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The first surprise of the day: when Bulla finally unearths herself from her bed at noon, ignoring Trunks’s rags of, “Well, look who finally decided to join us,” stumbling into the kitchen for something to eat without even having brushed her teeth, she finds it impossible to miss the two gigantic papayas sitting on the rose quartz island countertop.
“Morning, Bulla,” Goten chirps—oh, Goten’s here, too, and he’s eating sausages right off of Trunks’s plate (did he sleep over?), giving her a friendly little wave. “My folks asked me to bring over some fruit. We harvested a crap ton, this season.”
“Oh.” Bulla inclines her head, smoothing down a cowlick in her bangs and resisting the urge to kiss her teeth when it just springs right back up, twice as tenacious with the Saiyan gene of gravity defying hair in her blood. “Well, thanks.”
“Sorry, Goten and I already ate all the peaches,” Trunks says, not sounding apologetic in the slightest. He flashes her a grin, the sort that indubitably makes girls at the company fall over their six-inch corporate-appropriate heels but makes her retch, bright and blinding. “Share those with dad, will you, B?”
“Whatever,” Bulla grunts, rubbing at her eyes as she walks around them and their bar stools pressed meltingly close together, opening a cupboard to reach for a glass so she can pour herself some water. “Where is he, anyway?”
Trunks feeds Goten a piece of the yolk in his sunny side up. “It’s a Saturday morning, so he’s probably been busting his ass in the Gravity Room since five a.m.” He waves a hand. “You know. The usual.”
Bulla fills her glass. The water pitcher handle creaks beneath her idle touch for mercy. “Mhm.” She watches Goten slip Trunks’s glasses further up the bridge of his nose where they’d started to slide down, the two of them giggling over some inside joke they’d probably convoluted before she was even born. “Okay.” The water is lukewarm when she takes a sip.
She wonders what Pan is up to.
She considers asking Goten.
And then she just hefts the papayas under either arm and pads across the tiled floor to leave.
The second surprise of the day: her father is, evidently, not in the Gravity Room. He’s busting his ass, true to prediction, just not in the Gravity Room. Bulla looms over him like a shadow when she finds him doing one-handed push-ups shirtless in the backyard, waiting wordlessly and patiently for him to look up, her expression flat as she observes him. Summer is in full-swing, and the cicadas roar in sync with the ruthless beat down of the sun. She wonders how the hell he’s been here since before it even came up over the horizon.
“What do you want,” Vegeta grunts, eyes trained to the ground as though the freshly-trimmed suburbia-green grass is the most interesting thing in the universe. He doesn’t even phrase it like a question, just blunt and obstinate as though he can’t be bothered to throw some lilt into it. Bulla wants to kick him in the stomach.
“Goten brought these,” she explains, and her lacking specification of what ‘these’ is actually makes him dart his head up, his eyes narrowing as he stares at the large, bulbous fruits she’s holding. They really are ginormous for papayas, huge enough to fit into the dips of her waist, the bends of her inner elbows. “Said they’re from Uncle Goku and Aunt Chi-Chi’s farm.”
“Kakarot?” Vegeta inquires, looking even more skeptical. “What is that idiot trying to play at now?”
Bulla rolls her eyes. “He’s not trying to ‘play’ at anything. He’s a farmer, and our family friend.”
“Sure, that’s what you think, girl,” Vegeta grumbles, gracefully maneuvering himself into sitting cross-legged, making an indifferent motion with a scarred hand that means for her to sit down. “But when it comes to tricky bastards like him, you must always think one step ahead.”
Bulla puts the fruits down, sprawling on the lawn next to him. “Ugh, you’re so lame,” she mutters, flipping her hair over her shoulder as though it’s been fried pin straight to perfection and not a total rat’s nest at the moment.
“Have you brought a knife?” Vegeta scrutinizes her now-empty hands. “I don’t exactly want to rip them open with my bare hands like a savage.”
