Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ Lies, Deception, and a Baby ❯ A Love for All Time ( Chapter 18 )

Disclaimer: If I owned it I wouldn't be hear right now.

Lies, Deception, and a Baby

Chapter 18: A Love for All Time

"Vegeta, put me down!" Bulma shrieked, causing the flying prince to wince at the pain in his ears.

Bulma began flailing her limbs wildly, pounding ineffectively on his chest and back with her tiny, weak little fists. Vegeta would have found it amusing if she hadn't also tried to knee his crotch.

"Put me down!" she screamed again, "NOW!"

Smirking, Vegeta complied with her wishes, releasing the blue-haired woman in mid-air.

When she realized what he had just done, and began her rapid descent to the ground below, Bulma sucked in a big breath and let out an ear-splitting scream. If she was going to die, the least she could do was take the Saiyan's hearing with her!

Just before she hit the ground, however, a pair of strong arms wrapped themselves once again around her waist and lifted her back into the air.

Bulma glared at the flying man, even as she clung to him, scared to death that he might find it funny to drop her again-and next time he might choose not to catch her in time!

"You did that on purpose!" she accused the father of her unborn child.

Vegeta looked at her innocently-or rather, as innocently as Vegeta could possibly look, which wasn't very. "I was only doing what you said, Woman," he said as innocently as possible-which, again, wasn't very!

Bulma mumbled something under her breath that most likely was a very bloody, very violent threat to his person, but if Vegeta was able to decipher her words, he never let her know. She just buried her face in the crook of his neck and clung to him as he flew towards her home.

Vegeta landed skillfully on Bulma's private balcony, sauntering through the doors into her room and dumping her gracelessly on the bed.

Bulma fought with the billowing skirt of her wedding dress for a moment before she managed to arrange herself to some order on the bed as she sat there, amidst a sea of ruined, messy white skirts, glaring up at the Saiyan Prince, who stood, arms crossed, glaring down at her.

"What was all that about, Woman?" he snarled.

Bulma's glare intensified, until her blue eyes seemed to radiate with electricity, directed solely at him. "How would you like it," she queried, "if someone just ruined your entire wedding, in front of a whole bunch of the wealthiest and most important people in the world, then punched your would-be groom in the face and then picked you up like you were a sack of potatoes, and flew out of there, nearly dropping you along the way, and without a single word of explanation!" Having worked herself into an angered frenzy, Bulma let out a scream of frustration as she flopped back down onto the bed, pulling out a pillow to cover her head. "I think you'd be pretty pissed off, too, if something like that happened to you!" came the muffled exclamation from beneath the pillow, which she was slowly beginning to rip to shreds as her nails dug into the soft material, allowing a few feathers to escape.

"That's not what I meant, and you know it, Woman," Vegeta growled, grabbing the pillow from her grasp and throwing it across the room. He leaned over until his nose almost touched her, and her eyes were locked onto his, and couldn't look away. "I meant that shenanigan that you call a `wedding,'" he mocked the word. "What the fuck were you thinking? I will not have that fucking worthless human raising my brat." He bared his teeth. "That baka human isn't even good enough to breathe the same air as my heir, the fruit of my loins!"

Bulma frowned. "Your child?" she asked calmly.

Too calmly.

"YOUR CHILD?!" she screamed next, causing Vegeta to jump back away from her, covering his sensitive ears as he glowered at the woman sitting with clenched fists in the center of her massive bed.

"First, you want nothing to do with the child, now you're calling it yours, as if I don't exist?" Her voice rose steadily as she spoke, in direct proportion to her rising anger. "I'll have you know, buster, that this child is much more mine than yours! You didn't even fucking want it! You even questioned its paternity! And you know what? You might just as well! It doesn't matter who the father of my baby is, it's my baby, not yours!" Bulma's arms wound themselves protectively around her still flat stomach as she said the words, emphasizing her point.

Vegeta couldn't help but feel his heart swell at the protectiveness she showed for his child. Just as he was protective of her-she was his woman, after all!-she was protective of the unborn child they had created together in a fit of passion. Passion, of course, was Vegeta's euphemism for a certain word that consisted of four letters and began with an `L' … a word that Bulma had longed to hear for a very long time!

But unbeknownst to her, Vegeta couldn't even use the word in his own mind, at least not in relation to his feelings about her. Hell, he could barely even accept that fact that he actually had feelings about her in the first place, let alone serious feelings such as … `passion.'

