Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ All That I Am ❯ Existence ( Chapter 1 )

All That I Am

Chapter One: Existence

A Dragonball story by Derr

Dedicated to *Angelus and mi m'o of the Hentai Institute

First posted December 25, 2002

Standard Disclaimer: I do not own the characters or the franchise of Dragonball Z, but consider this a work of fan fiction, for the pleasure of myself and other fans. I do not plan or expect to make a profit from this work. Suing me would be pointless.

One need is for food,

to eat meat and bread.

One need is for sex,

to bring joy to one's bed.

One need is for battle,

to run with blood red.

If you live without one,

you are ill, it is said.

If you live without two,

the third must be fed.

If you live without three,

you are probably dead.

- The Three Needs

Old Saiyan epigram (translated)

Briefs Vegeta, Prince of the Saiyan species, heir to the throne of Vejitasei, Warden of the Second Moon, Keeper of the Lesser Key to the Grand Tower of Norun, sat impatiently.

On an examining table.

Without a shirt.

Staring at wallpaper dotted with pastel-shaded prancing ponies.

Holding a glorified thermometer in his mouth, tipped with a plastic, smiling elephant's face.

If the woman sitting in front of him were aware of the gross impropriety of the scene, of the ignoble - no, obscene - debasement of the proud royal in front of her, she did not show it. As it was, however, Son Videl simply looked over her notes, tapping the tablet computer on her lap absently with a stylus. In any other circumstance, Videl would have wasted no time exploiting the compromising, unprincely nature of Vegeta's uncharacteristic vulnerability. At this time, in this place, however, she was a professional.

"So you've had no pain, no dizziness or fainting, no sleep disturbances, no debilitating fatigue, no concentration or attention problems…" she recapped, as much to herself as to the compact form in front of her. "In fact," she stood up and began to wander the room, pausing to look out the window at the late afternoon summer sky, "you have really no outward signs that anything is wrong with you, other than the fact that you feel less powerful, and that you say your ki levels have been dropping."

She heard the beginnings of a low growl from her patient, and quickly cut him off. "I don't disbelieve you, Vegeta. I just don't know what to make of it so far. I don't see anything obvious, not that that's easy with a Saiyan - you people hardly ever get sick - but what you're describing isn't something that matches anything I've ever seen with any of you, or anything I've run across in your pod's records. If it's a pathogen, it's an inapparent infection, unless…" she turned to him quickly. "You haven't been having any squeezing sensations after exertion, have you?"

Vegeta looked at her for a moment, puzzled, then shook his head.

"No, I suppose it couldn't be that heart virus. You probably would have had it by now, anyway, and even if you did, you'd have been fine up to the point where you keeled over. Whatever this is, it sounds like it has a much more insidious onset." She turned back to the window, lost in thought.

Vegeta looked down his nose at the device in his mouth as the elephant face made a soft trumpeting noise, its eyes briefly flashing. He looked up at Videl, still facing away from him, apparently oblivious to most everything except whatever monologue she was holding in her head.

"Onna," he mouthed around the elephant stick. Videl started, then turned from the window. Vegeta pointed to the device. As if on cue, the elephant trumpeted and flashed its eyes again.

"Oh! Sorry, I was thinking." She plucked the device from Vegeta's mouth, then held it over her tablet for a few moments. "Come on…" she muttered, waving it absently over the computer like a magic wand. Finally, the tablet beeped and the elephant trumpeted once more. A window on the tablet appeared, briefly displaying "ACQUIRED," then filled with numbers, most of them red and blinking. She took the stick and deposited it in a red container attached to the wall next to her chair. The container was marked "BIOHAZARD - FOR AUTOCLAVING REUSABLES ONLY - NO SHARPS," and was filled with similar devices, many with other types of animal heads. Videl looked at them momentarily, grinning. "Sorry about the elephant," she said to Vegeta, turning back to her tablet, "I would have given you a monkey, but every second kid I saw today asked for one, and I didn't have any left after four o'clock. Hey - don't roll your eyes at me! I could have given you a pig, you know. Now… temperature one hundred point five, blood pressure ninety-one over fifty, pulse fifty-two, oxygen saturation above measurable limits, blood glucose indeterminate, etcetera etcetera. If these were from a human, I'd have them in the hospital inside a minute, but seeing the readings were from you, it looks like nothing out of the ordinary. About what I expected."