“Crap.” Bulla looks down at her palms like the sharp object might magically materialize in her clutches at any minute now. In a world like theirs, there’s no ruling anything out. “Nope. Sorry.”
Vegeta huffs as though he’s been thoroughly inconvenienced, but there’s a ghost of a smile on his lips when he gets to his feet and pats her head. “One step ahead, remember?”
Despite it all, her nearly closing in on sixteen, the fact that she’s basically all grown up now and doesn’t follow Vegeta around the house like a pitter-pattering pup wailing Daddy! Daddy! after his heels anymore, she still flushes from the apples of her cheeks to the backs of her ears. “Just go.”
Vegeta snorts, and then he stalks off, but not before he rakes a hand through her hair, smooth as butter, dispelling more tangles in seconds than she could even if she were actually combing it properly. There’s a fizz of ki following his fingertips, and then he’s suddenly already meters away when she swears he was just close enough to touch a nanosecond ago.
(One step ahead. She guesses he’s a tricky bastard in his own right, too.)
She doesn’t have to wait for long. Vegeta returns with a knife and two spoons, which he hands to her before he plops down at her side once more.
“God damn it,” he curses, already most of the way cut into the fruit where he’s splitting it in two, its nectar sliding sticky like liquid gold under the sunlight down the slope of his arm, “so many fucking seeds in here.”
“That means it’s good,” Bulla tells him, accepting the half he passes to her, trading him his spoon. “Maybe. I think I just made that up.”
He levels her an amused glance, his eyes dancing with mirth. “Well, let’s put your theory to the test, shall we?” he challenges, scooping a spoonful of the soft orange flesh from the bowl of its skin before he unhinges his jaw for consumption, his fangs flashing briefly before he closes his mouth around the metal. Bulla watches him chew, his face solemn as though he’s ruminating on something as serious as galactic politics or he’s a food critic on television. Finally, after he swallows, he kisses his teeth and grits out, “Shit, it is good. Damn, I’ll have to kick Kakarot’s ass twice as hard for this the next time I see him…”
“What?” Bulla shovels a spoonful into her own mouth, lapping the sweet pulp off the convex side of the spoon’s head. “You are such a weirdo.”
“You come from this weirdo,” Vegeta retorts, spitting out a seed and saying that word, weirdo, like it’s part of a foreign language and not the one he’s currently speaking, “so you are also a so-called weirdo, as well, by default.” He points his spoon at her like it’s a spear, his focus zeroed in on her machine-precise. “It’s in your blood.”
“Sure, okay,” Bulla concedes through a lazy laugh, carving out another morsel of fruit. Something about that phrase, It’s in your blood, makes her jittery with some emotion she can’t place. The papaya in her hand is suddenly a beating-bloody heart, and a pop of pressure explodes in her eardrums. She shakes her head. “Hey. So are we ever going to talk about it?”
“Talk about what?” Vegeta slices into the papaya more violently than he has to. Spoon, spear. Knife. Sharp object. He turns everything he touches into a weapon, and Bulla is beginning to realize she’s just like him. “I’ve no idea what you’re referring to.”
“The thing.” Bulla purposely herds about a dozen seeds into her spoon, ignoring the vaguely grossed-out, disdainful look Vegeta gives her. “Yesterday.”
Vegeta raises his brows. Both of them. “Yesterday.”
Yesterday, Bulla had put the entire baseball team at her school in the back of paramedic vans and then, in poetic sequel, the hospital. She’d beaten them to sorry pulps and then sat haughty in the principal’s office when she’d been given her two week suspension, which was definitely only a suspension and not an expulsion because she was the daughter of the Bulma Briefs, counting her blessings that it had been Vegeta who’d answered the phone call home and so, consequently, had to come fetch her.
“I don’t see what the problem is here,” he’d said, hulking over her like a shadow with one arm braced over the chair she was sitting in, his other hand was tucked into the pocket of his horrendous khaki pants, looking posed for battle and yet also deceitfully human, maybe just a guy who worked out more than average; her war hammer, her right hand. “They sexually assaulted her, and you want me to believe she’s in the wrong for packing them in? They better have learned their lesson or I’ll give it to them twice as hard as she did.”
