flatly, "How'd you maintain the guise of death? I checked your vitals..."

"I belong to the most elite fighting race in the universe, breathing techniques to imitate death were all part of my education. I can even detect incremental changes in gravity. First you tried 5 gs, then a succession of 10 gs and lastly a bundle of 50 gs to make the force in here total 200 gs, isn't that right? If you had amplified the gravity up to 300 gs, you might have given me some trouble."

Such control, so much so that even the part of his brain that regulated heart rate was under his control. Bulma could only respect it. This entire time he had just been playing dead and she had fallen for it.

Suddenly, Vegeta flipped her over, so that their positions were reversed and he was now looming over her with all of his encroaching darkness.

"Seeing as you're at full health, I'll just leave you to it," Bulma said cheerfully, trying to remove herself from under him, but knowing that it wouldn't be that easy to get him to free her. Her arms and legs fluttered against him like finespun butterfly wings that couldn't camouflage her from what she had attempted to do to him.

"Do you know what I do to people that interfere with my training?"

Bulma was a butterfly caught in a jar trying to fly towards freedom, not knowing that she was trapped until death under the bioglass of his arms, that closed in on her like ever shrinking walls.

"I kill them."

Bulma was overcome with a strange, suicidal lust for laughter, and she couldn't contain it. She broke out into an uproarious, breathless fit of laughter that was pure comedic delight and had a slight sarcastic edge behind it. She couldn't explain it, but she was positive that he wouldn't kill her. It was a theory that had been solidified into law. It was as if Vegeta were an actor reading lines for a part that wasn't meant for him, and she could see how miscast he was and how poorly he had rehearsed.

The vaults of his eyes widened, revealing only emptiness and no hidden bodies within them. She was laughing at him! She was laughing at the prospect of him delivering her death. What kind of woman was she? He couched his body further onto hers, crushing the laughter out of her, and her body conformed to the weight of his hard muscles with the softness of a marshmallow.

Although he had tried to eliminate all of her sounds, Bulma could still speak in a sigh that nevertheless had strength behind it. "Here we are with these threats again, is that all you have in your arsenal? You're not a complete warrior."

"What?" Vegeta shouted, as he increased his hold on her, so she could not even flutter against him.

"You're the master of all battling arts except one - wit. You're woefully inept in a war of words. You'll huff and you'll puff, but it's all hot air. We both know you're not going to kill me, at least not now, not when I'm still useful to you, so why don't you aspire to battle me on another level, another playing field, instead of always barraging me with these idle threats? There's more than one way to be strong, why don't you show it to me? I know you can do it and it'll be much more fun for the both of us."

That palpable fear that Vegeta had noted from her when she had first entered the ship had vanished. She had been scared at the thought of him being injured, but not at him causing her death? What a crazy woman, she must be good after all. But where had her fear for him gone? It must be nearby.

He inhaled vigorously and smelled something new instead. In the witch's brew of her anger, her defiance and her promised retribution, there was something else that was almost naughty...and she became for him, lady strychnine, with a dash of bitter amandine cyanide, topped with a sprinkling of deadly nightshade, but there was no longer any fear there. He was almost disappointed, but these new smells, they tasted just as good. What he smelled was a challenge that sent a potent anticipation through him that stayed his hand and that called to him like a war horn.

A chemical imbalance started within him and Vegeta could feel the sudden hike in serotonin, the constriction of vasopressin, the antidepressant of oxycontin, the heightened sensations of DMT and the boost of testosterone all aroused within him. This must be the endocrinology of intrigue and it would be enough to keep himself from killing her - for now. If only she had feared him again, he would have killed her instantly. But with her fear long gone, killing her now just somehow felt hollow. He had to make her fear him again before he could end her.

Bulma just stared at him, waiting for him to come to the same conclusion as her, with eyes that sparked electric blue. The resemblance to a Saiyan female was uncanny despite her colouring being all wrong. And Vegeta could finally pinpoint her scent, she smelled like a Saiyan, and that scent was getting under his skin.