"Foolish woman," Vegeta scoffed, completely nullifying the entire point of her long, angry rant. "I never said I didn't want the brat! You were the one that lied about him to me in the first place!" He glared at her. "The Prince of all Saiyans doesn't run from responsibility, even if it is of the … fatherly variety." He crossed his arms and smirked at her, his eyes suddenly smoldering as his train of thought began tackling more interesting ideas than that of a child that wouldn't even be born for several months yet. "Besides," he purred seductively, walking slowly towards the woman on the bed, "being a father isn't such a bad thing. The act of making a brat can be quite …" he paused, in order to savor the word on his tongue. "Fun."

Bulma blinked. "Fun?" she exclaimed, attempting to jump up before tripping on her skirts and falling back down onto her knees on the bed. "Is that all I ever meant to you?" she cried, tears coming unbidden to her eyes. "Fun?" She turned away from him, hiding the pain that suddenly felt dangerously close to the surface. She couldn't let him see it; he'd just scoff at it and call her weak, then seduce her again-thus proving her moral and emotional weakness even more!

She pulled another pillow from the rumpled bed and clutched it to her chest, hugging it as though it had all the answers, as though it could keep her life from crumbling down around her.

"You don't want to marry me yourself, but you won't let me marry anyone else!" she exclaimed through her tears, shocking the Saiyan Prince. "Why must you do everything in your power to make my life miserable? Do you really hate me that much?!"

She didn't know exactly where that outburst had come from … somewhere deep inside her soul, perhaps. When he had interrupted her wedding, she had been so happy to see him. So in love with him. And then he had taken her away, not even bothering to marry her himself. She was still a single woman, soon to be an unwed mother. And he wanted to take responsibility for his son, but not enough that he would actually marry her in order to do it. He wanted to continue living in her house, sleeping in her bed, and eventually acting out his role as father to their son. All without the benefit of marriage, leaving him free to go on dates and maybe some day meet the woman of his dreams, marry her, have tons of half-Saiyan babies with her, and consider Bulma Briefs, Capsule Corps heiress and richest woman in the world, to be merely an ex-girlfriend, and the mother of only one of his children.

Bulma refused to live a life like that, loving a man that would leave her on a whim, because it suited him to do so!

The only way she could assure herself that he would never leave her permanently would be to tie herself to him. And the only permanent tie that could hold them together-until death did they part, and not even that, thanks to the dragonballs-was marriage. Legal, binding, holy matrimony.

Exactly the kind of matrimony it seemed Vegeta didn't want.

Bulma felt a hand on her shoulder, but didn't turn around to look at him. She didn't want him to see the tears flowing freely down her face, wetting both the front of her dress and the pillow clutched in her arms. She didn't want him to see the pain that she could no longer hide.

The pain of loving a man that couldn't love her back.

"Woman," his gruff voice was raw, almost sorrowful, and he sounded incredibly weary, as though he hadn't slept for weeks. "I don't hate you."

Bulma remained silent for a few moments before shrugging his hand off of her shoulder. He hesitated, then let his arm drop to his side as he stood behind her, staring at the shimmering sea of blue that fell past her shoulders. Waiting for her next move, her next words.

"I'm sorry, Vegeta," she finally managed. No matter how much these next words cost her, no matter how much they broke her heart, she had to go through with it. She had dug herself this deep into a hole with lies. With one final untruth, maybe she could finally free herself, to live a life without unrequited love. A life filled with peace, and only occasional pangs in her heart for what could have been.

A life where her child grew up loved and happy, instead of sad and lonely, wishing for a father that actually gave a damn.

"Vegeta, I …" the words stuck in her throat. The final lie just refused to come out. She just couldn't do it.

`It's because you're a wimp,' taunted that internal voice that she had grown to hate over the past several weeks.

Fine, then, she replied to her … conscience? Why don't you tell the lie?

`Maybe I will.'

The voice that emerged from her throat wasn't her own; it was as though another entity spoke through her body, lying in a way that Bulma herself had never been able to accomplish, even at the peak of her misfortune.

"Vegeta," Bulma said calmly, as she turned around and looked at him, her eyes stained with tears, but her cheeks free from new rivers. "I hate you."

