Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

— Stereophonics, Maybe Tomorrow

The air tasted of dust and steel. From the upper terrace, the city stretched flat and colourless, a mesh of roads and light. Clouds loitered low. Rain was waiting for permission.

Vegeta stood with his arms folded, unmoving. Four days here. Four dinners he had eaten in silence, four nights he had slept in a room that smelled faintly of lavender and ozone. The capsule compound was too clean, too quiet. Even its silence had structure.

He told himself he was here to train. The gravity chamber was functional. The food was incredible. The atmosphere helped. All measurable, all justifiable. Still, the facts did nothing to settle the restlessness behind his ribs.

When the wind shifted, he could smell the ocean. Autumn on this planet was a quiet thing. He’d never seen trees redden before.

A planet like this had no business surviving. It was soft. Lush. Ill equipped for war. And yet, it had outlived empires. Even now, the trees clung to the edges of the city. Ferns grew through cracks in the pavement. Humans laughed in the streets. The weak endured.

It unnerved him.

He had trained to the edge of collapse this morning. Muscles still twitched with the memory. No transformation came.

He adjusted his stance. His calves ached from the morning’s strain, but the burn steadied him. A soldier’s ache. Honest pain.

The form continued to elude him.

He had imagined Frieza’s end for years. But not like this. Not at someone else’s hands.

He had heard the stories. On Namek, Kakarot had transformed in his golden glory and boundless energy, the legend made flesh. A Super Saiyan. And it had been him, not the prince of a fallen race, not the one born to lead, forged in fire, tempered in blood.

But that third class fool. The one who smiled too much and never took anything seriously.

Kakarot had killed Frieza.

Vegeta’s hands curled into fists at his sides.

That dream had been taken from him. Stolen. Along with his planet, his birthright, his father, his people. There had been no retribution. Only a ghost story told on the journey home.

Frieza was dead. The prince had avenged nothing.

And Kakarot had not even returned to bask in his triumph. He was gone, somewhere in the stars, unreachable, untouchable, and impossibly ahead.

Vegeta trained harder with each passing day, blood seething with the insult of it all with questions he would never ask aloud. What did it feel like? What had triggered it? And why why why had it chosen someone like Kakarot instead of him?

The form would be his. He would surpass Kakarot. He would make the universe remember who he was. He had to.

He remembered none of his mother’s face. The names of their moons. The scent of their homeworld. But he remembered the silence after its end. The long, empty years of becoming what Frieza required. And then the noise, of loss without ceremony, of rage without end.

There was no rite for the last of a people.

He pressed his palms into the railing, cold metal grounding his thoughts. He didn’t notice Bulma until she was beside him.

“I thought you might want some tea,” she said. No preamble. No smile.

She placed the cup on the ledge, not too close, and waited. He didn’t take it. She didn’t insist.

He had broken stronger people with fewer words. Bulma, untrained, unarmoured, did not flinch. She wore no fear. Just a kind of effortless certainty. He hated it and admired it equally.

“Why are you helping me?” he asked.

She shrugged. “You looked like you needed it.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“I didn’t offer terms.”

He glanced at her. Her eyes were tired. Her spine, straight. She looked at the clouds, not at him. The tea cooled between them.

“You don’t know what I am,” he said, voice low.

“No,” she replied, “but you do. And that seems worse.”

She left him with the cup.

Inside, the world continued. The hum of machines. Her father’s distant monologue. The scent of something frying in a pan. It was all maddeningly intact. And yet, part of him remained on the edge of that domestic rhythm, not within it but no longer wholly outside it either.

At times, he imagined what it might be like to stop running. To allow the silence to reach him. To sit, to eat, to speak.

He imagined swimming in that ocean, not fighting it, not conquering it. He would let it hold him. It reminded him, distantly, of the regeneration tanks, suspended in silence, cradled by something colder than comfort. Like a memory of safety he’d never actually had. Like being unborn.

Once, when he returned late from training, he saw her asleep on the sofa, a notebook on her chest, the light still on. He stood in the doorway and listened to the sound of her breath, soft and untroubled. She stirred and said his name. Just once. He left before she opened her eyes.

Detachment was supposed to be clarity. But it was starting to feel like weight.

He wasn’t done yet. He knew that much. Not with rage. Not with the need to prove that he had survived for something. Not with the lie that he could force meaning into his life through sheer force of will.

He would go back to chasing the form, the legend, the thing that had chosen Kakarot instead. That was inevitable.

The night had deepened around him now. Bulma’s voice echoed distantly inside. Laughter, then the clink of cutlery. Warmth he hadn’t earned.

He stared out into the dark. The sky didn’t answer.

He had dreamt of killing Frieza. Of avenging his people with his own hands. Instead, the tyrant died on another planet, at the hands of a third-class warrior who hadn’t even stayed to claim the victory. The universe had moved on, and Vegeta remained, unfulfilled, unseen, second.

He would never be granted that moment. There would be no justice. No closure. Only power, if he could still grasp it. If it hadn’t already chosen someone else.

He knew even then, on some unconscious level, that this path wasn’t straight. That the relentless and worthy man she saw in him wasn’t someone he could simply become. He would have to suffer for it. Would have to choose it, one day, after falling into everything he had tried to rise above.

He would have to descend first, into pride, into rage, into the man he thought he had left behind. Majin was not a word he knew yet. But its shadow was already forming. A crucible. A return to the worst of himself, so that he could finally choose what came after.

He could not reach her light without passing through fire.

Maybe tomorrow he’d find his way home.

Chapter Text

If I tell you

If I tell you now

Will you keep on

Will you keep on loving me

If I tell you

If I tell you how I feel

Will you keep bringing out the best in me

– Sade, The Sweetest Taboo

The gravity room thrummed, seventy times Earth’s weight pressing down on every surface. Vegeta moved like water poured through a funnel. Controlled, narrowing, lethal.

Without warning, the gravity reverted to Earth’s standard. The gravity slipped away, and with it, the illusion of control. Frieza was gone, split like a rotten fruit under that mysterious teenage boy’s blade. Not Goku, not him, the boy.

The floor under Vegeta’s boots vibrated slightly as the pressure began to shift. 

The door hissed, and a different kind of presence entered. Lighter, sharper.

Bulma. 

She wore a reinforced vest over her tank top, hair pulled up, eyes bright with mischief, her usual air of casual disruption wrapped around her like perfume.

He scowled.

“Go away.”