Vegeta frowned and cocked an eye at her. "If it was what you expected, why did I have to have that damned thing in my mouth for five minutes?"

"Kept you from talking, didn't it? I think sometimes they're more useful for keeping patients quiet than for all the data they collect." The prince began to splutter, preparing a particularly acerbic epithet, but was cut off. "Hush, your doctor is thinking." She turned to look out of the window again, once more lost in thought.

Vegeta exhaled sharply, but let his irritation dissipate. He was dealing with no ordinary human, one actually worthy of a modicum of his respect. After his late wife, Videl had become the world's foremost authority on Saiyan medicine and physiology, channeling her knowledge and insights as a physician onto a species that only a handful on the planet even knew existed. She was attractive, intelligent, outspoken. So much like the bluehair, he mused, looking at her during her quiet reverie. He would never admit it openly, but he believed Gohan had chosen well. Vegeta remembered what Bulma had said after the first time they met Videl long ago, introduced as Gohan's date.

"I like her," Bulma had said. "She doesn't take shit from anyone. I hope they stay together, …for his sake." Vegeta had grunted noncommittally then, but secretly agreed. Back in the present, he studied Videl's pensive face. If you weren't already mated, and I was more sure of my health… He sighed.

After a moment, Videl looked back at him. "Vegeta, how has your sex life been?" She fought an urge to smile as she watched his facial expression change from astonishment, to if-anyone-else-asked-me-that-I'd-kill-them-where-they-stood, to pensive thought, then finally to resigned irritation.

"I… it hasn't been, really." He looked slightly to one side as he spoke, as though ashamed to admit it.

"Just with other people, or alone, too?"

Vegeta glared at her, his face reddening slightly. "That's pretty damned personal, woman."

She sighed, and looked into his eyes. "Vegeta, I'm not asking for my amusement. I want to know what your libido has been like. It might be important. I really don't like asking questions about sex, especially not with the kinds of patients I see. At least I'm asking an adult, and not trying to tiptoe my way around the subject with a ten year-old who looks like they might have been abused." Vegeta started at this, shuddering slightly, his eyes briefly showing… fear? His gaze steeled over in an instant, leaving no indication that anything unusual had transpired. What the hell? She thought. Did I hit a nerve? Her mind briefly raced with the possibilities. Against her inquisitive nature, she decided not to follow up on her last words. "Please, Vegeta, I'm asking you as a doctor."

"My sex drive has been almost nonexistent for weeks. I can't think of the last time I had to… take care of myself. Last month, maybe." He looked embarrassed again, either from talking about such matters, or admitting what he did, or did not, do while alone.

She nodded soberly. "Forgive me, Vegeta." She jotted down a few more notes on her tablet, then thought again. "How old are you? In human years, I mean. You're in your sixties, right?"

Vegeta grunted in assent. "Sixty… sixty-eight," he said, mentally converting years. To a human eye, he looked about thirty-five; though Saiyans made for precocious children and matured quickly into adulthood, they aged slowly after that, living much longer than any human, assuming they weren't felled in battle. Videl beat down a feeling of jealousy; now in her mid-forties, she had recently found her first grey hair, plucking it out before her ever-youthful husband could see it.

