Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ Reciprocity ❯ What Is Freedom ( Chapter 6 )

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_____What Is Freedom

Her heels rapped on the steel grating as she descended the spiral stairs. The living quarters were dim, and she peered through the thick quiet of the lower chamber. The only light came from the empty bathroom, which cast a redolent rectangle across the bed. That's how she found him, sprawled out on the solitary full sized bed on his back with his eyes closed, his head cushioned on his crossed arms.

How could he be so relaxed at a time like this? She understood he had spent a great deal of his time in space, keeping cool as a cucumber as only a self satisfied predator could. Being blasted into the heavens wasn't anything new to him. The experience wasn't exactly new for her, either. It was just...them! How could he act so unrestrained, so casual, when all that had happened between them weighed so heavily on her?

Ugh! There is nothing between us! Remember the last half year, Bulma Briefs? The last half year where you totally didn't have anything going on with this jerk?

She was a strong, independent lady, a verified modern day woman. If she was single, it's because she wanted to be. She knew what she wanted and she went after it. Right? She didn't let anyone walk all over her. So, she just needed to tie up any loose ends between them. Then they could get down to business, getting to and from the trade planet smoothly, and back to her totally lame and lackluster life on Earth.

She stood, spine straight, at the end of the bed. Despite her appeal for control, her gaze slid across his features. She knew he wasn't sleeping. He wouldn't tolerate anyone this close to him without some kind of plan of attack. He had made a show of his cunning many times before. She rolled her eyes. But even with his features supine, softened in the glow from the bathroom, he seemed coiled, prepared...to a fault, she hissed inwardly. She wrinkled her nose in derision and scowled at him. That was the whole problem. Being ten steps ahead of everyone just makes him hyper vigilant and isolated. No one will ever be allowed to get close to him. But the whole universe has to capitulate and revolve around his indifference to them. Ugh, this man! What a royal pain in the ass! Well, she was going to put an end to this mess.

“We need to talk,” she huffed, cutting the silence.

“What do you want,” he rumbled, unmoving.

Bulma's hackles rose. “The ship's computer is wiped out, just in case you were wondering. It's been programmed to fly, and that's it! I checked the map and we have enough fuel to get there,” she squinted sidelong at him, “like you said, but we will need to refuel once we get there. Our air conditioning and our water supply should last the trip there, but we'll have to reign in our appetites. We don't have much food to survive your Saiyan stomach. A week and a half. That's it. You just need to ration your portions for thirteen days.”

“Now that business is taken care of, why are you still standing there?”

Bulma saw red. “Why are you such a big jerk?!” She seethed. “Fine, in order of importance. One! I am not sharing a bed with you! Go sleep in the gravity room. Two! I'm not putting up with your smart aleck comments or your bullying! Three--”

“My bullying!” He glanced at her, clearly agitated. “Just what exactly is it that you're doing? You came down here with one intention--to intimidate me! As if.”

Bulma gasped. His colloquialism was totally lost on her. “I did not! I'm here to do you a favor, meat head!”

“I told you before, I don't need any favors!”

“Yeah, yeah, tough guy, we all know you can do evvvvverything by yourself! And that's why your right hand will be your best friend for the rest of your life!”

Vegeta's fury diminished, and he broke out into indolent chuckles, closing his eyes despite her.

“Alright, Onna, go ahead and give me the third degree. Make yourself feel better. Prove something to yourself by putting me in check, just like you did last time, and let's see where it gets you.”

She paled as she curled her hands into fists. “Now you listen here--”

He shot out of bed. “No, you listen to me. You've been meting out punishments and demands since I touched down on your god forsaken planet. Well, I've had enough control to last a whole lifetime, so go pester someone else!”

Is that...is that how he really saw her? Bulma could feel tears forming stupidly at the corners of her eyes. She wasn't expecting to be yelled at. Why did she come down here again? She tried desperately to hold onto a thread of the determination she had when she woke him up.

“Three. You need to relax,” she cleared her throat unsuccessfully. Isn't that what she was going to say? “Your damn,” she sniffled, “your damned pride always gets in the way of our business.”

“Business.” He scoffed. “Everything is a business to you now. Your hair, your boyfriend. Some way to relax, as you've been demanding from me for a year now. But what about you?” He appealed her softly, unrelenting. “What have you been doing for the last six months? Sitting up on your pedestal, keeping yourself very carefully in control. Doing all your paper work, dating boring office types. If anyone needs to learn a lesson in humility, it's you!”

“My work life has nothing to do with you!”

“It has everything to do with me. You couldn't handle that I wouldn't be leashed, so you tried putting a lid on me instead. I'm the Prince of all Saiyans! No one can put a lid on me.”