“Can’t. I’ve got something to test. Needs an elite royal Saiyan.”

A pause.

“Tell me something, Vegeta, how does it feel to fight an enemy who learns faster than you?”

She walked past him to the control room inside the chamber without waiting for permission. She didn’t ask for it anymore.

“I’ve been watching your sessions,” she said, strapping into the harness at the pilot’s rig. “You’re plateauing.”

“I’m not here for your analysis.”

“You're not here to waste time either,” she countered. “Which is why I built something better.”

The drones hanging in the rafters shifted, responding to her presence. She adjusted the gauntlets at her wrists. sleek, custom coded, and then slid her hands onto the dual joysticks embedded in the control board.

“I call them Ghosts. I programmed them based on your own movement patterns. But not just yours. I fed in tactical profiles from Namek, Saiyan pods, even some of Goku’s fights.”

Vegeta turned. Something in his expression cooled.

“You want to spar.”

She smirked. “Ten strikes. You win, I’ll have the kitchen make you that ridiculous four-course Saiyan-sized meal you keep pretending you don’t want. And I won’t steal any bites. Probably.”

“And if you win?”

Her eyes gleamed. “You admit I’m better at this than you.”

He stared for a long moment. Then stepped into the centre of the floor. “Begin.”

With the control room sealed, Bulma restored the gravity to 70G, safely cocooned behind reinforced glass and pressure shielding.

The Ghosts dropped into motion.

They didn’t hover like the old drones. They darted, flickered, feinted, flying not by pre programmed rhythm, but by Bulma’s hands. She shifted the controls like a conductor with a mad, invisible orchestra. Each twitch of her wrist sent a drone into rotation, spinning towards him with calculated aggression.

The first strike grazed his ribs. He didn’t react, but the line of his jaw tightened.

“Point to me,” she said, grinning through the mic.

He lunged. She deflected, rerouting her Ghosts in a swift counter twist. The gravity made everything heavier, slower, but she had learned to compensate. Her fingers danced. Her breath hitched with effort.

He began to sweat. Not from exertion, but from the realisation that she was inside the fight. Watching, yes, but also feeling his patterns. Learning in real time. Just like the other one. The boy who knew his name before Vegeta had ever spoken it. 

In the other timeline, he’d stayed. Long enough to die. That fact haunted him more than the warning.

“Three more points.” Her voice in his ear like static.

He adjusted. Went low, then vanished mid movement. A classic feint.

She read it. Pulled a Ghost from his blind spot and clipped his shoulder.

His eyes flashed. “That was luck.”

“That was calculus.”

He snarled, and for the next sixty seconds, he didn’t hold back. Ghosts exploded. Sparks flew. But Bulma’s focus never broke. She leaned into the panel like it was a cockpit, arms trembling now from the effort of keeping pace, sweat beading at her brow.

Nine to nine.

One strike left.

He feinted high. She pulled a drone across, but he twisted under her projection.

Then, at the last second, she rerouted. A downward snap of her left control stick. One of the Ghosts rebounded off a wall, struck low.

Hit.

It struck the back of his knee.

His leg buckled before he caught himself.

He froze. The glow of the panel dimmed. Silence.

Bulma exhaled. Slumped against the rig. Her hair stuck to her temple.

“Ten,” she whispered.

Vegeta stood at the centre of the gravity room, the last drone sparking faintly at his feet. He stared at her. Not the Ghosts. Not the wreckage. Her.

“You’re dangerous.”

She grinned, already rebooting the system. “Took you long enough.”

Bulma peeled herself away from the chair and walked to face Vegeta. Her cheeks were flushed, breath still uneven. She wiped a line of sweat from her neck and looked at him.

The silence stretched.

Then, as if dragged from him against his will, he said quietly but not gently,

“It wasn’t the machines. It was your mind. Your beautiful, infuriating, impossible mind.”

She blinked, taken off guard. Then something flickered in her eyes. Surprise, and maybe something warmer. But she covered it with a crooked smile.

“Well,” she said, “nice to know you noticed.”

He turned from her before she could say anything else. There was a flicker in him, like retreat, like panic, but his voice came low, even.

“Next time, I won’t hold back.”

“Next time,” she said, already turning towards the exit, “I’ll bring upgrades.”

She left without fanfare.

He remained in the chamber. 

The room hummed around him, lights dimming into standby. He stared at the floor where the final strike had landed, then up toward the place she’d stood.

There was a small indent in the grip panel where her fingers had pressed.

Something inside him twisted, sharp and unwelcome. Not pain, not exactly.

Her mind, he thought again, his mouth set hard.

The boy had her eyes, and something in his features that pulled at memory.

He hadn’t asked. No one had said.

But the thought lingered, just beneath knowing.

He reached for the next training program, but his hand paused just above the panel.

Instead, he sat on the floor.

And for the first time in a long while, he didn’t train. He stayed in the quiet, listening to the echo of her voice in the back of his mind.

Chapter Text

Love me, love me, love me, say you do

Let me fly away with you

For my love is like the wind

And wild is the wind

Give me more than one caress

Satisfy this hungriness

Let the wind blow through your heart

For wild is the wind

You touch me

I hear the sound of mandolins

You kiss me

With your kiss my life begins

You're spring to me

All things to me

Don't you know you're life itself

—Nina Simone, Wild Is The Wind

The kiss had been nothing, and everything.

Brief. Unspoken. A flicker of warmth against the constant cold.

It had happened in passing, between shifts in the gravity chamber, between days when the silence between them stretched so tight it might have snapped. She had leaned in, brushed her mouth against his, and stepped away like it meant nothing.

But he was undone.

He hadn’t touched her since. But he had memorised the shape of it. The press of her mouth. The strange softness of it, as if she were asking a question instead of making a claim.

It hadn’t felt like a challenge, it hadn’t felt like weakness, it had felt like permission. And now, every time he closed his eyes, his body remembered before his pride did.

He stood on the rooftop again.

The wind was high tonight, dragging across the sky in long, uneven gusts. The lights of the city blurred below. Somewhere far off, an aircraft buzzed low over the skyline, too distant to see.

He didn’t move. He hadn’t trained today. Not properly. He’d pushed the chamber past safety tolerance twice this week, and the feedback coils needed replacing. Bulma had told him not to touch them. He had almost done it anyway.

He wasn’t progressing. He was circling something. Too close to see it clearly. Too far to grab hold.

He thought of the teenage boy again. He had her eyes and something in his face, foreign but familiar, hit a part of him too deep to ignore.