Sexual assault is a stretch.
Well, it isn’t a stretch, not really, but frankly, nobody human is on the same playing field as her, so she’s sure it’d be ridiculous to imply any of them could put a dent in her indomitable extraterrestrial alloy. One of the boys had smacked her ass and then the whole lot of them had catcalled her, and they’d caught her on an awful hair day, which meant that there was bound to be bloodshed. Vegeta had flown them home piggybacking her like she was a kid again and then he’d made dinner just for the two of them, carbonara pasta with way too much bacon, and they’d eaten it in silence and he’d tucked her into bed, paranoia in his veins as he’d hiked the covers up to her chin.
She hasn’t chewed in around two minutes because her mind is working on overtime and now she sort of wants to barf, so she startles when Vegeta flicks her in the knee with two fingers, thumb and middle, to bring her back to him.
“Don’t dwell,” he tells her, quietly. “It festers if you do.”
Oh. He thinks she’s still in knots about—some stupid high school boys. It couldn’t be farther from the truth.
“I’m fine,” Bulla reassures him, hating the way he’s looking at her, like she’s a flower about to be blown away by the wind, a fragile piece of paper-thin glass, something that should be shielded. He’d made her a ticking time bomb just by being her father and then treated her like she was something to be cradled even though there was a time when she just couldn’t stop breaking things she tried to hold; ceramics, porcelain, wood, metal, she’d snapped a classmate’s arm like a twig during game of tag at recess, for God’s sake, and all he did was look at her as though she were a toy doll and then gather her into his arms, sweep her hair back and tell her it was all okay when it was clearly anything but.
You have to teach her how to control it properly, Bulla had heard her mother pleading with him one night, in their bedroom. She can’t go on like this. You know she’s not like the others. She’s half you.
Not yet, her father had said, it’s too early, he’d said, even though by the time her brother was that age he had already known the motions of Vegeta’s most prized technique, had already been Vegeta’s little scholar in the training room. She won’t be able to handle it.
Not yet, not ever. Bulla feels her eyes sting with the frustration, forces it all back before she can humiliate herself further. Her father has trained her before, in all technical senses, but nothing more than basic sparring and backyard brawling. That was all he thought her capable of, apparently.
“What do you want me to say?” Vegeta asks her, sounding so stressed out it’s a little hilarious, the veins on the back of his hand illuminated with the papaya sap. “What—do you want me to reprimand you? I didn’t think you did anything wrong. I still don’t think you did anything wrong.”
“I put twenty something teenage boys in the hospital,” Bulla starts, looking him right in the eye, “and you don’t think I did anything wrong?”
“They deserved it,” Vegeta says, without a beat of hesitation. “They tested you, and they got their due.”
“I lost control,” Bulla corrects him, taking care not to bend the spoon beneath her grip. “In the heat of the moment, it felt so good. Hearing them beg for mercy. Sobbing out apologies while I broke their noses and their legs.” She shoves another bite of fruit into her mouth. “But that rush totally wore off later. Sure, they deserved it. But the problem was, I didn’t know when to stop. I could’ve killed one of them—all of them—and that would’ve been for good.”
Vegeta observes her, his spoon dangling between his teeth. He scans her like that for a few passing seconds, and then: “It wouldn’t have been the end of the world if you did.”
Bulla’s stomach lurches. “How could you—how could you even say that—”
“You know your mother has the means to cover it up,” Vegeta says nonchalantly, calm in the face of her horror, licking his spoon clean like it’s an animal’s bone. “Not only that, but we’ve got the dragon balls. And—”
“That isn’t the point!” she finally explodes, throwing the empty skin of her papaya half to the ground, glaring at him furiously through the tears she refuses to let fall. “This isn’t about mom, or the dragon balls, or all the other—insane crap we’ve got at our disposal, it’s about me, and how I’ve ended up, how I’m going to end up, because I can’t—I don’t even feel like my body is my own, some days—”
Her breath is running away from her in ragged heaves. She ducks her face into her lap with her hands over her head, and then there’s the immediate weight of Vegeta’s side crashing against her own, his arm coming to wrap strong and solid around her shoulders.