He was all feral beauty and predatory grace. She loved to watch him train, watch him sleep, watch him deliberate, watch him eat. She loved just watching him, even strutting towards her, infuriated.

Vegeta stopped stalking towards her when she glanced up at him, his intent to berate her stalled by a force in her eyes even greater than his injured pride.

Longing.

“I didn't,” Bulma croaked, “I didn't put a lid on you. You put a lid on me. When you left me in the hallway, like a coward. Punishing me ever since. If you didn't want to return my god forsaken feelings for you, fine, you're entitled to that. But don't you dare accuse me of running, when you're the one who literally shut me out of your life.” Her eyes rolled to the ceiling and she brushed her bangs out of her face. “I felt like a pawn in your game of power. I thought I was your...friend.”

“We were never friends,” he stated, coldly. Vegeta, flustered by Bulma's emotions for him, was doing some self examination, and he wasn't comfortable with it one bit. He felt a little trapped,causing him to bite back. “Self preservation has been my job for two decades. You're a fool if you think I could be otherwise,” he mumbled grimly.

If Bulma hadn't have known him better, she would have missed the apology in the thick of his cruel delivery. Was this her opportunity to get through to him?

“I'm a fool for believing you to be better than that. You have a chance now unlike any before. You're free!” He stiffened, but she went on. “You're free to do whatever you want now. You don't have to be like that anymore. You're just a man, free to do all the things you never could do. Relax by a pool on a sunny day. Fly around with your eyes closed. Free to create your own expectations for yourself. Free to enjoy things and to accept that other people may enjoy you.” At his silence, she ventured, “Free to eat all kinds of new foods just for the pleasure of it?” He rolled his eyes, but she thought she definitely saw a smirk for a second. “You're free, Vegeta,” she implored, sadly. “You don't have to play these games with me. Whatever you may think, I am not trying to manipulate you.”

He glowered. “Don't lie to me, Onna. You wear your heart on your sleeve, you're a terrible liar. That night, you sought to play a game with me, to break me to your will.”

She stared at him, chastened. “Vegeta, I didn't....” She swallowed her words. What had she done, if not try to force him into obeisance? She had dismissed his feelings, treating his concerns...the feelings he had for her...as illegitimate, in order to mold him, as if the Vegeta that had stood before her wasn't good enough. She had resented him for rejecting her, but wasn't she culpable, too? Her guilt was only overshadowed by her realization that she had hurt him. “I...I guess I did. I'm sorry. I didn't realize what...what it meant to you.”

It was his turn to be taken aback. Did she just...apologize to him? In Frieza's dominion, there was no quarter for apologies, and, if one wanted to survive, no room for regret. Feelings took a few gulping breaths and died in Cold Space. Frieza's reign on the body was absolute: your body was his property, your actions inventoried, your feelings rationed, your experiences outside of the martial, sharply curbed. Only competence and aggressiveness were rewarded, and in the Prince's case, they were the only thing keeping what little was left of his race and culture alive.

As frustrating as being stuck on Earth waiting for Kakarot to return was initially, this slight, bubbly, and fearless blue haired scientist had made it bearable. It didn't make any sense. She constantly intruded on the personal bubble he had carved out in service to the White Lizard, as the Saiyans called him. Appealing to the Saiyans overwhelming ego, brokering an alliance of strength and technology, Frieza had swept through the sprawling desert planet like a north wind, bartering for more than was deserved and then effectively extinguishing it with icy circumspect. Groomed as a royal to a race of warriors, whose technological spoils of war allowed a burgeoning hope of territory and pride beyond their own planet's atmosphere, the Prince had never thought twice about the fallibility of destiny. When his father had sold him into servitude to the White Lizard to buy the continuation of their race, he had shorn him of his destiny and severed him from arrival--to the throne, to a legend, to destroying the Ice-jinn bastard's hold on space with all the proud Saiyan berserkers at his side. Vegeta promptly put his faith for his father in the rubbish. As he grew up in service to such an irrefutable aggressor whose very business seemed to be sowing the seeds of cruelty around the galaxies, all the Prince could do was seethe, and sketch a plan...of attack, of escape, of vengeance.

Instead, his spilled blood and labored sweat, work he couldn't even get the satisfaction of calling his own, were sketched grimly across the tiles of Frieza's ship. Any hopes of outsmarting or overpowering the lizard were dashed against the rocks early on. Vegeta had been misled by the Saiyans. Although they were renown for their brute strength, they couldn't hold a candle to the portentous, elusive power that surged around Frieza. Not only did he have to live with the shame over the weakness of his people and his routine humiliation at Frieza's hands, he even had to withstand the taunting of the other Planet Trade Organization elites--Cui's malevolence, Zarbon's sadism, Ginyu's sinister showmanship--and continue living. Any despair born from his circumstances was swept up in a strong wave of life preserving disregard and sheltering negligence. The only thing that thrived under Frieza's foot, was vitriol. And it was Vegeta's only thrill.