"You're not even middle-aged yet," she mused. "Normally, you wouldn't notice a decline in your sex drive until your nineties, and even then it would be gradual. I can't help but think that this is related." She jotted down a few more notes, then sighed. "Even then, though, I have to admit I still don't know what to make of it all." She turned her tablet over as a gesture of finality. "Well, I don't know that I can say very much more at the moment. I'm tempted to draw some blood, but I don't know what to look for, if anything, and by the time I figure that out, the sample might be too old, anyway. You're my last patient today, unofficial or not. I'm going to go home and think about this some more, and look through the databases from your pod. If there's something biochemical going on, I may have to ask Gohan for help."

Vegeta sighed. "I would rather you didn't tell anyone else about this. This is - "

"I know how hard it must have been for you to come here in the first place," Videl interjected. "I know you dislike giving an impression of weakness to anyone. I'd only ask for his help if I needed it, but he's more experienced than I am with chemical analysis and handling DNA. Besides, it's Gohan we're talking about, not some unknown quantity. He respects you. We all do, you know. We won't talk about this with anyone else, even your children, though if this is something serious, I'd highly recommend you say something to them."

Vegeta grunted, then nodded. "Thank you," he said simply. "Can I get dressed now?"

Videl smiled. "Of course. We're done for now." She stood up, picking up her tablet and setting it into a slot on the desk. Vegeta pulled his shirt over his compact but muscular frame and began to button it. "So how is Bra doing?" Videl asked, changing the subject to something just as intimate, but more personable. "I haven't seen her in a while."

"She just finished her third year," he said, his expression brightening. Videl smiled; Vegeta would have been horrified to learn it, but only the least perceptive of people would fail to notice how much he enjoyed talking about his daughter. "Her major's accountancy now, and it looks like this one might actually stick. I gave her a clerkship at Capsule for the summer, and her supervisors say she's quite good. Hn. Your husband's brother has been trying to shoo her into pure mathematics. He thinks she has the head for it, but she seems to like working with real numbers and money." He looked off into space for a moment, the wisp of a smile on his lips, then pulled himself back to the present moment. "How is your own brat?"

Videl blinked, surprised, not that Vegeta called Pan "brat" - he so rarely referred to people by name - but that he was asking after someone's welfare in the first place, something even more unusual. "She's fine. Still music education, starting her third year in the fall. She's taking on some students this summer, tutoring piano. Living away from home for the first time this year, too. It's nice to have the house to ourselves again, but damn, I miss her. She was just over last week. She played some, too. You should hear her. She's getting better all the time, even better than she played at dad's wedding."

Vegeta grinned ferally. "Oh yes, the wedding. How is your new mother doing, by the way?" He looked at her, a wicked gleam in his eye.

Videl growled in an almost Saiyan manner. When her father announced the year before that he was, at long last, dating again, she was delighted - until she actually met his date. Her lack of enthusiasm became horror when still later, she was told they would marry. "She's still alive, the damned, old, trophy-wife, lizard-necked shiksa. I love dad, but he has absolutely no sense of taste." Vegeta snorted. That much was obvious; Hercule Satan was never known for tact, style, or restraint. Even the prince, oblivious to many human customs, thought it was… bombastic… for Videl's father to stomp on and break not one, but five glasses at the end of the wedding ceremony, much less do so after a running leap. "Still, dad seems happy with her - God knows how or why - so I suppose I shouldn't complain. Thanks very much for bringing her up," she said sarcastically.

"My pleasure," he smirked. "That was quite a ceremony, you must admit. Too bad there were no opportunities for dancing."

Videl grinned. "Bullshit. You're just someone with a long, vindictive memory." At Videl's own wedding, Bulma had somehow tricked Vegeta into dancing in a Horah. Fortunately, the photographers and videographers had recorded part of the unexpected scene. Of all the pictures and video clips of the wedding and reception, those of Vegeta dancing - if it could be called that - were Videl and Gohan's favorites. They never tired of thanking him for the entertainment, and he never tired of grousing about it. Unfortunately - or fortunately, as may be - the event was not to be repeated at her father's wedding. Vegeta was careful during the reception to stay in his seat, leaving only to pick up more helpings of food.