Mine.

It made him want to train harder, and made it impossible to focus. In that other future, Kakarot had died. There’d been no warning, no time machine. And still, that version of him had stayed. Why? Why hadn’t he left? There was ample time for his departure between Kakarot’s death and the arrival of the androids. There was no war to win. No rival to defeat. No planet to reclaim. 

What had held him? 

Her. And the boy who carried his blood.

Vegeta didn’t know the answer, but it frightened him, because the question felt personal.

He looked out over the Capsule compound. The pale domes, the garden, the satellite dishes blinking against the wind, and something in his chest pulled tight.

He told himself it was the plateau. That the chamber had stopped working. That he had stopped working. 

But the thought lingered. Not about the future, about himself in the present.

That was when he heard her.

Boots on tiles. A familiar weight in the air, like gravity.

She stopped right beside him.

Neither of them spoke at first.

“Thought I’d find you here,” she said.

He didn’t turn around. Her voice did something to him. It wasn’t violent. That was the problem.

“I needed air,” he said and added nothing more. The space between them felt thick, like heat, like water right before it boils.

“I was going to sleep,” she added. “But then I couldn’t.”

Silence again.

He wanted to say, I haven’t slept since you kissed me. But that sounded like weakness, and he wasn’t interested in sounding weak. 

Then she said, “I have something to show you.”

He followed her down the hallway in silence.

She didn’t turn to look at him. Didn’t speak again. She walked like she always did, like her thoughts moved faster than her body, like the world would catch up eventually. He kept pace without effort. He always did.

They turned into the main corridor and took the lift down to the lab. He recognised the gesture. She hadn’t wanted to leave the thing she was working on. She just hadn’t wanted to be the one to say ‘stay’.

The lab was lit by the low amber lamps she used for late-night builds. Monitors blinked softly along the wall. A diagnostic arm retracted into the ceiling with a sigh.

She walked to the workbench and picked up a capsule. Pressed the button. It opened with a hiss.

A suit unfolded on the table. Not the usual model. Not battle wear, not ceremonial, something new.

He stepped forward.

Midnight blue, reinforced but light. Fitted at the waist. Sleeves panelled with mesh-grade tensile. It looked like it had been poured into shape.

“For off-world training,” she said. 

“Three layers of climate regulation,” she said. “Composite filtration, in case you’re training near gas pockets.”

She gestured to the readout.

“Modelled for extreme gravity shifts, rapid temperature swings. I factored in possible vacuum exposure, atmospheric pressure surges, corrosive wind systems,you know, the kind of places you’d pick.”

He raised an eyebrow, quietly impressed.

“You think you can predict where I’ll go?”

“I’m not here to predict,” she said simply. “I’m here to make sure you come back in one piece.”

He said nothing and watched her hands as she unfolded the inner armature.

“It’s not ready for deep space yet,” she added. “But it’ll hold under high gravity and atmospheric instability.”

He lifted a brow. “Testing phase?”

She nodded. “If the first iteration holds up in the Gravity Chamber, I’ll start refining. Upgrade the matrix. Increase vacuum resistance.”

He looked at the suit again. Studied the seamlines, the stress points.

“You’ve been observing,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.

“You’ve been pushing harder,” she replied. “Your stance has shifted. You favour your right side. You’re holding tension in your upper back.”

She paused.

“And you’ve stopped checking the chamber readouts before you go in. You already know what they’ll say.”

He looked at her, not directly. Just long enough for silence to settle between them again.

“It’s only a matter of time,” she said. “Before you go.”

A beat.

She stepped back from the table and folded her arms, but not in defiance. In steadiness.

“I don’t know why that bothers me,” she said. “But it does.”

He let the words hang.

There was no confrontation in her tone. It was not even a plea. It did something to him, that she would tell him this plainly, and still offer him the suit.

He stepped closer.

“Do you want me to stay?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I want you to do what you have to do.”

He reached out and touched the suit. His fingertips light on the collar. The fabric was warm, as if it still remembered her hands.

He turned to her slowly. 

And then, with no hesitation, he kissed her.

Not like the hallway. Not a flicker. Not a question.

This time, it was an answer.

She didn’t speak after he kissed her, didn’t ask what it meant, didn’t push for more.

She stepped back, very slightly, and said, “Not here.”

He didn’t need to ask why. He saw the corner lens blink red. The gentle pivot of a camera housing tracking motion. Capsule Corp didn’t sleep, especially its security system.

She crossed the room and pocketed the capsule, then walked past him without a glance back.

He followed.

Not because he was told to, but because there was nowhere else he wanted to be.

Her room was warm and dim, the kind of dim that invited silence, not sleep.

She shut the door behind them and let the click settle into the air.

There were notes on the desk. Schematics. A half-finished drink. The clutter of a mind that never rested. Her boots left prints on the rug. She didn’t apologise for the mess.

She turned to him and looked.

He stepped forward, but didn’t touch her.

It was her hand that found his.

There was no hurry, no hunger. They surrendered to what was inevitable.

He let her unfasten the upper layer of his suit. He let her pull the fabric from his shoulders. He let her study him like she was solving something.

He touched her at her jaw, and she closed her eyes. It wasn’t a kiss yet, but it was the beginning of them.

When she undressed, it wasn’t performative. It was methodical, as if what was happening between them was natural. Expected. A question answered long ago.

He didn’t say anything as they moved to the bed. The way she climbed back into it, half naked, barefoot, certain. This did more to undo him than anything else ever had.

He followed her down. Slowly. Reverently.

When he entered her, he did it with a kind of care that surprised them both.

Later, when her fingers tightened against his shoulder, when her mouth found his neck and he made a sound he didn’t recognise, it hit him like fire. She would have been a magnificent Saiyan queen. Not because she fought, but because she built.

Because she made things that endured. Because she didn’t flinch. Because she saw him, not for what he could become, but for what he already was.

And in the deepest fold of his desire, the vision blossomed further. Her beside him, not in armour, but on a throne of her own making. His equal in defiance, in creation, in pride.

Their children. Loud, brilliant, wild. His blood tempered by her impossible mind. Warriors of a new kind.

When he came, it was with the force of that truth buried in him. He wanted that life. Not as a fantasy. As his future, their future.

It terrified him.

Afterwards, they didn’t speak.

She lay with her head against his chest. One arm across his waist. The blanket pulled over her shoulder.

He stared at the ceiling, and the silence wasn’t heavy.

