Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ You've Got a Hold On Me ❯ Chapter Two - Oozing ( Chapter 2 )

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]
A/N:  I’m not sure if I’ve EVER updated a fic this quickly before.  Blame catgirl26, Lady Lan & Piccolo is Green for inspiring me.  ^_^   But thank God for that, and thanks for the support, ladies!!  Hehe.  And go read them if you haven’t!
Enjoy this installment!  I’m getting closer to what I think I want to capture here…  
And again, while you’re at it and if this is your first time reading my schtuff, go visit the “We’re Just Saiyan…” Community on Google Plus!  There are many other talented authors there as well who should be read.  Go!  Be fruitful!  Multiply your… inner fangurl/boy!  ^^  Ok, that’s enough from me…

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Chapter Two - Oozing


It wasn’t just the solace of the gravity simulator that appealed to him.  Since its reconstruction a week ago, something else made him long for its suffocating and galling interior.  Inside the GSR, nothing mattered except the weighty, overpowering air.  Nothing distracted him from the bursting lust of battle that his Saiyan blood yearned for:  that it sang for.  Inside this room he could pretend.  He could pretend he was still on Vegeta-sei, a home he had never really known but had ached for since he was old enough to think of his father’s face in a more vivid and proper light.  
He’d last seen that intelligent, scheming bastard at five years of age.  Even as he shut his eyes against the red, red air inside the GSR and steeled his body against the impossible force, he could see his father’s face.  It was proud, and stern, and… and?
Right now though… Right now something inched up his side under the swath of bandages that still clung to the middle of his chest.  Gods help him, he could not remember but, it might be pain.  It had been about five hours since that blue-haired, vulgar Earth Woman Bulma had re-wrapped his ribs.  She’d used a device called a “bioStitch” that sounded a lot like what an Arlian pulse blaster did when he was being fired at right before the purge of that useless heap.
Vegeta finished his last of countless pushups – he’d stopped keeping count half an hour ago – and pushed until both legs were stock still in the immense air above him.  He levitated slowly; the weight of the air made all that thick blood pool in his head and shoulders like a vat of molten metal.  The gash on the upper right side of his skull ached in protest, but he grit his teeth together in a silent, defiant snarl and squeezed both eyes shut.  The oppressive air around him was blissfully, amazingly, stabilizing.    Vegeta breathed out slowly and began to count the beats of his heart.  He remembered suddenly, it was the first sound he’d heard after being resurrected on Namek, in that dark, dark grave Kakarot had buried him in.  The presumptuous, low-class shit head.  
A bluish glow appeared behind his eyelids, and Vegeta squinted into the source.  The holo screen had popped up, and that stunning little bitch of a genius appeared; her arms were crossed over her chest and a flash of unadulterated rage zipped through her big blue eyes.  It had to be some kind of galactic law violation, to look the way she did; all breasts and legs and the cocky assurance of a Katchoni Royal Courtesan.  Hah, exterminated three years ago by Frieza, if he remembered correctly, and with regret.
“I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of this--!”  She said, calmly but dripping with ire.  “But seven of your ribs are broken, you cracked the bone of your left cheek, there’s a gash seven inches long on your head, a small hernia in your small bowel and, wait, wait this is the best part!  Your ACL ligament is torn.  Didn’t know you could sustain such a mundane injury!”  Her voice was slowly gaining momentum into a bitchy, amused condescension.
Vegeta shut his eyes again, willing the creature in front of him to disappear as quickly as she had appeared.  Her arched eyebrows, viper-like tongue and glistening lips were really, really, starting to pervade his sense of stillness and concentration.
“Go away,” he replied, as calmly as was possible for someone being so viciously impeded.
“Are you completely out of your mind--?!”  She screeched.  “How can you hope to train properly with a quarter of a functioning body?”
Vegeta felt his teeth clench.  That was it: every muscle in his body was on edge now, wrapped around a coil of exasperation.  His concentration was fucked now, and it was all… her… fault.  He opened his eyes into narrow slits and gazed at the holo screen again.  His brow creased with an incandescent rage so closely woven around his gut, like longing, that it made him growl.  Bulma snarled back, and his blood pressure jumped insidiously.