At that, Videl opened the door, and they walked out into the hall, wordlessly passing through the reception area to the front door of the clinic. They paused there, Videl breaking the silence. "I'll give you a call when I've found anything out," she said quietly, "and I promise that I will find out what's going on."

Vegeta responded with another wisp of a smile. "Thank you, doctor onna."

"Anything for family," she said. …What's left of it, she added to herself. "Good night, Vegeta."

Vegeta bowed his head briefly, grunted, then walked out the door. Videl sighed quietly, then began to walk back to her office. She passed by the reception desk, where one person sat, doing end-of-the-day tasks. "Hi, Kel," she said.

"Hi, Videl. Say," the receptionist said, taking on a conspiratorial tone, "who's that guy that just left?"

"Friend of the family." Videl thought for a moment. "Let's see… husband's brother's husband's father. Father-in-law-in-law, I guess," she grinned.

"Weird hair. Sexy, though," said Kel as she grinned back. "Is he available?"

Videl laughed. "He's single, if that's what you want to know. Whether he's available… I'll let you risk asking him. He's a handful, I'll tell you that."

"'Handful,' huh? Sounds interesting," Kel said, a decidedly naughty look in her eyes.

Videl whooped, immediately covering her mouth. "You're even worse than my father. I can't believe I'm having a conversation like this in a place of medicine," she said, drawing herself up in mock indignity.

"Sorry," Kel chuckled, "when I start having dirty thoughts about the people passing through clinic, it's definitely time to go home." She looked at a wall clock. "And it is time to go home. Geez, it's almost six. Well, to be serious and professional for a few more seconds, I have tomorrow's appointments queued up. They should be on your tablet by now, if you want to look at them. Beyond that, I think I'm gone, unless you need something else." She looked up at Videl.

"No, I think that's it," said Videl. "I think I'm gone, too, after I clean up a few things. Thanks for the appointments. Probably all booster shots and otitis media cases again." She turned and began to walk down the hall to her office. "You go home and come back tomorrow with clean thoughts, okay? Wicked woman…"

Kel laughed again. "Will do. Good night, Doctor Son."

"G'night, Kel," said Videl. She passed into her office and began to pack for her trip home. When she glanced out the window, however, she paused. Outside, in the nearly empty parking lot below, stood Vegeta, his back to her. While she could not see his face, Videl guessed he was thinking about something - pensively, if he had been standing there all this time. After a few more moments, he drew something out of his pocket, staring at it as he held it in his hand. He looked around, as though hoping no one would see him, then tossed the object a few feet away from him. The air around where the object landed shimmered, and a hovercar came into view, seemingly growing out of nothingness. Vegeta entered the car, and in a moment, it rose into the air, smoothly banked around the lot, passed over the hedges bordering the clinic property, and was gone.

Videl stood at the window for a long while in surprise. The mechanical act of Vegeta driving a hovercar was not terribly surprising; Trunks had told her and Gohan once that his father had flown similar craft in his younger days. What was more surprising, and alarming, was that Vegeta was driving at all. He preferred to fly most places, disdaining vehicles like hovercars as "infernal tools of the weak." Videl enjoyed flying when she could get away with it, being one of the few humans who could do it, but recognized the necessity of cars when the situation warranted. Was Vegeta in such a situation? Was he so weakened that the act of flying home bodily would be too tiring?

It might explain why he stood there so long, she thought. He was probably embarrassed as hell to flip that capsule car out. Videl was suddenly overcome with concern for the prince. He was stubborn, egotistical, and difficult, but he was a friend of the family, however much he would grumble off the distinction. Not to mention the fact that she was a doctor. She may have been a pediatrician primarily, but her call was healing, and it seemed clear that Vegeta was in need of it somehow. She resolved to start looking at the pod medical databases that evening. It's a good thing Gohan's cooking tonight, she thought. This would probably be another most-of-the-evening problem, leaving her annoyed at herself that she would work on something so long into the night, and her husband annoyed that she was yet again taking her work home with her.