As Vegeta silently deliberated, Bulma felt the rise of exhilaration in her that was like the plummet from the highest point of a rollercoaster, that loop-the-loop feeling in your stomach like there is hardly any net force acting on you. With her heart racing a million beats per second, she saw Vegeta bite back a string of curses.

His eyes sparked dark energy as he said, "Try harder to kill me next time, that was just pathetic," and he slinked off her and went over to the gravity console.

Hmph, she thought, that's right Vegeta, I'm not some gilded butterfly that you can just pin down. Although the lid to the jar had been opened, Bulma didn't fly away, she hovered around the source of danger instead. Bulma rose from the floor, smoothing out the wrinkles in her lab coat. "Don't worry Vegeta, I can do better, I'll have you watching your back, just you wait and see."

"You know I'm going to kill you right after the androids are defeated?" he said while peering at her from over his shoulder.

"I look forward to thwarting your attempts."

"But for now, prove your usefulness to me, since that's the only thing keeping you alive, and make me some fighting bots."

Bulma nodded at him, she could do that for him, after all, he had just told her that he'd allow things to get more interesting around here.

...

He was still surly and taciturn, but if she called him to arms, he was now not above throwing a stinging barb her way and many times he had even left her with no zinging riposte. That rush of adrenaline that their verbal spars gave her, Bulma chased it. And as for Vegeta, he could admit that a different kind of training was beneficial for the mind. He was bored here on Earth and thus far, their verbal altercations were the source of his only entertainment, so he didn't mind obliging her every now and again. And little by little, his range also expanded beyond scare tactics. And so that was how they lived, caught between the storm and the drive that simultaneously described their own characters and the action between them.

"Hey Vegeta, you stink. Why don't you take a shower? What's it with Saiyans and not bathing regularly? There are some useful Earth inventions called soap, deodorant and cologne. You should learn to use them."

Bulma had just entered the kitchen from upstairs in search of a midnight snack and Vegeta was already seated at the table with stacks of plates around him. She had been in the mood for something sweet, but maybe something with a little more spice would suit her better. Just to take another sample to help her decide, she cut into Vegeta with her words again. "Why don't you shower immediately after training instead of eating first? You don't want to have that same stink cloud following you around for days like that time you came back from hunting for Son-kun."

In all honesty, Bulma didn't think he smelled particularly offensive, if anything, he smelled earthy and manly and like hard work.

Vegeta didn't look up from his plate when he said, "And you? You smell like rotten eggs."

"What?" Bulma went to sniff her clothes. "I was working with sulfur compounds earlier, but that was hours ago. I've had a shower since then. I can't still smell like sulfur. I have a date with Yamacha tomorrow, so I better smell amazing."

"Are you sure you weren't sprayed by a skunk?"

"Oh, you're just making this up," Bulma figured. With her nose in the air, she declared, "I smell like a bed of roses."

She opened up a packet of wasabi peas that she had chosen to be her snack as Vegeta moved on to different bait.

"Eating some more? You already look like a beached whale, you could use some training instead."

Bulma shanked him with her eyes. She already worked out multiple times per week in the Capsule Corp. gym, and was damn proud of toned yet curvy body. Just because her body didn't present like she had overdosed on steroids like his, that didn't mean that she resembled some blubbery marine animal. When she had told him to fight back, she hadn't quite been expecting this genre of invective. But leave it to a man, alien or not, to have no recourse other than maligning a woman's appearance. Sometimes this plan to spar with him rebounded onto her but in the end, she always found a way to best him, and this would be another one of those times.

"You're right Vegeta, I won't eat anything else tonight." Bulma threw her wasabi peas unceremoniously into the trash. She walked past the table in the direction of the door, but stopped in front of his chair. "But neither will you," she added vindictively.

"Huh?" Vegeta finally looked up and as he did, he saw Bulma dunk the entire jug of water that had been on the table, ice cubes included, onto his head. She had finally found something basic, or rather neutral, to christen her revenge.