Vegeta backed away from her, his eyes widened in shock. The way she said that, so cold, so unfeeling, there was no way she could be lying to him.

But after all they'd been through together … how could she feel that way towards him? He could feel his heart begin to break even as he looked at her, could feel a coldness seeping into his soul, darker and more frightening than anything he'd ever felt under Freeza.

That this woman could make him … care about her, then spurn him, telling him that not only did she no longer wanted him, but her emotions had completely turned around and caused her to hate him, as well! There was no hope for him now, he thought, as the futility of the situation began to sink in. If she hated him, there was nothing he could do. Seduction would just make her hate him even more, and as it was, he doubted if she would want him around when their … no, her child was born.

Vegeta couldn't believe it. A part of him, the old, mass-murdering Vegeta, wanted to fight for her. Wanted to pin her down on the bed and slam into her at a furious pace that would remove any doubt from her mind about his true feelings on the matter. That same part wanted to make her love him, to turn her feelings around back to what they were before.

But the new Vegeta, the one that had begun to grow within him after the death of Freeza and his stay on this planet, new that that would be futile. He knew Bulma well enough to know how stubborn she was; if she told herself she hated him, nothing could make her budge from that stance except herself. No matter how much persuasion, seduction, or good old fashion force he used on her, she wouldn't change her mind.

And as much as it pained him … he cared enough about her to respect her wishes. He could never hurt her. He knew there was no way for him to change her mind.

But it killed him inside even as he thought about it.

His newly discovered heart, the one he hadn't even known he had before he'd met Bulma, withered in his chest at her words. If she, the only person who had ever cared about him, or about what happened to him, could grow to hate him, then what hope was there for him? What kind of future did he have?

None on this planet, that was for sure.

As soon as he destroyed the androids and Kakkarot-in that order-he would leave this fucking mudball far behind.

Leave the planet … and her, behind.

But he wouldn't leave just yet-at least, not permanently. No matter what she thought of him personally, she was still the mother of his heir. And she obviously planned on keeping and raising the child. The least he could do would be to ensure that their child actually had a future-even if that future would be wasted on this worthless planet, while he, the Prince of all Saiyans, took to single-handedly conquering space.

"I want you to leave, Vegeta." Her voice was soft, yet serious. And sharp, so sharp, like an arrow piercing his withered heart. "Please go. Now." She looked away from him, unwilling and unable to meet his demanding gaze.

Before he turned to go, he had to know the truth.

He had to know if this was another one of her lies … or if she really did hate him as much as she said.

"Bulma," he rasped, pulling her to him for a kiss.

But before their lips could touch the blue-haired woman turned her face away and his lips met with only the soft, slightly damp skin of her cheek. He pressed his lips there, gave her a small lick with his tongue, tasting the salt from her bygone tears.

And still she refused to turn and look at him.

She refused to accept his kiss.

In that moment, he knew the truth.

She really did hate him.

So he pulled away from her and stalked over to the window.

"You are sure you want me to leave, Woman?" he asked softly as he stood in front of the portal leading to her balcony. "If I go now, I may never return."

Bulma, still refusing to turn and look at him, simply nodded.

"So be it."

With those final words of farewell, Vegeta took his last step onto her balcony and launched himself into the air, landing in front of the space pod.

Minutes later, he blasted off into space, in order to train once again, leaving the tiny mudball of a planet-and Bulma Briefs-far behind.

As soon as the sounds of the space pod launching drifted off into the air, leaving only silence, Bulma buried her face in the pillow that she still clutched in her arms, as she burst into tears.

Truth, she learned on that fateful day, really does hurt.

A/N: Uh oh!! What's going to happen next??! Is Vegeta really gone for good???? Or is he going to come back and figure out that it was all just a lie, and win over Bulma's heart again???

Next Chapter: Aww, now I'm gonna cry … because the next chapter is the last chapter!! The last chapter of Lies, Deception, and a Baby! My very first fic is finally coming to an end … but will it be a happy ending? Or a sad one? Because we all know that happy endings are for fairy tales … and this definitely isn't a fairy tale!

Love, Tina

PS Sorry it took so long for me to update … but a combination of new boyfriend + thanksgiving + evil family/relatives just kinda took it's toll on me … ^.^;; So sorry! I'll try and get the next (i.e. last) chapter up within the next few days … and then I'll have to deal with the post-fic depression syndrome. *sigh* -.-,