She drew the tablet computer out of its slot and slid it into her bag. Making sure she had everything else she needed, she turned the lights out, tested the door lock, and left, closing the door behind her. Back to home, she sighed, and then back to work.

Later that evening, Vegeta had just finished his dinner. "Dinner" was something of a misnomer, however, as the plural form of the word better described the sheer amount of food the Saiyan consumed. While not requiring as much as in days past, when training was more than simply something to occupy his time, he could still pack it in.

I can still eat, anyway, he thought, looking across the table's expanse at the vanquished remains of his meal. The gnawed bones and bits of gristle, wayward crumbs, dots of sauce, and mounds of plates were now to be the purview of the living compound's cleaning `bots. Vegeta believed the robots to be the most useful parts of the house, beyond the plumbing that kept hot water running copiously in his showers and baths. He briefly wondered at the longevity of the mechanical legacies of the Briefs household, when he remembered that there was a separate platoon of machinery whose task was to repair and maintain the rest of the robots, including the cleaners. Still, their staying power was impressive; some of the individual units were older than his grown children.

Even if the apparent age of some of the `bots raised questions about their ability to function, they had less to clean and maintain through the years. With the deaths of Bulma and her parents, Trunks' moving out to live with his husband, and most recently, Bra's tentative steps towards living independently - even if that meant living with a noisy gaggle of three other young women only a few miles from Capsule - the last few years had seen Vegeta as the compound's sole everyday occupant. As he left the table, pushing a button on the wall to summon the cleaners, he smirked at the irony. So many years ago, his future wife had off-handedly suggested he stay at the Briefs' ample home.

"Just don't do anything naugh-ty! I know I'm hard to resi-ist!" she had teased in a provocative singsong voice. What Vegeta had intended as a temporary stay turned into a thirty-odd-year relationship, including marriage and children, two things he never thought he would experience, much less with such an unusual soul.

And he had outlived her.

He had expected to do so - he had known before he even set foot on the planet that its sentient occupants were short-lived compared to Saiyans - but he did not expect her to have been laid to rest before her own aging parents. No one had.

An accident. A stupid… fucking… accident, he brooded as he wandered the quiet halls of the compound. Not fallen in battle, defending her own, not taken by the infirmities of old age. Just a momentary brush with a misplaced limb. Given his state of mind, it was perhaps no accident that he eventually found a door to his left. The door. And it happened right here. "This is Vegeta. Open," he said, almost without thinking. The door, set now to open for only a handful of people in all the world, parted at his words.

Vegeta turned on the lights as he entered, their glow suddenly illuminating the usually dark space. He came here, sometimes, when the mood struck him; when nostalgia, sadness, or anger moved him to visit the place where she had died. The door slid shut again, sealing him away from the outside, and into a tomb of memories.

There was relatively little left in the room, which had been one of her personal laboratories. Papers, computers, and equipment that were still of use elsewhere had long been removed, but the general appearance of the place had been preserved. Against his son's recommendation, Vegeta had asked that the room not be converted to other uses. At the time, it had been a rare show of his inner thoughts. "You can always build more research space, but this is the only place where she died," he had said haltingly and without scorn, to Trunks' astonishment. So the room remained, informally becoming a shrine to the blue-haired woman who once worked in it.

In the floor in the center of the room, bolt holes and a differently-shaded footprint of concrete were all that remained of the equipment that had claimed her life. Some old, empty crates huddled in one corner, some of them scattered and upended, marking where the discharge had thrown her. The bulk of the room was taken up by a long, wooden workbench, still cluttered with odd bits of machinery and circuit boards, and at one end, her desk, bearing only an old, long-unplugged computer and monitor, and a picture frame. Though the room was unused, it was remarkably clean and dust-free; the cleaning `bots still made the room one of their regular stops.