It was honest.

He’d never had that before.

And already, the thought began to form,

I can’t stay.

From then on, there was no ritual, no secrecy. Only the quiet understanding that he would follow her upstairs when the hallway lights dimmed, and that she would leave the door unlatched.

He never stayed until morning.

Except once, after a night slower than the rest, her hand resting flat against his chest like it had always belonged. He didn’t leave.

He closed his eyes. And when he opened them again, it was morning.

She was still asleep beside him, hair tangled against the pillow, breath warm against his shoulder.

He didn’t move. Not for a long time.

And for the first time in memory, he didn’t feel like something was chasing him. Not Frieza. Not Kakarot. Not fate.

Just the soft pull of her hand, and the silence of a room that asked nothing from him.

That was the night he stopped dreaming of war. That was the night he began to fear peace.

After that things began to shift. The suit improved. She reinforced the micro-mesh to withstand longer term vacuum pressure. Rewrote the filtration algorithms. Built emergency thermal regulators into the lining.

He tested it in the chamber. Cranked the gravity to twice his maximum. Launched into low orbit without warning.

It held.

When he landed, she was waiting. She didn’t ask how it went. He didn’t tell her the suit was ready. She knew.

A few days later, when the replicable suits were complete, she found him in the control room. He was standing at the main console when she walked in, already pulling up coordinates. The holomap flickered to life, casting pale light across the room. He rotated the projection, narrowing in.

Stars blinked and realigned. Systems shifted into view, unfamiliar sectors, far beyond what they’d discussed before. She watched quietly as he zoomed out even further, until the map displayed a stretch of space she hadn’t fully charted. Sparse. Unstable. Largely unmapped.

She stepped closer.

“This isn’t any of the systems I modelled for,” she said.

“No.”

Her eyes traced the readings: high radiation, unstable gravity wells, limited planetary data, hostile in ways even she hadn’t prepared for.

“Further than I thought you’d go.”

“Yes.”

The map rotated once more. She paused, reading the implications in the empty void of the map. Even with her intelligence and technology this was past what she could bridge.

“Even if I tried, I wouldn’t be able to reach you.”

“I know.”

He stood still, watching the quiet spin of the stars.

After a long pause, his voice dropped.

“I wanted you to know where.”

She didn’t answer and let the projection rotate one final time before powering it down.

The stars disappeared, but the distance remained.

That night, when they laid together, he sometimes thought of the teenage boy again. The unbearable knowledge that he would grow up in a world Vegeta hadn’t saved.

Not in this timeline. That was what this was all for. Not the chamber, not the armour, not even her. 

The future.

He had to become what Kakarot had become. And he couldn’t do it here. Not surrounded by comfort. Not softened by her hands and her voice and the way she said his name like it wasn’t a warning.

They moved more slowly that night. As if their bodies had learned to remember.

He held her longer.

She didn’t ask for anything.

The next morning, he stood in the launch hangar before sunrise.

The air was cold. The stars distant and unwelcome.

He left her no capsule, no message on the intercom, but a small envelope on her workbench, folded neatly, written with her name on it.

Inside, a note in his hand, tight, angular, deliberate:

Bulma,

There are things I understand with my body before my mind can catch up.

You are one of them.

I came here to surpass everyone. I wasn’t meant to stay, but you gave me reasons to. Even when I didn’t want them.

I don’t have the capacity to be more than one thing. Right now, I have to be what I was born to be. But I will return when I have earned the right to be more than that.

Vegeta 

She read it twice. Folded it again. Tucked it into the drawer beneath her tools.

Then she got back to work.

Chapter Text

There is no pain, you are receding

A distant ship floats on the horizon

You're only coming through in waves

Your lips move, but I can't hear what you're saying

When I was a child, I caught a fleeting glimpse

Out of the corner of my eye

I turned to look, but it was gone

I cannot put my finger on

The child has grown, the dream is gone

I have become comfortably numb

-Pink Floyd, Comfortably Numb

The signal appeared first as static, a thin pulse on Capsule Corp’s long range receivers, buried beneath background noise. Bulma saw it immediately.

She had stopped allowing herself hope months ago, or told herself she had. Yet her eyes had never fully abandoned the telemetry screens that tracked the outer sectors, waiting for something she refused to name.

The ship’s identifier blinked faintly on the upper display: VGT-9001.

Her breath caught before she could suppress it. He was coming back to Earth. 

She activated Capsule Corp’s deep sync protocols, and as the starship approached the system, its automated logs began streaming in. Navigation data, orbital charts, environmental scans.

Hours passed as the data accumulated. He had gone farther than she ever imagined. The plotted course traced reckless arcs across regions she hadn’t fully charted. Rogue star systems, unstable gravitational fields, radiation zones no sane vessel would approach.

Planet after planet, he had pushed himself into hostile terrain. Gas giants writhing with silicate storms, dead moons split by magnetic shears, frozen dwarf planets with crushing atmospheric pressure.

She studied the downloaded sensor logs. The numbers were cold, but what they represented landed like a weight in her chest. He had chased power into the jaws of annihilation. Alone.

Her hand hovered above the console. She closed her eyes briefly, forcing the data into its necessary compartments inside her mind, the same compartments where she had stored the months of his absence.

And then her fingers traced to another file cluster of failed transmission logs. The one message she had written to him. She clicked through the subdirectory. There it was: Transmission Failure – Deep Sector Bounce Error.

She had sent it nearly eight months earlier, when the baby inside her had started to kick against her ribs, when she had decided that pride was no longer worth more than hope. A simple message, telling him she was pregnant, that he was going to be a father.

But the transmission had never made it beyond the deep sector relays. The distance had swallowed it. He had never heard her words, and she wasn’t going to resend it now that he was returning.

She stayed in the lab that night, surrounded by maps of his trajectory. She kept his data on screen even after she stopped actively working, letting it fill the silence. 

Her mind worked as it always did, breaking the data into schematics, stress tolerances, material failures.

The suit she had designed for him would have taken more than even her calculations had anticipated. The environmental logs told the story. Extreme gravitational shifts, atmospheric pressure spikes, magnetic storms, radiation fields that would have eaten through weaker alloys.

She expects her designs to have held, barely. But she saw where they would have failed if conditions had pushed even slightly further. It wasn’t enough. Not yet.

She fed the data into her models, recalibrating the environmental tolerances. Adaptive climate mesh, deeper pressure seals, improved impact dispersion. 