“I suggest you shut the hell up now, Earth Bitch.  I’m tasking myself with the most important training of my life, and your interference is infuriating.”
The look on that woman’s face…  Gorgeous!  Vegeta nearly smirked aloud in triumph at the glowing evidence of his glory.   But suddenly, the way her eyes bulged out of her skull, the slack-jawed, complete and utter bewilderment that someone had dared to speak to her in such away faded as quickly as it had come.  And then…  Then she fucking smiled.  Not just any smile, but one of deriding, unadulterated self-satisfaction.
At that moment, as he hovered effortlessly about three feet from the holo screen, a quick slip of his left arm tweaked out the rigid stasis he’d held in mid-air.  He sucked in a breath, eyes wide, and held in a breath as his body, weighing four hundred times what it should weigh here, slammed into the floor of the GSR with a slap.  He felt a few of those seven broken ribs she’d mentioned crunch and grind against one another.  He groaned and rolled laboriously to his side.
“Oh hoooo!”  Bulma Briefs laughed.
That voice…  It crowed above him with uncontained glee.  Vegeta ground his teeth together and pushed up on all fours.  He glared at her; he glared at her with all the menace he could muster.  And somewhere on the heels of that menace he could sense it – it was the lilt of her voice, the curve of her lips that resembled the striated rock of Planet Vegeta’s Eastern Low Lands that did it.  
“Look at that!”  She was cooing now.  “Can’t say I’m wrong now, can you?”
Vegeta felt one of his ribs poke against his lung.  Not hard enough to puncture it, mind you, but enough to make the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end (as much as they were able in this environment), and enough to make him want to wrap his fingers around that alluring harpy’s neck.  He pressed his lips together once and shook his head to rid it of the shine on her lips.
“Do you want to die?”  He asked, softly so as not to breathe too heavily and disrupt his rib further.  Her eyes widened again, and that lovely look of haughtiness returned.  She huffed aloud.
“What exactly was that, Vegeta?  I’m not sure I heard you.”
“I SAID DO YOU WANT TO FUCKING DIE, WOMAN!?  Do you want to be torn apart by androids with a power greater than your precious ‘Son-kun’?”  His rage exploded, and the rib poking at his lung scratched violently against that tender organ.
Vegeta gasped loudly and clenched a fist against the floor of the GSR.  He punched it until it caved a bit under the meaty flesh.  When he looked at the holo screen again, she was staring at him doe-eyed, but something else glinted there.  It was the same self-satisfied, gleeful look she’d given him before.
“No, Vegeta.  I don’t want to die.”  She said, and the screech was gone from her voice.  It enveloped him in a cluster of something unfamiliar.  Or at least… something not felt for so long that it seemed unfamiliar.  Bulma clutched her dainty fingers in front of her and grinned.
“I’ve got a long, full life ahead of me, Your Highness.  I’m young, smart and by Kami, am I beautiful.  So don’t you dare try to threaten me!  In the state you’re in now, I’d make your life a living hell.”
In the state he was in now… In the state he was in now--?!  He slammed his fist down again and pushed himself up so that he was eye-level with the holo screen.  
“Holy War Gods, woman.  Do you have any idea what I could do to you, ‘in the state I’m in now’?”
That shut her cherry-pout mouth.  Vegeta saw that his meaning carried a heavy weight in her mind, and her oceanic eyes glittered.  She lifted one finger and shook it at him.
“Aw, Vegeta.  We both know you won’t do that.”
“Do we?”  He growled.  She gazed at him with that ridiculously endearing smirk until he shook and gripped the side of his torso where his rib edged away from its proper place.  Vegeta grunted in a vain attempt at concealing the pain.
“When you feel like getting stitched up again, come see me.  Otherwise, you can thank yourself for breaking down to a useless heap.”