Vegeta pulled a rolling chair out from under the desk and sat down, looking out over the expanse of the workbench, at all of the flotsam and jetsam of unfinished projects and half-formed ideas. I still miss you, of course, you pain-in-the-ass onna, he sighed. Despite an epiphany long ago that revitalized his relationship with his son; despite the birth of Bra, which somehow, finally, drove home to him the fact that he was part of a family; and despite Kakarott, whose unconditional friendship, and later, briefly - oh, so briefly - love, convinced him that his life still had meaning after her death, he still missed Bulma. It was she, after all, who first showed him that there was more to life than struggle and death. More to desire than conquest and revenge. More to love than lust and pain.

He shifted his eyes back onto the desk, fixing them on the picture frame. There, behind glass and metal and hinges, lay what had become his favorite image. It was fitting that the only remaining print was here, in this very private space. Only here could he drop his usual reluctance to express enjoyment and simply experience the picture, and his memories of its making.

Years ago, not long after Bra had been born, Bulma decided it was time for a family portrait. After much complaining and cajoling - from the young Trunks as well as Vegeta - she managed to secure an appointment with a professional photographer. He was renowned for his use of old techniques and equipment, including large-format cameras, and took most of his pictures from underneath a black dropcloth draped over the rear of an accordion-shaped camera.

"Now, let me get a good smile out of all of you," he had said, when the four Briefs had been assembled and posed in front of the backdrop. He disappeared under the cloth, his arm stretched out, holding a squeeze bulb.

"He's obviously never met you, Papa," said the fourteen-year-old Trunks, already grinning.

Bulma had been fussing with the infant in her arms, making sure Bra's tiny face would be visible to the camera. She smiled, looked at Vegeta out of the corner of her eye, then did a double-take. "Aren't you going to smile, Vegeta?" She laughed softly. "You've done it before."

Vegeta sighed and scowled, his arms already folded across his chest. "Yes, I have, onna, but only in more… intimate settings. But we're wearing clothes, and we're not alone." Trunks made a face and a strangled noise, punctuated by an "oof" as Vegeta poked him in a kidney.

Bulma pretended to ignore the rejoinder. "Just smile. It'll only take a moment."

"But that moment will be recorded for all time," he replied calmly. "If these photographs are meant to capture people as they are, wouldn't it be truer to form if I could simply stand here? Even you must admit that feigning emotion on demand is rather vulgar."

After many years together, in any other situation, she might have detected his humor, but in a moment of weakness, her desire for one instant of wholesome, picture-perfect family harmony clouded her senses. "Just smile, you," she said, a hint of exasperation in her voice.

"Honestly, woman, as I've told you many times…"

"Smile, dammit," she growled, "or I'll hang you from the ceiling by your testicles!"

Vegeta raised an eyebrow at this, and Bulma herself gasped at her broach of etiquette in front of a stranger. After a moment, however, Trunks chuckled.

"I think you'd have to sew them back on first," he smirked.

Vegeta glared at his son. "Quiet, brat, if you want to live long enough to use yours."

Intending to hold an embarrassed silence, Bulma instead burst out laughing. Trunks quickly joined her, and after a moment, even Vegeta began to chuckle. Bra, picking up on the emotion of the scene, began to gurgle and squeak happily in her mother's arms.

"Honestly," Bulma gasped out between giggles, "at least once a day I think of killing you all and starting over, but, God, I wouldn't trade this family for anything." She looked over at her husband, noticing a twinkle in his eye that matched hers. "Don't you think?"

Smiling gently from one side of his mouth, he looked back at her. "Hn," he grunted simply.

They were all brought back to reality by the sound of the photographer's voice, and turned their heads back in his direction. Whether he had kept silent out of ignorance or discretion was unclear, but apparently his moment had arrived. "That's perfect," he said, "now hold that for just a second or two." He squeezed the bulb in his hand, triggering bright flashes around him, making Bra squeak anew in delight.