And here was this water spright, this siren, calling him to be swept out to sea, to just let go.

His pride, his whole blackened history, couldn't allow for her commandeering. He had left her that night in the hallway in a storm of fury and self righteousness. No one made a fool of the Prince of Saiyans. No one could get close to him because everyone would inevitably betray him. She was making him feel things, and her maneuvering was a sharp reminder that he couldn't afford feelings. Being an elite in Frieza's service was a game of thrones. Care and flounder. Strategize or die.

He had locked the gravity room against her in a raging effort to remake himself a ruler, a conquerer, an heir to a legacy that, had it not sold out, could still be breathing the hot, arid air under three red giant suns in pure resistance and glory. His people, his father, as they struggled merging their warrior culture with the Tuffles stolen civilization, had hesitated at the wrong moment. They had tried making a decision that was against their nature in an attempt to recycle the Tuffles civility that they had always envied and been outcast from. Vegeta knew, he had sat in on the meetings. The Saiyans secretly yearned for advancement. They had paid the ultimate price for their misstep. And so had the Prince.

As he peered down at Bulma, he hardly registered that his hands were clenched around her shoulders, as though he was trying to shake her out of a dream.

Bulma stood gazing up at him in wonder.

The only problem was that his Saiyan instincts were screaming at him to conquer the little scientist, who was, ludicrously, a lurid example of the Tuffles intelligence and emotion, which his father and his father before him lived to plunder and squash out of existence.

The fight he was having with himself was singing a lullaby of primal desire, wrapping around his senses. The struggle against his Saiyan blood screaming at him to conquer her, enfold her, unfurl his Saiyan might around her, claim her, herald her as a trophy towards advancement, wasn't one he could win easily. He prided himself on his resistance against all odds, his fluidity in the heat of battle, his stubbornness in the face of loss. But desire and need for her were so intertwined that he could not make heads or tails of his own heady attraction to the smart, brave waif as separate from the Oozaru-like call for her. His people's voice, speaking through him, weaving in and out of her own beguiling appeal to him. She was worthy of kings, with a tongue like a lash and a quick silver mind...a welcoming embrace that forgave him his past atrocities, soft skin that beckoned him into feeling, cleansing azure eyes, laughter that encouraged him to laugh with him, to share joy, to relax and let the waves carry him who knows where over the horizon. She had, from the second he stepped on to Earth, fearlessly met his cold Saiyan fire with her own hot lust for life. He grit his teeth while she wasted herself on that weakling, as Scarface turned her vibrant ultramarines a melancholy indigo. She had given him a chance without asking him to repent, infiltrating his draconian self regiment with the one weapon he was ignorant to and powerless against--all inclusive joy. And even though her world had come crashing to a close after his pod sunk into her precious Earth in a violent clamor of screams and dust, her life irreversibly altered with Raditz's transmission, she still had the guts to engage him in a battle of wits every time he turned around. He couldn't stand to watch as she retaliated against him by joining with her father's company, lining their pockets with zenni at the detriment to her well being. She had withered. No longer was she the siren, singing him into a spell to sink below the surf. Her fire had puttered out into a dully pulsing ember. Her joy had ebbed and become stagnant. Surrounded by papers and cubicles and the machinations of office life, the only thing she was fighting anymore were her feelings.

Just like when he found his feet taking him to her that night with the snow melting in her hair, the street lights from the windows glancing off the droplets of water pearled in her eyelashes as she readjusted to the dark, he now absently ran his hands through her hair, his thumbs over her temples. He rested his face against hers, finally powerless against it, and she leaned into him, her smooth cheek against his as they stood holding each other in the dark, one wet tear trail baptizing him.

A/N: Hey, guys! I'm sorry about the time lapse. It's been a few months. *nervously chuckles* Well, shortly after I published my last chapter, my husband came home from a year's deployment over seas, we picked up and moved across the country, and we were settling into a life together again when I got hit with a mysterious illness that I've been contending with the last month and a half. So, *blows bangs out of face,* I've been busy. Also, I really struggled with this chapter. I've had a plot line laid out since the get go, but I just couldn't pick what I really to convey in this chapter. I tried to force myself to write, and that was basically fruitless. Then, yesterday, it was a dark and stormy, blustery afternoon (Winnie the Pooh reference, anyone?), and I just kind of gravitated toward the computer, turned Bat For Lashes on blisteringly loud, and wrote it all up. I'm sorry that it's not as long as my last few chapters, but I'm comfortable with the length. After all, there's more to come.

Our characters should be making landfall next time!

Please review!