He was soaked and his meal was now soggy and inedible. Vegeta didn't initially react, his mind had taken him to a place of bellicose sanctions, of just desserts, and he needed a moment to feed on it before he came back. How had she gotten past his defenses anyways? Why hadn't he realized what she was doing? He must have been too preoccupied with his food to notice her.

There was silence in the kitchen, but of the uncomfortable variety, where you know something sinister is lurking closeby just you can't see it, and that thing that was lurking was rage. Maybe I went too far this time, Bulma thought worriedly, before she scurried away. Once she had reached the stairs, she sprinted the rest of the way to her room. "Phew, I made it," she said, letting out a sigh of relief.

Suddenly, she felt a hand pull her feet from off the ground. Vegeta had caught up to her, and he was dragging her by the collar of her shirt from her room to the large second floor balcony. The way he was hauling her by the neck was cutting off her air supply.

"I'll kill you," he announced murderously, as his eyes like the prongs on a fork stabbed into her.

The playful games with him were over. Bulma wasn't sure if he was serious or not, but she had overcome her fear of him and she most definitely wasn't going to apologize. The latter would be worse than death.

Once they were on the balcony, Vegeta paused, looking like he himself didn't quite know what to do with her, and had to confer inwardly with his rage for guidance.

In that small space of time, Bulma patted the hair on top of his head and cast an ice cube entangled in it to the ground below. Vegeta's hair had gone from full, flourishing flames that spread up towards the sun to a coat of black soot heaping down his back. Bulma laughed. "Vegeta, I didn't know your hair got so nice and long when it's wet."

Vegeta stammered and looked utterly flummoxed, "I'll kill you," he stated again, this time less convincingly.

Bulma continued laughing and stroked his hair again. Her laugh ended prematurely though, as he tightened his hold around her throat, and lifted her over the balcony ledge. Bulma's eyes widened, but she didn't look frightened, it was just the same old anger and defiance. Her nails started ripping into his fingers in a vain attempt for him to release her.

It was his turn to laugh. "You want me to let you go?"

She glared at him, not sparing one glance for the cold hard cement awaiting her two stories below. Her feet dangled over the balcony and she tried to wrap her legs around the bars just beneath the rail. She was wriggling like a disgusting worm in his arms while he tried to shake the fear back into her. He wanted the idea of falling to terrify her, with it only made worse by her knowing that he'd do nothing to prevent her fall, but it never came. So he had to let that wish go and let her go too.

"Ok, here you go."

Vegeta hurled her towards the ground. Bulma didn't scream, instead she used her last seconds of life to curse Vegeta. She didn't come crashing to the earth like she thought she would, but landed with a big splash into the pool. Her head bobbed up from the water, as her arms thrashed around. The pool wasn't directly below the balcony, but was located further into the backyard. He had purposely aimed her there, when she had thought that she was going to die!

Her vision was suddenly partially blocked by strands of her hair. "What the...?" Her hands went to her head. Her perm was gone, her hair limply drooped down her face in its place. Bulma looked up to the balcony in the distance. Vegeta was regarding her coolly, with his arms crossed. With her hair in disarray and hanging over the surface of the pool like strings of seaweed, she looked exactly like the being she was, especially with that colouring of hers. She looked just like a sea wench.

His voice floated down in a rich baritone towards her, "You should be thanking me, the chlorine should wash that stench right off of you and you can get some exercise too while you're in there."

Bulma shook her fist up at him. "Vegeta, you're dead." Ruining her hair was akin to a declaration of war, and she had plenty more war games in mind.

Vegeta watched her struggle in her watered-logged clothes to make it to the pool ladder, it was like she was wading through pond scum. She looked back at him once more before he went back inside, and it was weird because the way she was looking at him was so serene and innocent, but if he looked deeper into her eyes, there was a sharp glint, and he knew a shark fin was on the horizon.