She would build a new generation of protection. Stronger. Lighter. Ready for whatever awaited next. Because that was still the only way she knew how to care for him, by making sure he survived.

You’re dangerous , he had once told her. She hadn’t understood then how deeply those words had cut into him. Now, with his ship racing closer each hour, she understood more than she wanted to.

When his ship finally breached atmosphere, three days later, she stood alone on the Capsule Corp landing platform. Waiting.

The air was still when the ship landed. The sky had shifted to that faint bruised colour between night and dawn, and the soft hum of Capsule Corp’s landing stabilisers vibrated beneath Bulma’s boots.

She had been standing there for over an hour before the ship finally broke atmosphere. She watched it descend with clinical detachment, as though observing the final stage of an experiment whose outcome she feared to know.

The vessel’s landing gear engaged with a quiet hiss. The ship was smaller than when it had departed. Patched, weathered, its exterior streaked with the burn scars of atmospheric entries that should have killed it.

The hatch opened. Vegeta stepped out. They looked at each other, and for a moment neither of them moved.

He looked almost unchanged. No visible injury, no limp, no frailty. Yet everything about him was different. The weight of his presence was sharper, heavier. His aura was coiled beneath his skin like a waiting blade.

But his face was tired. Not from battle. From something deeper.

Bulma stepped forward slowly. Deliberately.

“You made it back,” she said softly.

“I said I would,” he answered. The words hung in the air between them like fragile glass. There was a long silence. His jaw tensed and began to step towards her, his eyes searched hers for something unspoken.

Finally, her voice dropped to almost a whisper, “Show me.”

For a brief instant, something flickered in his gaze. Pride, fear, hesitation, then resolve. 

Without a word, his posture straightened, breath steadying. The air thickened. A faint hum of power began to rise from beneath his skin, first subtle, then growing. The wind stirred around him as golden light bled from his aura, licking at the air like flame.

In seconds, his hair lifted into that unnatural, radiant gold. His eyes snapped into brilliant teal. The ground beneath them quivered faintly with the pressure.

Yet it was calm, controlled, and not a burst of rage. It was a transformation mastered. He held the form effortlessly. The strain she had once seen in Goku’s early transformations was absent.

Bulma exhaled slowly, the weight in her chest loosening. She watched him not as an engineer now, but as the woman who had built his armour, carried his child, and waited through the long silence.

“You did it,” she whispered, smiling.

“Yes,” Vegeta answered, his voice quieter now, almost vulnerable beneath the pride. “I am more than I was when I left.”

His aura lowered gradually as he powered down. Gold fades back into black, light evaporating into stillness once more.

The silence between them softened. Bulma nodded once, her voice steadier now. “There’s someone you need to meet.” She turned, leading him inside.

Her bedroom was quiet, dimly lit by the soft glow of the early morning. The small crib sat near the window, where the first thin light pooled against the pale fabric.

Bulma moved towards it with steady hands, though her chest was pounding. She reached in and lifted the child.

Trunks stirred against her shoulder, breathing softly, his small hand curling instinctively into her hair. His fine lavender hair shimmered faintly in the low light, and his eyes blinked open, wide, bright, and impossibly blue.

Vegeta stood still as stone. His gaze fixed on the boy. And then, without intending to, he felt it. The chi was faint, flickering, like the pulse of a candle behind glass, but unmistakably Saiyan. A thread of something ancient and familiar, buried in the fragile body of an infant.

His chest tightened at the recognition. His instinct didn’t ask for permission. He simply knew. His breath caught, barely audible, but unmistakable to her.

He didn’t need to ask. 

Bulma spoke softly, “This is Trunks.”

The silence pressed around them, heavier now.

Vegeta’s voice came, low, rough edged:

“He’s mine.”

It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” Bulma answered simply.

His eyes swept over the child, searching, perhaps, for something familiar in the softness of features that barely resembled his own. There was nothing Saiyan in the boy’s hair or eyes. Yet the chi pulsed with a quiet echo of his race.

Vegeta’s hands remained clenched at his sides. His jaw tightened, and for a long moment, he said nothing more.

Finally, his voice returned, quieter than before. “I thought of him,” he said. “Out there.” His gaze drifted briefly, as though seeing some far star still burning in his memory. “Before he existed.”

“I did too,” she whispered.

Neither spoke again. The words had grown too dangerous.

The child sighed and settled back into sleep.

Vegeta took one slow step forward, tentative, as though approaching a cliff’s edge, and let his hand lift.

His fingers brushed the down of Trunks’ hair, featherlight, and hovered there. A breath. A connection.

Bulma watched, her throat tightening. She said nothing.

Vegeta lowered his hand, withdrawing it as though unsure he’d earned even that. His face was unreadable.

The silence stretched between them, but this time, it was not the emptiness of before. Something had shifted. A fracture, not yet a wound. Neither dared move any closer.

—

They lived beneath the same roof now. They moved through the same rooms and corridors. They exchanged words when necessary, about repairs, upgrades, the android threat, Capsule Corp systems. Never about themselves.

From the beginning, they hadn’t spoken about where he would stay. Capsule Corp was vast. There were spare rooms near the gravity chamber,  private, distant, safely removed from the nursery and the fragile domesticity he wasn’t ready to inhabit. But he hadn’t chosen those. Instead, without asking, he took one of the unoccupied rooms down the hall from Bulma’s suite, near the nursery. Close enough to feel her presence through the walls. Close enough to hear his son’s faint cries in the night.

Neither of them knew who had drawn the boundary first. But once drawn, neither crossed it. It was easier this way. Safer. It was the distance they both understood.

For Bulma, the ache of his absence had been constant during his time away. Now, with him under the same roof, his presence offered little comfort. He was here, yet never truly with her. She saw him at breakfast, sometimes late at night, in passing. Brief collisions that never lingered.

At night, as she worked, she would hear him stir before dawn. Sometimes, she found him standing at the nursery door, the door cracked open just enough to let him see inside. His arms folded behind his back, head tilted slightly, watching as Trunks slept. His face unreadable. His longing buried beneath years of discipline.

Once, early on, before the rhythm of silence had fully settled, they had allowed themselves something closer. A training session, a challenge she had offered, or maybe he had invited. It had ended not in violence, but in something far more intimate, the awareness that their minds moved together, effortlessly, feeding off each other’s precision. 