Vegeta passed his hand over the image of that moment, pausing over the sunny expressions of his wife and children, and even over his own face, his hard eyes belied by the smile below them. This is my family, the face seemed to say defiantly, and I won't part with them. The picture was now twenty years old. Barely five years after it was taken, his wife would be dead.

"And I might be joining you soon," he murmured quietly. His falling ki levels had been concerning him for months, though he had been too proud to say anything to the others. He had finally, reluctantly, decided to contact Videl after his power levels had consistently fallen below 3.0 - even on the silly logarithmic scale his wife and son had devised to measure Saiyan energy with, he knew his current readings were very low.

There was some truth to the old adage: "Saiyans never get sick - they die." While a small part of it referred to classic Saiyan pride, to a hatred of succumbing to something as fundamentally weak as illness, it had a more literal truth. Saiyans were relatively resistant to infectious disease, and their typically active lifestyles served to protect them from degenerative problems like the heart diseases that felled the ningen in droves. The state of Saiyan medical knowledge during Vegeta's lifetime had been such that most remaining problems were treatable, but those that weren't were often incurable and fatal.

He held no false hopes for whatever problem he suffered from. Though not trained as a scientist or physician, he knew that Saiyans generated and metabolized ki the way that most other life forms processed molecules of sugar and phosphates for energy. While fluctuations in ki levels over a lifetime were normal, persistent drops were not. Saiyans needed ki; without it, they would die. Whatever his malady, it would likely claim him.

But would he really join Bulma? He had been dead before, true, but his time in the afterlife - or whatever it was - had been lonely. He had seen few others then, and those he did had been in similar situations: warriors fallen in battle, sinners atoning for wrongs, victims of violent deaths. Goku and the others he knew who had also experienced death and resurrection reported much the same experience. Was there more than one afterlife, a hierarchy or system more complicated than good-people-go-to-heaven bad-people-go-to-hell? Had any of the human, Saiyan, and Namek warriors who had left and returned really died? Wherever Bulma was - or for that matter, the overwhelmingly vast majority of the deceased - was beyond his afterlife experiences, beyond the wishes of the Dragonballs, perhaps beyond anything and everything. He would eventually find out for himself, probably sooner than later.

Vegeta sat in the chair for a long while, musing on this and other thoughts, staring at the bench, at the walls, at nothing at all, listening all the while to the quiet hiss and hum of the air system. Eventually, he found himself absently looking back at the desk, wondering if anything was still inside. He knew the desk had been cleared of anything important, but if anything else remained, he had forgotten, not having set foot in the room for some time. He checked the file drawers, noting only a few unused envelopes, some corporate letterhead, a very old telephone directory, a half-empty box of tissues. He opened the thin, central drawer just above his lap, revealing small compartments with old erasers, spent pens, dried white-out, and the occasional odd screw. His eyes lighted on a hinged plastic box half full of multicolored push-pins, and in his current state of mind, thought it the most interesting thing he had seen in hours. He drew out the box, opened it, and began plucking out the pins one by one, inspecting each for their shape and color.

Onna used a lot of these, he thought, rolling a pin between a thumb and finger, feeling its irregular shape, and so did her father. Both Bulma and her father frequently put notes and other items up on walls, tacked on with pins, tape, or other fastening devices. "It's a filing system for geniuses," Bulma had defiantly responded once to his complaints about the clutter they caused. A scatter-brained system of organizing for scatter-brained ningen, the thought then, as now. As if in response to the mental slight, the pin in his hand slipped as he was turning it, the pointed end jabbing hard into the ball of his thumb.