“Get off,” she seethes, proving unsuccessful in her attempt to shove him away, “get off of me—”
“So what is it?” Vegeta asks her, hushed into her temple, not letting her go for anything. “What is it that you’re trying to say?” What do you need from me? is what he’s asking, and Bulla feels like bawling her eyes out, because all he’s ever done since before she could even walk was give her everything she needed, everything she wanted, everything he probably couldn’t even dream of having as a child. She’s never had to be strong the way he did, detrimental to his survival. She thinks if she could be reborn, cycle of reincarnation and all that, she’d like to be his mother. Raise him with love and give him a childhood that, to her limited knowledge, wasn’t only filled with strife. He’d been a little boy once, and the thought breaks her heart.
But that’s then. That’s then, and this is now. And now, what Bulla really fucking wants to ask is—
“Why didn’t you ever train me?”
The question comes out miserable and warbled, hangs in the air like a bad joke nobody’s laughed at. For a moment, she thinks Vegeta might not have heard her, and she is relieved. She knows she’s a coward for feeling that way. It’s the answer to her own inquiry. But then, Vegeta says, quietly: “Why are you asking me this now?”
Bulla peers at him through the cracks between her fingers. “You’ve always trained Trunks.”
Vegeta stares. He still can’t see the correlation. The longer he looks at her, the more Bulla starts to fear she can’t either. “Yes,” he confirms, slowly.
“So why not me?” she hurls, and it sounds wretched, like she’s a little girl throwing a tantrum over someone having a better toy than her, as privileged and petted as she’s always been. “You’ve always chosen him over me. The only time you trained me for more than an hour a day was when he went away for university.”
“Where is this coming from, all of a sudden?” Vegeta furrows his brow and frowns, deep set. “You’re not interested in that sort of thing, and I’d find no pleasure in forcing you. So what’s the problem?”
“You never cared if Trunks was interested or not,” Bulla counters, hiccuping through her words. “He had more fun skipping class with Goten to go to the arcade in high school and now he likes to play up the rich boy CEO act to a T, but you still drag him kicking and screaming to the Gravity Room at least once a month or whenever he comes home. You don’t treat me like that, like I’m—”
Someone worthy of respect.
She exhales.
Her father loves her to pieces and would die for her over and over again, as many times as he needed to, but he has never seen her as an equal, not even once. He’s never looked at her the way he looks at his son and thinks without a doubt that he could one day be as strong as him, carry on his legacy in the only way that really matters. At least now he has the decency to stay silent as she sniffles through another feeble sob, wordless as he sets their empty papaya boats aside together and gets to hacking the other open.
“I’m not strong,” Bulla says, plain and simple, scratchy and nasal. “I mean, I am, obviously, in comparison to normal people, but—I’ve just got all this energy inside me, these massive reserves of unrefined ki, and it’s keeping me young at the same time it rots me from the inside out. Does that make sense?”
“You are strong,” Vegeta tells her, his tone absolute. “You are one of mine, and so you are strong. That is all there is to it.”
He’s cutting corners, as usual. He thinks her existential crisis is a byproduct of her teenage girl hunger. Bulla gingerly accepts her second half of the papaya from him—this is a well-practiced routine between them, having something she threw away in a fit immediately handed back to her, whole and new and shimmering with his affection. The sun has warmed the fruit to a pleasant simmer, and it’s mushy in her mouth when she slurps another bite off her spoon. “Look at Pan. She’s only quarter, but she can already go Super. I can go Super, too, but it’s so much more remarkable for someone like her.” She licks her lips. “She could probably kick my ass, too. She’s been training since she was tiny, after all.”
