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She was five when he started talking to her in the old language.
Clunky, at first. “My tongue doesn’t remember, daughter,” he said, stiff.
She thought that was a funny thing to say. Tongues with memories. She laughed about it later, when she was alone. Never in front of him. She sensed somehow that it would transform, would turn into something harsh and horrible in his ears.
He kept speaking, and unbeknownst to both of them she took it up into her mind like a plant drawing up water.
After six months she spoke back to him. “Please, father,” she said, when he denied her an ice cream before dinner. The sounds were broken up and sharp-edged, but unmistakable. In his surprise he handed the cone, in its sugary-pink paper coat, right back to her, and forgot that he had been about to put it back into the ice box. Victorious, she skipped away, humming a tune from a TV show. Xena: Warrior Princess?
At sixteen, she spoke eloquently, without hesitation. There was no-one to talk to except her father but, happily, she enjoyed his company more than almost anyone else’s. They trained every day, shouting quick commands, switching language effortlessly when Trunks or Bulma or one of the elderly grandparents appeared in the lush green of the garden to join them or call them inside for lunch.
Bulla maintained that Scratch had picked up the Saiyan language long ago. A fluent listener, even if he lacked the vocal apparatus to reply.
“I don’t know how he’s still alive.” Trunks scooped the tiny cat up.
“He’s either a clone, a cyborg, or a demon,” Bulla said, with affection, leaning over to massage the little creature’s head.
Trunks had tried, without success, to learn the language too. A few words had stuck — enough to sometimes let the two children get something past their mother, or say something rude in public, using it as their personal code. But they couldn’t converse, not really. The language was a private world that only Vegeta and Bulla had the keys to.
Sometimes, when they’d spoken it unthinkingly around friends and family, Goku’s head would turn, his brow furrowed. She had once handed him a plate heaped with skewered meat at a barbecue and asked him about it. In between mouthfuls, he had explained that he could tell which sounds were the words, and could sort of feel the beginning and the end of a sentence. But each component was a mystery to him, he’d said, polishing off the grilled chicken with a speed to rival her father’s. He had no cipher, Bulla observed. No way in. Still a private universe, then, she had thought, as she’d slipped away with a smile, not knowing whether to feel pleased or despairing about it.
She reported back to Vegeta. He listened, with mild interest. “Of course he doesn’t remember at all. He retains nothing else.” He sighed then. “I sometimes wonder what the point was, of teaching you.”
“If someday I meet one of our kind out there, I will be able to converse with them,” she said, in the formal register of the old language.
At that Vegeta looked at her sharply. “There are no more of our kind.”
Bulla scuffed the toe of her boot on the ground and switched language. “Big universe, daddy.”
He frowned. “If you do meet any, they’ll be outcasts or rebels or other unsavouries. Don’t speak to them in the old tongue.”
“Why not?”
“You speak like a princess, daughter. They will know who you are.”
“Let them know. Who could challenge me?”
At that he smiled, because it was true. He’d made her as strong as him, as strong as Goku. Her training had been given the same priority as his own. He had even lagged Goku for a few years, such was his dedication to preparing her for “the universe”.
Trunks was jealous, at first. Bulla thought their mother had started to favor him, to try and balance things, and she resented that. Then they were even, in a strange way, with their perfectly weighted resentment, and Trunks’s envy could give way to pride. Look at my sister. Isn’t she amazing? Watch yourself, she’ll flatten you.
Home from college at weekends, he would drop his bag in the hallway, and peer around doors till he found her: “Helloooo? I’m home. Do you want to spar? I’ve been in the library all week and I’m ready to have my ass handed to me by a teenage girl … Is that lasagne I can smell? Where’s Scratch?”
Vegeta said he wanted Bulla to be ready. For what, it wasn’t clear to anyone. He acknowledged that he wasn’t psychic, but he had a feeling. Puzzling, but Bulla humoured him. And she loved being strong, so what harm?
She agreed with her mother, who thought the horror he couldn’t stop imagining was an echo of the past, not a sign of things to come. Her dad had done terrible things. She knew that. He had told her about them in the old tongue. One by one, when she became old enough to hear. Not a simple disclosure, not to shock or burden her, or to spitefully shatter her idea of him. Each event calmly described, and always paired with a lesson — the real point of the story. This is what I learned when I came to Earth and killed half your mother’s friends. Here is what I grasped, years later, when I thought of the planets I’d destroyed. That way of being you admire now? — That came from my regret at having killed Nappa, one of the last of my kind, as close to me as kin, in a moment of humiliation so powerful I lost all sense of myself.
And this. This is what I understood, after I had given myself to Majin Buu in my weakness, and killed hundreds. I was afraid of losing everything, so I tried to destroy it before that could happen. Her father called it madness, but Bulla thought it made plenty of sense. She could understand, at least abstractly, that the only thing harder than losing it all would be living in anticipation, waiting for everything good to be gone.
He could speak things in the old language that she knew he could never say normally. Like his assertion that the best training he knew was simply to care about anyone else. Look at bloody Kakarot. More idiot friends than he knows what to do with. After a certain point — Vegeta told her he thought it was Cell, for both of them, when they had had to watch their sons destroyed in different ways — something changed in both Saiyans. It went from fun, life as competition, another tussle, to having something to lose, both of them winded by the realization of the fragility of the people around them. They were afraid. They never speak of it, Vegeta warned. So don’t bring it up with Kakarot. But he knows it, and I know it, and you should also reconcile yourself to it. We attract trouble. The more people you decide to love, the stronger you have to be. That’s the price.
It wasn’t so bad, Bulla thought, closing the kitchen drawer with her foot and bringing an excessively-large tub of ice cream through to the TV room with four spoons. Not too great a cost, barely a cost to her at all. Perhaps she’d feel differently in a few years, want to do different things with her time like Trunks did. But for now, she could finish training for the day, put her sweaty feet on her brother’s lap till he complained, throw her mother the remote, and ask her father to pass the sprinkles in Saiyan (they’d had to invent a word — apparently there had been no toppings, or even any ice cream at all, on planet Vegeta). This was worth protecting. It was worth being strong for. Just in case.