The holo screen flickered and disappeared, and Vegeta pressed all five fingers into the skin of his side.  Absently, he remembered the day Bulma had followed the lot of them to the barren mountains outside West City where Frieza’s ship landed; her ridiculously bouncy hair (her ridiculously perky tits) and that idiotic determination at wanting to “see the action”.  By the gods, that woman and her stubborn, courageous idiocy might kill him before his body did.

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“Bulma, honey, why don’t you go lay by the pool for a while?  It’s near the East Lawn and that hunky friend of Son-kun is sure to notice you in your new swimsuit!  It might make you feel better.”
If Bunny Briefs was anything, and she was indeed – something – she was candid.  Bulma could never be sure if this frankness was a result of her apparent stupor as she went about her daily business, or if it was a genuine desire for harmony and copacetic existence that made her speak her mind.  To a fault.  Really, ‘friend’ of Son-kun?  Bulma sat, staring at a plateful of pancakes and fruit left untouched.  Her hands were busy holding up her chin, which was set firm in a sort of petulant, toothless grimace.
Three weeks had passed since the “Incident” with the GSR, and exactly two weeks had gone by since she’d discovered Vegeta, perched on a single finger under four hundred times Earth’s normal gravity pull, engaged in a mind-crunching, utterly ludicrous training session.  To her chagrin, he had not come to her, asking for another session with her (naturally ingenious) bioStitch device.  She’d concocted the idea several weeks ago, even before the GSR exploded, assuming that as the Z Warriors began their rigorous sessions in preparation for the Androids someone would eventually need help a little more quickly than a side-trip to Karin’s tower.  But not Vegeta, no…  The surly Saiyan Prince had probably healed on his own by now, and Bulma was loathe to even bother asking.
Bulma was also loathe to remember that Yamcha’s warnings (or rather his reproach of her attention to Vegeta) were genuine at the heart.  But her alienated, reformed ex-boyfriend had left after Vegeta’s accident without much of an excuse, short of his perfunctory explanation that he needed to beef himself up for the Android invasion.  What a poor excuse for a bandit…  Maybe Yamcha had been right though, much as she hated to concede to it.
Thus far her plan to flirt successfully with the alien had been a bust; Kami, she hadn’t even spoken to the grizzly warrior for two weeks.  Something in Vegeta’s body, his soul, kept her out: something old and frightening and possibly evil, though she still could not quite believe that last bit.  Even in the most frightening moments on Namek, when he’d threatened to kill her, and Krillin, in his manic quest for immortality, she had not seen evil.  She’d seen that blasted, inexorable determination and known its value.  But there was something old in his soul… old and dirty.
Bulma took a deep, sudden breath and picked up her fork.  Her mother glanced in her direction and smiled warmly with a gentle shake of her blonde head.  She giggled inanely, adorably, and went about her task in mixing more batter.  Dr. Briefs had been up for hours, so Bulma could only assume that her mother was, as usual, engaging in the futile task of creating a lovely breakfast spread for her house guest.  As Bulma pushed a forkful of blueberries and thick, warm pancakes into her mouth, she huffed quietly.  Something about Vegeta told her that a breakfast spread was not something he regularly engaged in on his numerous galactic purge missions.
The pancakes were good, and Bulma shut her eyes to the velvety feel of them as they melted into her mouth, and the blueberries sat sweet/tart on the tip of her tongue.  Outside the kitchen bay window, a few birds were reminding her that life was a very simple and beautiful thing, even when dark and menacing things were looming on the horizon.
As if on cue, a disruptive bang outside the kitchen doors brought Bulma out of her reverie.  Bunny yipped like a wounded animal and turned to the doors with the bowl of batter still poised in her hands.  A dribble of batter inched its way down the side of the bowl.  Across the room, the door command panel was shorting out, and a tiny sliver of smoke slithered up into the air.
Bulma squinted, left her chair and rounded the large island counter in the center of the kitchen until she reached the door.  She gazed at the panel for a moment, and then at the doors.  The red error lights were flashing unobtrusively at the top of the door frame.
Panel malfunction.  The virtual female voice droned.  Doors reverting to manual operation.