“She is different,” Vegeta says, all but rolling his eyes, his tone reserved. “She’s a Son girl. Rough around the edges. She comes from soldiers, not kings.” He tilts his head, pondering. “She is of the same race as you, and that is where the similarities end.”
“Because her grandfather is a third class?” Bulla is the one to roll her eyes this time. “Dad, none of that crap even matters anymore.”
“It matters.” Vegeta suddenly looks very far away, otherworldly, not existing in the same timeframe as her. Stuck somewhere far, far in the past. “It almost worked, back then. Because of this, it matters.”
Almost worked. It didn’t, though. Bulla watches him chew on his spoon, the fruit’s pulp long swallowed, his teeth grating against nothing but steel. “I could be stronger.” I could be more in control of myself. She examines his side profile, palace portrait striking. If you helped me. But she is her father’s daughter, and his ego is as much a part of her as she is a part of him.
“There is no need,” Vegeta argues, his tone level, but also strict—it’s that voice he uses when he is leaving no room for argument, but she’s always known how to weasel through his cracks. “I will always be there to protect you.” He’ll outlive her. He’ll have to bury her. “Your brother will be as well, although I’ll have to whip him back into shape soon enough. There is nothing for you to trouble yourself over.”
Bulla bristles. She feels less like something to be protected and more like a star on the verge of explosion, these days. “And what if I want to protect myself? What if I want to—”
“Nonsense,” Vegeta shuts her down, instantaneous, casting her a hard glance that tells her she’d better drop this bright idea if she knows what’s good for her. “If you think that I would ever endanger you on the battlefield, you have another thing coming, you foolish girl. It is not your place. Do you understand me?”
“Oh, I understand you,” she laughs, bitter, resentful. “You think I’m weak.”
Vegeta squints. “What I think is that I’d like my only daughter to be alive and well.”
“You’ve got no problem endangering Trunks,” Bulla rags, taking a vicious bite of the fruit, “so why not me?”
“Trunks can handle it,” Vegeta answers, pushing a spoonful of papaya past his lips with twice her ferocity, neck in neck competition with her. “Trunks can handle it, you cannot. I won’t let you. This conversation is over.”
He’s strong enough for the struggle. You are not. That’s what’s coded into his answer.
“Why?” Bulla asks again, for what she feels might be the millionth implore. “Why, huh? You’ve got no problem letting him risk his life whenever duty calls now that he’s a man—well I’m older than he was when he went up against Buu with Goten, and I’m still always locked in a safe house with mom when shit really hits the fan.” Wryly, with a satiric quirk to her mouth, she drawls, “It’s because I’m a girl, isn’t it?”
The sound of Vegeta kissing his teeth is so loud it echoes in the throes of her skull. “Don’t make this out to be something it’s not.”
“But that’s what it is, isn’t it?” Bulla looks at him, even if he’s not looking at her. “If I was your second son instead of your second daughter you’d have no problem sending me out there with Trunks. You can’t even take me seriously enough to train me properly, dad, face it.”
“I start training you properly, and you’ll get all these rubbish ideas about running out there and going up against things that’ll kill you,” he says definitively, swiping at the sweat that’s begun to bead down the sun-goldened skin at the nape of his neck. “No. I won’t allow it.”
Bulla thinks about punching him, right in the nose. He’d probably let her, and that would just hurt so much more. “Because I’m not a man.”
Vegeta whips his head to the side to meet her head-on. “Saiyan culture is not so primitive. There were plenty of women who worked on the field.”
Bulla just raises a perfectly groomed cerulean blue brow at him. He clears his throat.
“... Lower class women, so to speak.”
“Uh-huh.” Bulla leans forward, gets right under his skin. “But not a girl like me, the prince’s daughter and the princess of nothing.”
“Ha!” The laugh leaves Vegeta harsh and painful, and yet still not without humour. “Just like your grandmother, you stubborn little scamp. She wanted to play war god with her king and look at where it got her…”
Abruptly, he goes very quiet, trailing off like he regrets what he’s just said with his entire being, viscerally. It’s jarring, seeing this hulking, invincible man before her who’s always seemed as big as a mountain look so small, caved in on himself. Bulla feels the guilt swallow her heart whole. The papaya drip-drops sap in tacky streams down the back of her hand.