She had been ready then, willing to follow the pull between them wherever it led. But he had not. Not yet. His instincts recognised this long before his heart admitted it, how easily she distracted him, how much space she occupied in his mind. When the pull threatened to undo him, the distance became necessary. He chose it. She allowed it.

In the gravity chamber, the machine sang its violent song at all hours. Vegeta trained as if chased, as though fleeing something he could never outrun. The regulators strained daily under the increasing gravity levels. Emergency fail safes triggered often. She improved the algorithms quietly, repairing the damage as soon as he left the chamber.

It was how she remained connected to him now, through the machines that absorbed his rage and his discipline, through the quiet protection she offered without being asked, through the distance he insisted on.

Sometimes she watched the footage, private glimpses of his power coiled into perfect control. The gold flared often now. Not as outburst, but as mastery. His Super Saiyan form had become his second skin. Smooth, contained, steady. He was magnificent and unreachable. She stopped interrupting him.

The androids loomed larger with each passing week. The tension in the world stretched thin. When Goku recovered from his illness, the unspoken rivalry between him and Vegeta hovered like electricity in every shared space.

But Vegeta held himself back. “We end the androids first,” he said once, voice even, eyes hard. “Then Kakarot will be mine.” It was not patience. It was control and calculation. For now.

In rare, unguarded moments, Bulma would catch him watching Trunks from across the room. The baby, crawling now, would babble on the living room floor, reaching for blocks or pulling himself along the rug.

Vegeta never approached. But his eyes followed every movement. Every stumble. Every small flash of energy as Trunks laughed or tired himself into sleep. Something flickered in his face in those moments, not longing exactly, but a kind of unbearable weight. Fear, perhaps. Or guilt, or the overwhelming knowledge that he loved what he did not know how to hold. Bulma felt it too. She never forced him closer. Neither of them were brave enough to reach further.

The house was warm. Their child was healthy. The threat of war was growing. Inside these walls, they lived behind glass. Two people in love, keeping just enough distance to survive themselves.

—

The androids arrived. And with them, doubt. 

Mirai Trunks had warned them of two. He knew their faces intimately, Seventeen and Eighteen’s. 

But when the pale, mechanical forms of Nineteen and Twenty emerged, everything shifted. No one expected there could be more. Not even him. They assumed these were the androids he had come to stop. No one questioned it. Not yet.

When the battle began, Bulma should have stayed behind. She knew that. But something sharper pulled at her. 

She understood the devastation these androids had caused in another timeline. She had listened to her son’s haunted voice describe a world destroyed. Now, finally, they were here. Real. 

She needed to see them.

To understand what they were fighting. To witness, even if only for a moment, the monsters that had stolen so much.

She flew towards the battleground, baby Trunks secured beside her. The capsule aircraft was small, fast, built for manoeuvrability. But it wasn’t built for this. The blasts tore through the sky as she approached. One ruptured too close. The shockwave sent debris spiralling towards the aircar. The stabilisers buckled. The vehicle pitched, engines faltering, listing dangerously.

Trunks wailed from his seat beside her. Before she could react, a sharp flash of energy sliced through the air. Mirai Trunks appeared, sword drawn, cutting the debris cleanly. His free hand caught the aircar’s frame, steadying its fall before it could drop further. With precise control, he lowered the vehicle safely to the ground.

Bulma was breathless, her heart hammering, but unharmed. Trunks wailed, frightened but safe. “Thank you,” she managed. 

Future Trunks only nodded, his face pale, jaw tight. His eyes flicked back towards the battle still raging beyond them.

Vegeta had felt it all. The sharp dip in her chi. The infant’s flickering energy signature. For a breath, fear had pierced through him. And then, calculation. He saw Mirai Trunks move to intercept. He chose to stay where he was. The fight was still unfolding. The threat remained. He did not leave the battle.

That night, the house was quiet. Mirai Trunks stood in the doorway of the balcony. Vegeta didn’t turn.

“You felt them fall.”

“Yes, I did.”

“You didn’t go.”

“No.”

“They could’ve died.”

“They didn’t.”

“That was luck.”

Vegeta’s jaw flexed. “It was calculation.”

Trunks stepped closer, voice tightening. “You gambled with her life. With mine.”

Vegeta exhaled, steady but sharp. “I calculated. And I miscalculated.”

That stopped Trunks.

Vegeta finally turned, facing him fully. His eyes were steady, not cold.

“I’ve seen your mother survive things most would not. She is the last adult standing in your ruined future. She raised you alone, in a graveyard of corpses.”

His voice dropped lower.

“But today…” His voice tightened. “I forgot that being fearless does not make her indestructible.”

Vegeta’s hands flexed once, then steadied.

“Her strength deceives even me.”

Trunks held his father’s gaze. “And what about your child?”

Vegeta’s lip twitched. “No. He isn’t indestructible either. And she still brought him into that battlefield.”

Before Trunks could reply, Vegeta’s voice dropped further.

“Don’t pretend she was forced to go. She chose to be there. She wanted to face what ruined your future, and that was her recklessness.”

Finally, Vegeta spoke again — quieter, but more dangerous.

"I love that woman."

The admission came hard, sharp.

"I need her like a blade needs balance. Without it, only you break."

There had been a moment, early after his return, when he had nearly lost that balance, when they had stood too close, let too much show.

He would not make that mistake again. Not yet. Not while danger still hovered. Not while loving her fully might cost them everything.

The words hung sharp between them.

For Mirai Trunks, who had lived his whole life holding a sword steady in a broken world, power without balance was only destruction. He understood that far too well.

His father knew it too, and perhaps that was what terrified him most.

Vegeta's voice grew steadier again, his walls sliding back into place.

"This is between her and me."

Mirai Trunks said nothing. The ache sat quietly between them. Vegeta turned back towards the balcony, ending the conversation without another word.

The next day, Vegeta fought Android 19, he was devastating. The gold flared. His strikes were sharp, calculated, cruel. He dismantled the android with terrifying ease.

The others watched in stunned silence.

Vegeta stood over the broken machine, breathing steadily. His power buzzed in the air like a live wire.

For the first time in years, he felt control. Victory. Not peace. Never peace. Pride. And hunger.

Bulma stood far off, baby Trunks in her arms, watching the golden aura flicker around him. It would not be enough. 

She knew that now.

It would never be enough.

Chapter Text

The wounds on your hands never seem to heal
I thought all I needed was to believe
…

Learning to cope with feelings aroused in me
My hands in the soil, buried inside of myself
My love wears forbidden colours
My life believes in you once again

— Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Sylvian, Forbidden Colours

At some point in the night, he walks to her door and stops. The corridor is quiet. The nursery light is still on. A soft pool of white under the frame. The door is closed, not locked.