“Oh, balls.”  Bulma said aloud, above the scoff from her mother.  The sliding doors that made up eighty-five percent of Capsule Corp’s compound were an utter bitch to open manually, being that they were heavy and quite tightly riveted into their tracks.  Bulma sighed and glanced over at her mother.  Nothing but batter there…  She sighed and turned back to her predicament.
“What the hell?”  She muttered, reaching out to stuff eight fingers into the center of the panels.  With a grunt, she pried them open a few inches, until another set of fingers much larger and thicker than hers forced their way in.  She gasped loudly, and the fingers pushed the door panels open fully with little effort.
Vegeta knelt, crumpled with his head leaning against the wall, in front of the command panel.  His fist was lodged in it, and the wires were sparking around the ruddy skin of his hand like a ki ball.  He was gripping his side and breathing with deep, raspy gulps of air.
“Oh, Vegeta!”  Bulma’s mother chirped from inside the kitchen, her batter still unattended to.
Bulma knelt on one knee in front of him, her brows knitted together in a mixture of concern and irritation.
“Well, fuck a duck!”  She snapped.  “You’ve finally beaten yourself so senseless that you’d come asking for help, hmm?  Do you have any idea how long it’s going to take me to repair this command panel--?”
“Rib…”  He gasped, interrupting her.  Bulma tucked both feet under her and, at the sound of his voice, reached out.  For a brief moment, so small that had she not been watching his face she may have missed it, Vegeta regarded her intrusive attempt at contact with a contempt so wary – so petrified – that his pain-shadowed left eye locked onto her with absolute clarity.  The snarl on the corner of his mouth was so reminiscent of the one she had seen in Baba’s Crystal Ball during his invasion of Earth that she nearly balked.
But Bulma continued to reach out.  His eye twitched, and she curled her fingers into little ribbons of assurance.  There was blood seeping out from between the fingers he held clenched at his side.  One of his broken ribs had probably compounded, and by the look of him, he’d likely been ignoring it for days.  She inched forward, and he did not move: not further away, not closer.
“Vegeta…” She ventured a word or two.  “Vegeta, just…  Dammit, just let someone help you.”
With no other course of action, she stretched her fingers out further and covered his bloody hand with her own.  A few more trickles of blood leaked out from his hand to her fingers.  She glanced down at the covered wound, and then back to Vegeta’s face.  He was still watching her with the same contempt but, remarkably, a shade of it had dissipated.  He did not speak.
The Saiyan lifted a foot until he had pushed himself up to a hunched standing position, and leaned heavily on the door frame near the busted command panel.  Bulma ventured a hand around the small of his waist, and tried in all good faith, to ignore the heat against her fingers and the sudden rush of excitement that fluttered through her.  Even when he’d nearly blown himself to bits; even when she’d used the bioStitch on his ribs, she had never touched his bare and searing skin.
Vegeta’s breath hitched in his throat, and when she again examined his expression, she could not tell if it was his pain or merely the contact.  How long had it been since anyone had touched him in such a way, without malicious or violent intent?  Bulma looked away and back into the kitchen, where her mother stood still, her bowl of pancake batter finally abandoned on the granite counter.  Her hands were poised in front of her lips.
“Mama!  Don’t just stand there, call Daddy!  I’ll need some MediBots to help me get him to the infirmary!”  Bulma called to her.  Bunny Briefs nodded and turned to press the intercom near the kitchen sink, but not before casting an uncharacteristically introspective glance at the two figures in the hall.  One a pretty little genius with an empire at her fingertips, and the other a forgotten prince with his poor precious pride oozing like tar onto the floor of the hallway.

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Bulma pressed her lips together and watched Vegeta’s face as she pressed the bioStitch against the closed wound on his side.  He was still glaring at her, the bastard, and all the heated uncertainty in his black, black eyes made her tremble.  She wondered if he could feel it.  But then, he was a goddamn Saiyan; he could probably feel her pores sweating if he concentrated hard enough.