“I’m sorry,” she says, after they’ve stewed in the silence for at least a minute, because somebody has to say it first and it will never be him. “I shouldn’t have…”
Vegeta waves a hand noncommittally. (‘Noncommittally.’) “Pay it no mind.”
“Grandma, did she…” Bulla works her jaw. It’s rare hearing about her paternal grandparents—Vegeta hardly talks about them, for all his pride in what he’s made of. “She was a warrior?”
“The best.” Vegeta’s voice is raw with something she doesn’t want to place. “When Frieza laid siege on us, she was the first to fearlessly lead our troops into battle against him. There were songs about her. War hymns in her name.” There’s a slight twinkle in his eyes, a child once more as he recalls the woman he’d been born of. “It was wrong of me to water down her achievements in that way. She saved many. Slaughtered even more of Frieza’s soldiers.” And as quickly as it came, that babyish wonder is gone, replaced by the hard lines of his grizzled face, chiseled with the life he’s lived. “But it wasn’t enough, in the end. None of it ever was.”
(It almost worked.) Bulla can see her, in her mind’s eye, even if she has no idea what her grandmother looked like. A shock of thick dark hair, facing the direction of the rising sun like a crown. Prominent features you can make out from light years away, a nose and a mouth Bulla hopes she’ll grow into one day, a warm embrace in the sanctuary of those strong arms. A soft breeze envelops her, a brief blip in their dimension where she can feel that she is here, that she never left.
Ah. It would’ve been nice.
Bulla nudges her elbow with his. “Sounds like she was an amazing lady.”
Vegeta smirks. He lowers a scoopful of papaya into her empty bowl. “She was.”
Bulla eats what he’s given her. She always does. “But I’m not her.” She can see her reflection in his eyes, technicolour in the bends of his black. “I’m my own person. And I don’t need you to treat me like I’m going to shatter into a million pieces if I get hurt.”
Vegeta takes a breath. “If something happened to you, I…”
“Nothing will.” Bulla purses her lips. “Well, actually, yeah, I can’t promise that.”
Vegeta just looks at her, the draw of his brows and the deepening of his scowl saying, ‘See? What did I tell you?’ and Bulla can’t help it—she ducks her face into his bicep and giggles, trying not to think about the tears that are escaping her, hidden against his skin.
“I’m just tired of feeling like I could burst out of my skin at any second now.” She strains her lips to stretch into a grin so she doesn’t taste the salt dripping into her mouth. “You know?”
“Perhaps.” Vegeta stays as still as a statue and pretends he has no clue that she’s crying. “I suppose I could help you with that.” He wraps his arm around her again so she falls against his chest. “One day at a time.”
It’s enough for now. He’s making an effort, and it’s a start. Bulla nods into his sternum. “I wouldn’t wanna do anything more strenuous than that, anyway. I’m a really busy girl, you know.”
“Mhm.”
“And I’d totally get way stronger than you in, like, a week if I trained everyday.”
“Yes, of course.”
They sit there together like that, under the sun with two entire papayas thoroughly devoured, at more of an understanding now than they ever have been. In the distance, they can hear the muted whooping of Goten and Trunks, and when Trunks yells, “Oh, man, Goten, you totally busted the gravity chamber! Dad’s gonna kick my ass!”, Bulla actually has to fight another fit of snickers at the throbbing vein that materializes across the width of Vegeta’s forehead.
“Damn that boy,” he grumbles, his left eye twitching. “Maybe I should just make you my heir instead of him.”
And Bulla just throws his same look right back up at him, his furrowed brows and his judgmental scowl, See? What did I tell you? She’s coming into his colours just fine, she thinks as he swipes a palm over her face playfully, tells her to be quiet when she hasn’t even said a word.