"K'so!" he swore, dropping the pin and the box in surprise and pain, scattering the lot on the floor and under the desk. Powered up and mentally prepared, Vegeta could have been thrown bodily through a hill, taken a blow to the head from a fired cannonball, or walked out of a firestorm with hardly a scratch or ounce of discomfort; but taken unawares, a Saiyan's body could be vulnerable to lesser, more mundane injuries - such as a puncture from a push-pin. He reflexively stuck the meat of his thumb in his mouth, then immediately chastised himself, as much for attempting to assuage the pain by sucking on his injury, like a baby, as for leaving himself vulnerable in the first place.

I should always leave some defenses up, he grumbled mentally. He sighed hard. Dammit! Now all the little fuckers are all over the floor! In an earlier time of his life, he would have thought nothing of it, leaving others to tend to the mess; royalty, after all, could not be bothered to handle such trivial matters. After years of parenthood and married life, however, his first impulse was to clean up, especially in this room. In her room.

"I see you're starting to pick up the famous Briefs family anal-retentiveness," Gohan had once joked years ago on a visit, not long after he had married Videl. He was watching Vegeta hang shirts up in a closet, the shorter, older man unconsciously making sure they all faced the same direction, a quirk he had picked up from his wife.

"You should talk," the prince snorted. He almost made a reference to the elder Son's mother, who was the undisputed queen of everything-in-its-place, but quickly thought against it. By that time, it was unwise for anyone, even Vegeta, to bring up the topic of Gohan's parents in front of the young man. Very unwise.

Gohan, fortunately, was in a jovial mood. "You sure you don't want to straighten the collar on that red shirt? It looks a little off to me," he joked.

Vegeta finished the hanging and growled at him. "As long as they're off the floor, they're considered hung. I could care less as to their condition." As if to reinforce his words, he closed the closet door, hard, and walked away. Gohan followed the prince, mainly to find other ways of pestering the man.

The first chance he had later, however, Vegeta quickly and quietly returned to the closet, straightening the collar on the red shirt. He agreed; it had been a little crooked.

In the present, Vegeta was making short work of the pins. Most of them were in his hand, now ever-so-slightly powered up to prevent additional mishaps. Rooting out the last of them, he crawled underneath the desk, the very top of his hair sliding almost noiselessly across the bottom surface of the center drawer.

As he moved to pick up the last pin, his ears caught a faint change in sound. Pausing, the sound ceased. When he moved again, he caught it once more. It was the sound of his upswept hair brushing against some material other than metal. Turning his neck, he looked carefully at the dim underside of the desk drawer. There in the corner, tucked into a tiny gap where two pieces of metal making up the drawer joined, was a small, square paper envelope. He gently pulled it from its metal prison, and backed out from under the desk. Pausing to put the pins back in their box and into the drawer, he turned the envelope over in his hands. A circular plastic window on the other side revealed its contents: an old recordable compact disc. Nothing was written on it, save for the factory screening displaying its brand name and logo.

He squinted at it in wonderment. I'll be damned. Has this thing been stuck up in there for fifteen years? He opened the envelope, briefly inspecting it and the disc. The paper envelope held no markings, and while the disc was not scratched, a telltale change in the rainbow sheen of the underside indicated that something was recorded on it.

Vegeta's curiosity was piqued. Anything of value to Capsule had been removed long ago, and the disc looked like it had been stuck there deliberately. What is this? He sighed, knowing that he would probably not be able to find the answer himself. He was not ignorant of computers, but they were not his strong suit. He brightened as he realized there was someone who definitely was. Yes, Goten would know. If it's something digital, that brat knows how to use it. He resolved to ask him in the morning.

Vegeta looked at his surroundings as if for the first time, as though suddenly waking up to reality. For now, though, it's late, and time for a little more training before bedtime. He would visit his bedroom briefly to drop off the disc, then end his day with a training session, a habit he had never lost over the years. After the events of the day, he thought, losing himself in the almost mindless regimen of battle practice would be a welcome change. Turning out the lights, he walked resolutely out the door, ready to trade the relative quiet of the preserved laboratory for the hum of the gravity room.