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Her heart was made of rubbles and shards. Razed like her West City, whose once florid landscape was nothing but a memory rolling on the back of her lids when she closed them.
Vegeta was gone and, after him, her only other reason to live had followed at the end of spring. He had to go back to the past, but when she had stepped out of the house to say 'take care,' she found his lifeless body lying on the ground and the time machine gone. She had kneeled there, tearless, for days, holding his stiff body against her bosom as if he were just sleeping.
Her heart was dead.
It had taken five years to convince herself that suicide wasn't an option. She had to go on, because her boys, her friends, had all sacrificed their lives to allow her and the few survivors to go on.
Then, he came.
He, whose resemblance to Son was just on the surface. A creature with a brutal heart, that razed a world that had nothing to offer. She had named him Black. Just Black.
At the dawn of his arrival, she was just a useless, wrinkled woman with a wilted heart. A woman that hid in her basement like a rattling rodent, waiting for death to come.
Finding an old hoi-poi capsule in the littered chaos that was her old lab, containing remnants of Raditz's old pod, reminded her why she was still alive. To fight for what they fought, until her last breath. She had used the pod to build battle gear and weapons, and picked up where Trunks left off. To help the resistance.
But Black, killed. Killed to extirpate every mortal being from the face of the planet, in every timeline. With patience, she had rebuilt a prototype of a portable time machine. It was less powerful than 'Hope,' imperfect, and with a high percentage of failure.
The chance to use it came in winter.
Black had found out the resistance's hideaway. With a sole flick of his finger, that monster had wiped out what remained of her people.
At her wit's end, she had inserted a random date on the mini-computer on her wrist, bidding farewell to her timeline.
Forever.
The time leap had hit her, hard. By the time she woke, her senses felt magnified, her throat dry, and her head was spinning. She was lying on the ground, sponged out of strength.
All Bulma could hear was a loud buzz in her ears, that evolved into whispering mouthpieces she couldn't understand.
She opened her eyes and what she saw, stopped time, and the whole world spinning around it.
"...Trunks, from the time you were a baby I've never once held you, have I?"
Seeing that coy, blonde kid a few feet away swelled her shriveled heart with devastating emotion. Trunks, her Trunks was alive, and so tiny.
Then, he turned.
She was exhausted, she almost didn’t recognize the serene gaze on his blood-stricken face, a look she had never seen before. His name climbed up her throat but it refused to leave her parched, trembling lips.
“Let me hug you.”
She cried, cried like a baby, voicelessly, blinking furiously and refusing to let the picture of their embrace become blurry. You got it, my baby, even in her head, her voice shivered, you got it. You got it…
She watched and rewatched, and felt her heart alive again, alive with them, alive with hope.
Hope that again shattered upon a wounded heart that maybe, at the very bottom, already knew.
No.
“Take them and get as far as possible. Scram.”
No.
Not again.
She couldn't allow him to die again.
Suddenly, time slowed down. She pushed with all her might, forcing what remained of her strength on her trembling palms.
And ran. Ran even if her skin singed against the waves that started to radiate from Vegeta.
Her mind stopped thinking. Thinking about her mission, thinking about a future that was no more. The only thing her eyes could see was that man's back. And the unfamiliar turquoise in his wide eyes when he turned in her direction.
Look at you, my love, how much blood have you shed?
"Go away!"
Why are you always this damn stubborn Vegeta?
"Go away!"
She couldn't even hear his voice anymore, even though his commanding shouts drummed so clear against her ears.
"I'm not letting you!"
It was hard to discern the wild booming of her heart from his when she buried her face in his chest, wrapping her arms around his waist, tight.
"Bulma!"
He had never called her by her name. Never. She could feel he struggled to hold back a power that had already grown too uncontrollable for him to tame. "Please, please, stop!" Her arms hurt like hell, all her body felt like melting away, but all of it, all of the pain and the woe disappeared when she felt the tang of his bitter lips on hers.
"I can't." His admission, guttural and minced with raw emotion, whispered so close, broke her.
Her brows crinkled at the center of her forehead as she swallowed the knot of tears and fright back down her throat… and smiled against his mouth, pulling away. “It’s okay.”
"You-"
"It's okay. I have nothing more back there and even if I had, I would still try to save you... I know!" She didn't hiss when the feeling of death tore and pulled at her, "I know that you don't want! But neither did I want to lose-!"
He just hugged her. Hugged her so tight that her words faltered.
"I can't save you."
"You just did."
His body flashed, and as a blistering dome of energy surrounded them in a blinding light, she squeezed her eyes shut. Vegeta's pain echoed like torture, through his splitting ribs, all around.
"We're proud of you!" She cried, "we'll always be."
~
"Mom."
"Woman."
"I'm here."