Resetting the bone had been a short task for the MediBots, but despite Vegeta’s stoic expression she had seen that it had caused him a great deal of pain.  His expression was a mystery, Bulma mused.  He gazed at her with a kind of wary half-respect: an unsure venture that perhaps she had been right about his injuries.  She looked away and read the display of the bioStitch.
“You’re welcome.”  She ventured the phrase with such trepidation that it almost felt like rage.
Kami… His gaze was still penetrating the back of her head from above like a hot poker.  She felt a red heat wash unbidden through her body.  His skin, still so close to her touch and yet so far out of reach, seemed to radiate that fire.  She had not touched it since the hallway…
God damn him.  Vegeta’s defiance – his dedication, again yes, yes! – it was something so maddening that it was admirable!
“I am unfamiliar with such trifling Chikyuu-jin phrases,” his voice came slowly through her haze of thought.  “I came here because my body would not heal on its own and it needed attention.  I’m supposed to ‘thank’ you for that?  Feh--!”  He spat the words like poison from his tensed lips.  “Ironic; you purport such selflessness and dignity yet I should disgrace myself to grovel for you.”
Bulma’s fingers squeezed her little device so tightly that it began to shake.  When she looked up, Vegeta’s glare had turned so derisive that he was smirking again.  The bioStitch dropped, forgotten, and it banged loudly on the exam bed Vegeta sat on.  Before she could lean into him, into the heat of this alien man who made jelly of her bones and stoked her ire, she breathed a deep and laborious breath.  He continued to watch her with growing amusement, the dickhead!
She leaned forward and pressed both palms flat on the bed, one on either side of his wide-spread legs.  Bulma’s heart pounded in her throat, and she wondered if he could see the pulse fluttering wildly under her chin.  Maybe…
“Are you angry now, Earth Woman Bulma?”  He asked, and his breath brushed against her parted lips.  The fear intensified, but Bulma shuddered reluctantly, and her fingertips suddenly ached with something very foreign to her.  Yes… Yes, Kami, it was longing.
“Look, you crazy fucking bastard,” she snarled quietly.  “You can be as disrespectful as you want, you can be as ungrateful as you can muster.  You can even try to be as dastardly and evil as you thought you were on Namek.  But if you think I’ll cower before you like I did then, you’re wrong.  This is my house.  Come at me-!!”
Bulma’s voice caught on the end of the words, but she hoped he had not heard it.  For Kami’s sake… So much for her attempt at flirtation.  If anything, he’d blast her to oblivion now and end the game before she’d even begun it.  There was silence around them inside the infirmary, save for the soft whirring of the idle MediBots.  She forced herself to keep his gaze: to grapple his position with her.  God, he was still smirking.
“Come at you?”  His voice was just this side of a whisper, and he chuckled.  It was low, deep and barely there in the first place, but it shattered the mask of her resolve.  Her arms quaked with the nearness of his body, and her shoulders trembled when his chin tilted upward.
Bulma pushed herself away from the table violently, scattering a few of the instruments left behind by the bots and shifting the bioStitch to the edge.  She abruptly longed for the silence from before.
Vegeta stood, no longer impeded by his injury, and closed the small distance between them.  His one inch gain on her height suddenly seemed like a mile, and his shadow loomed over her in the blanched lights of the room.  His lips had never wavered, and he smiled at her the way a crocodile may, if it were able, at a fresh piece of meat lying static at the edge of a river.
Kaiyat’ehn…” He whispered, the sound so foreign to her own language that she wondered at its meaning.  But on the edges of it, the smile faded, and his brow creased back into that deep ‘v’ of contempt and haughty derision that he had such trouble hiding.
“What--?”  Bulma’s breathy question was barely that at all.  “What the hell did you say?”
“Hn.”  He snorted at her breathlessness and looked, really looked at her from head to toe before turning from her making for the door.  Just before he exited, he turned back, grinned rakishly and pressed the command panel delicately.  The doors slid open, and she watched the backside of the Saiyan Prince stride nobly down the hall – as though he hadn’t had a rib jutting out of his side only moments ago.  As though such a thing so miniscule could ever dampen his resolve.