It used to be open. Just enough to see the edge of her bed, the light on her shoulder, the curve of her breath. That was before. When things between them didn’t need permission. When he would step inside, undress without words, and she would reach for him like it was inevitable.

He remembers the feel of her back under his hand. The sound she made when he touched her hair. Her thigh hooked over his waist. The stillness afterwards.

Now, he stands outside the same door and doesn’t move. He knows she’s awake. Her chi is calm but alert, like someone waiting without admitting they’re waiting.

He could knock, he could go in, but he doesn’t.

Downstairs, the lab lights are still on. He ends up there. 

The room smells like solder and citrus. There’s a mug on the workbench, half-finished coffee inside. He can see the smudge where her thumb rested on the rim. He stares at it like it might offer some kind of answer.

She’s building again. The suit is in pieces on the rack. New alloys. Improved shielding. A way of saying I want you to survive.

He touches nothing. He doesn’t belong to this place. But she keeps building for him anyway.

He stays until the lights time out and the room goes dark.

—

Upstairs, Bulma lies on her side. She doesn’t sleep, but she doesn’t get up either.

She knows he was at the door. She felt it, like a change in pressure, like the wind rising before a storm.

She remembers the way he used to sleep beside her. Always on his back, arms crossed behind his head, like even in rest he refused to surrender. Once he pulled her into him, rough and uncertain, like something breaking open inside him. She had kissed his shoulder and didn’t say anything. He slept in that morning. He hasn’t since. 

She leaves the door closed now. Not as punishment. As protection. For both of them.

Eventually, she hears him go. She turns to face the nursery wall, and closes her eyes.

—

In the morning, the mug is washed and back on the shelf. He trains longer than usual. She doesn’t ask why. But she checks the chamber’s oxygen seals and replaces the thermal regulators anyway. Just in case. Neither of them says anything.

But they both feel it. Something between them had hovered, close to breaking. Then it passed. Unspoken. Not absence exactly, but near enough to feel like it.

Chapter Text

Wake up the dawn and ask her why 

A dreamer dreams she never dies 

Wipe that tear away now from your eye 

Slowly walkin' down the hall 

Faster than a cannonball 

Where were you while we were getting high? 

Someday you will find me 

Caught beneath the landslide 

In a champagne supernova in the sky 

Someday you will find me 

Caught beneath the landslide 

In a champagne supernova 

A champagne supernova in the sky

— Oasis, Champagne Supernova

The wind howled past them as the capsule glided over the desert. A thin stream of vapour trailed behind the engine. Below: cracked earth, distant ridgelines, and the low, glittering curve of West City on the horizon.

Vegeta sat silently in the rear hold, hunched over his broken arm, eyes fixed on nothing. He hadn’t spoken since they left the battlefield. Neither had Trunks. The teenager flew in silence, hands steady on the controls. He didn’t look back once.

The only time Trunks had spoken was when he’d called Bulma to inform her that Vegeta was badly injured and would need immediate medical attention. Vegeta wasn’t sure how he was still conscious. His body ached in dull, rising waves, and the numbness around the break had begun to sharpen. It was strange, this human fragility. Bone split. Nerves exposed. Pain had never surprised him before, but that wasn’t the injury that mattered.

He had walked into the fight glowing. Not just with chi, though that had been dazzling, but with conviction. The battle with Android 19 had been art. Brutal, precise, clean. It felt so good to win. Not just to destroy, but to be seen doing it, to perform it. Even Kakarot hadn’t looked away.

Then came Android 18. He hadn’t sensed it nor respected it. He’d thought her lack of chi meant weakness. Less a warrior than a novelty. No aura. No transformation. Nothing golden. She’d broken his arm like it was an afterthought. No tension. No fury. Just efficiency. That was what stayed with him, her disinterest.

He’d expected to stride through her. To strike her down on the way to the real prize, the final fight, the one with Kakarot. The one that was his birthright to win. Instead, the truth had found him. There was no ceremony. He simply dropped.

The capsule dipped in turbulence, and Vegeta winced. Across from him, Trunks adjusted the stabiliser without a word. His profile was all concentration, jaw tight, eyes forward. Vegeta stared at his son. Not for the first time, he thought of the other world. The one the boy had come from, where the androids hadn’t just humiliated him. They had taken nearly everything, ruled over it, ruined it. And Trunks, in this tender age, had kept fighting anyway. Bulma had survived them too. Alone. No soldiers, no him.

What did she look like in that world? Certainly older, thinner. Still building, still inventing. Protecting people who couldn’t protect her. Making impossible things out of nothing, because someone had to.

He had promised her once that he would be present. Not just as a soldier, not just a name in her son’s mouth, but as her and her home planet’s protector. He had said it with the certainty of someone who believed power would make the rest come easily. That had been a lie.

There was no honour in what he’d just faced. No symmetry. No arc to rise through. It was Frieza all over again. The cold, crushing weight of real helplessness. He remembered it now, being strong enough to see the shape of his fate, but not to stop it. A child’s clarity, a soldier’s silence.

The capsule began to descend. They were close. Vegeta closed his eyes, but there was no peace in the darkness. Only the echo of his own arrogance, rattling back at him like the aftershock of thunder.

Trunks toggled the comm. “We’re on approach. ETA four minutes.”

“Roger that,” Bulma’s voice crackled back. “The OR’s prepped. I’ve cleared a path to medical.”

“Any senzu beans left?”

“Negative. The next crop isn’t ready. We’ll need to treat him the Earthling-standard way.”

Trunks didn’t reply. Just sighed. The line went quiet.

Beside him, Vegeta didn’t speak.

—

Bulma was already on the platform when the capsule landed. The moment the hatch hissed open, she was moving. No words. No hesitation. She pulled open the side compartment and began unfastening the clamps that held him upright. Trunks looked shaken, but she didn’t waste time asking questions. She had seen enough.

“Get his other side,” she said.

Together, they lifted Vegeta out of the hold and onto the waiting gurney. His body was heavy, limbs slack, eyes half-lidded with pain or sedation, she couldn’t tell. But he was breathing, he was alive.

She pushed him through the corridor at speed, one hand steadying the drip, the other guiding the wheels. The hospital wing doors slid open before them with a hydraulic hiss. She didn’t look back.

