Archive of Our Own ^beta

Regret was instantaneous when he walked through the doors—bumping shoulders with sweat-soaked concert goers, all of them shouting over the house music, fighting toward the bar, the bathrooms, or the venue’s exit to choke down a cigarette between sets.

Bulma was nowhere to be seen. If he left now, he could lie, tell her practice ran late. That excuse wasn’t overused, yet.

He spun around, moving with the tide that streamed toward the exit. Freedom, a shower, a pitch black room and warm bed were just beyond its graffitied double doors.

Then something hooked his sleeve and a shrill squeal spiked his eardrum like a thumbtack. Goddammit.

Bulma hopped up and down, tugging like she was trying to rip the arm off a mannequin. A shitfaced smile was strapped between her cheeks.

“I didn’t think you were coming!” she said, a declaration that left some room for negotiation. If she didn’t think he would show, perhaps she wouldn’t be too upset if he left early... say in twenty minutes. After a few more drinks, time would skew and her senses would swirl. She’d be up at the front screaming at some pale, stringy-haired diva as he marched back and forth across the stage, pumping the mic stand into the air like a baton.

“Where’s my drink?” With her lip puffed in a pout, she squinted at the bar across the room.

“It’s not a country club, princess. You have to fetch them yourself.”

She shot him a little look, unamused but quickly forgotten as she dragged him behind her to stand with the clusterfuck of people that swarmed around the bar like cattle waiting for slop to drop in their buckets.

Drunk Bulma was handsy and easily bored, not to mention severely uncoordinated. Lifting his hand into the air, she spun a pirouet under his arm and predictably tripped over herself. That’s when he noticed the black t-shirt she donned was his, the bottom hem stretched and tied in a knot above her midriff.

“Are you wearing my clothes?”

“Are you paying rent?” she quipped, surprisingly quick.

Before he formed a worthwhile comeback, someone shouted Bulma’s name nearby. A plastic cup was thrust sloppily before her, and Vegeta’s attention snapped to the grinning, floppy-haired idiot that carried it. Judging by his U-West College of Sciences t-shirt, he hadn’t run into the woman at a hardcore show by coincidence.

“Who are you?” Vegeta grit out.

“My lab partner,” Bulma answered for the nerd. “You said you weren’t coming, and I didn’t want to go alone.”

“Well, I thought you were a girl.”

Her classmate gave a nervous laugh as he extended his hand that was probably sticky with whatever mixed drink he’d been carrying. Vegeta didn’t shake it, nor did he bother to listen to his name. The only word that penetrated the dense cloud of rage between his ears was what’s-his-face referring to Vegeta as her boyfriend. He’d never confess it outloud, especially not to her, that he didn’t hate it... at least not in this context.

The house music faded beneath a swell of screaming fans. A second ago, the woman was standing at his elbow, sucking on a vodka cranberry. Now, he watched the top of her blue head get swallowed up by the crowd. What the hell was all the grief about over whether or not he attended the damn show?

In a fit of pique, Vegeta almost forgot about the geek standing next to him until his damp breath hit his ear. “Did you want a drink, man? The bar’s cleared out.”

Yes, he wanted all of them. He wanted to lay on his back, throat open with a goddamn funnel of vodka to obliterate his stupid insecurities. Instead, he gave the poor fool a comiserating pat on the back and went out the front door.

Vegeta paced the sidewalk. Besides the bouncers, he was the only one outside the venue, the only one not tripping over their tits for some suddenly famous band that would probably break-up as fast as they appeared. Maybe not; it didn’t matter.

The band wasn’t the source of his nosediving mood, neither was the classmate—who he felt a little sorry for on Bulma’s behalf that he’d been abandoned to a horde of angsty scene kids. Nor was he angry about Bulma’s own insane ploys to get him outside of the apartment through cloying suggestions, straight-up threats, or twisted games to stoke his jealousy. It wasn’t even her obnoxious, drunken alter-ego.

What bothered him was that she had to resort to such tactics at all just to pretend for one pathetic night that their relationship was normal.

A parade of concert goers streamed out the doors and dispersed in every direction down the city blocks. Vegeta scanned them as they passed in a blur, his brain homed on a singular search for the color blue. He felt a little like TV’s token lost kid, left behind in grocery store aisles and carnivals with burgeoning panic, waiting to be rescued.

Then around the corner from what must have been another exit, Bulma suddenly appeared. Her t-shirt was soaked through with sweat, and black makeup streaked down her cheeks.

“Hi! I thought you bailed!” she said with a tone and a smile that conveyed her relief that he hadn’t.

The bar of expectations she’d set for him tonight couldn’t have been any lower, bookended first by her giddy surprise that he’d shown up at all and then that he hadn’t deserted her. Worse was the truth that he’d spent the entire evening consumed by the intention of both.

She slept the whole drive home, passed out cold with her head against the window. Getting her upstairs would be difficult, and the compact space in the garage didn’t help matters, especially with Chi-Chi’s consistently piss-poor job of parking inside the lines.

After adding a dent to her roommate’s collection, Bulma stumbled groggily from between the cars. She was dead weight in the elevator, braced up against him, yawning in tune with the doors that opened and closed at almost every floor with loudmouthed college students trading spaces in a real life game of Elevator Action.

Chi-Chi was asleep, but she always left the hallway lights dimmed as a safety measure because Bulma was a human hurricane, and the debris she dropped made for hazardous trips to the bathroom late at night.

Vegeta helped the woman into her bedroom where Bulma immediately threw herself backward to splay across the mattress in the wrong direction. She was inert as a rag doll as he helped remove the post-concert swamp she was wearing, barely managing to lift each leg as he tugged off her fishnet stockings.

It was impossible to distinguish clean from dirty among the garments that plagued every available surface in Bulma’s bedroom.

Though only partially conscious, she still found the means to delight in his decision to dress her in his own, her voice low and gruff in a mocking imitation, “Don’t stretch out my clothes, woman.”

Then she laughed and crawled toward the pillows. She kept on laughing as she held out her arms, gesturing for him the way infants claw for their mothers.

He was never tired when he should be, but wasn’t that the way with depression. Sunny days spent sleeping with the blinds drawn, nights spent with a pack of cigarettes, pacing the balcony, or skateboarding down empty streets.

What was supposed to be a fling, some temporary top-eight spot on Myspace, was now a messy codependency. It was a tetherball competition of manipulation by which they batted one another away only to come swinging back around, desperate for affection. It wasn’t her fault. This was his rigged game, and she was simply a willing participant.

She looked almost sober when her laughter pittered out and limbs flopped down heavy with defeat. He didn’t know why tonight should be any different, but for once he fought his deplorable instinct, and rather than leave, he found himself lying down beside her, slipping an arm beneath her head, pulling her tightly up against him. She was asleep within seconds.

After an hour of staring at the ceiling, he couldn’t say the same. While the logistics of escaping now would be too easy, in terms of irony, he was surprised to find he didn't want to.