Later, after the medics had stabilised him and Trunks had gone, she returned to the landing bay. The corridor still shimmered faintly with scorched dust. She found fragments of his shattered armour strewn across the tile. She gathered what she could. The rest had to be swept. She took the pieces to the lab. Logged the impact pattern. Scanned for fracture data. The shoulder plating had failed at the seam. Again. She let out a breath. Then opened a new design sheet and began modelling improvements.

The machines had fallen silent. The medics were gone. Only the soft hiss of oxygen remained, steady as breath. Vegeta lay in one of Capsule Corp’s recovery rooms,bandaged, cleaned, but still aching with the echo of failure. Beside his bed, Bulma sat in a hard chair, holding the silence with him. They didn’t touch or speak to each other. He didn’t know what to do with that. Part of him couldn’t meet her eyes, and part of him hoped she’d reach for him anyway.

In the back of his mind, he knew she’d already taken his ruined armour to the lab. She’d be working on it by now, breaking it down, rethinking the failure. Making something better. Because that’s what she did. He looked at her eventually, still quiet beside him. Unusually, he was the one to speak first.

“Bulma,” he said, voice low. “When Androids 19 and 20 first appeared… you flew straight into the battle.”

She looked him in the eye and said nothing.

“With our infant son. In a capsule plane.”

A breath. “Yeah.”

“It lost control. I watched it spin out. And I remember thinking… if you both died, I’d be free.”

She turned away, just enough so it didn’t come off too sharp.

“I wouldn’t have to explain myself. Wouldn’t have to feel anything.”

“Did you believe that?” she asked, her voice quieter now

He hesitated.

“Yes. For a moment. I told myself it was true. That if I cut my tether to you, I’d be stronger. Clearer. Untouchable.”

He shook his head.

“But that was a lie.”

He glanced at her, then away.

“And when you walked out of that wreckage unscathed holding our son, thanks to our future son…”

His voice caught, just for a second.

“I stood there like it didn’t matter. But I was furious. Not at you. At myself. For standing still, for hoping it would all just end.”

A silence settled.

He reached out, deliberate but tentative, and touched her wrist.

“But you’ve never needed me, have you?”

That caught her.

He didn’t stop.

“You’ve loved me, maybe. Wanted me. But you’ve never needed me. Not the way I...”

He let the rest trail off.

“The way I need you.”

He said it like a truth he’d been dragging behind him for years.

The oxygen line hissed softly in the room.

“Flying into a fight like that,” he said after a while, “was reckless.”

She didn’t argue. “So was charging at 18.”

He looked at her, sharply this time.

She didn’t flinch. “You had something to prove.”

Then quieter, with the edge of memory still in her voice, “And I had to see them for myself. The androids. The ones who tore apart Trunks’s future.”

Another silence stretched between them.

“Different reasons,” she said. “Same instinct.”

He didn’t reply. But he didn’t let go of her wrist.

After a long moment, he continued, “I’m sorry I didn’t save you,” he said. “You and Trunks. That day.”

She didn’t answer at first. Then slowly, she turned her hand in his and laced their fingers together. A quiet gesture. A silent reply. She didn’t forgive him out loud, there was no need for that. Because for all the battles he’d fought, it was Bulma who had stitched him back together. Over and over, pulled him from craters, rebuilt his armour, rebuilt his pride, gave him shelter, tools, and a place to live. A reason to stay. And he, in turn, had never tried to control her. Never asked her to be anything other than who she was.

In his silence, she saw respect. That was why she had stayed. And somehow, impossibly, he had loved her because of it.

—

The sun had barely crested the edge of the city when the senzu beans arrived. One had been rushed down from Korin Tower overnight, carefully packed, barely ready. Future Trunks had flown out to retrieve it before dawn. When he returned, he handed it to Bulma without ceremony.

That morning, Vegeta ate in silence. Sitting up now, mostly healed. Still sore, but ready. The bruises hadn’t faded, but something in him had settled. Bulma left the bean on his bedside table, tucked in a folded cloth. She didn’t wake him. He would take it when he was ready. When she returned, he was gone.

The room had been cleared. The cloth was folded again, neatly, placed back on the table. Capsule Corp’s hangar was still half-shadowed when she looked out from the terrace and saw them. Two figures, rising into the morning sky. Trunks flew slightly behind, trailing his father by a few metres. Neither turned back. Bulma didn’t feel the need to call out or wave. She only watched them disappear into the blue. 

It was Piccolo who first brought word of the Hyperbolic Time Chamber, a place above the clouds beyond normal time. One year inside for a single day outside. Built for gods, but open now to desperate men. There was no debate about who would go first. Vegeta insisted, Trunks and Goku did not object.

By the time the lookout appeared, white stone, high above the clouds, Vegeta’s wounds had stopped aching. They touched down without speaking. Mr Popo met them with a nod and turned to lead the way. Trunks adjusted the strap on his capsule bag, but didn’t say a word.

Vegeta walked ahead, slow and deliberate, each step echoing. Trunks followed, his own feet quieter, more cautious. There was no speech between them. Just the hush of air, the dim hum of otherworldly machines. Time folded around them like silk.

Inside the chamber, the world was empty. White. Wide. Unforgiving. It would stretch time. Break their bodies. Strip their pride bare. It felt like walking into nothing. Like a place outside of consequence. And that, Vegeta thought, was exactly what he needed.

They trained. Hour after hour. Day after day. And time, as promised, slowed to a crawl. But something in Vegeta did not slow. He rose, higher and higher. Broke through one threshold, then another. He called it control, but it felt like fire.

The transformation brought clarity at first, ten disorientation. There were days he barely slept, hardly ate. His body adapted, burned cleaner, brighter, hungrier. He began to crave the tension, the flood of raw power. The ache of pushing too far. 

It was intoxicating. He was, once again, ahead of Kakarot. He hadn’t felt this alive since Namek. Trunks trained in silence beside him, watching, absorbing, adjusting. He climbed too, but cautiously, methodically. His power swelled in quiet layers.

But Vegeta was flying at something. Chasing a shape only he could see. And the higher he climbed, the less he seemed to hear. By the end of the second month, he was no longer just chasing strength. He was chasing the feeling of it. The rush. The purity of dominance. It dulled his senses. Blunted his judgment.

When the time came, when Cell stood before him, not yet complete, pleading for one final transformation, Vegeta would not hear the warning. He would not feel the pull of consequence.

Only the high.