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Vegeta was no stranger to pain. It saturated his days, his very existence even. Especially back during the times when he had worked under Freeza.
Every day back then had been filled with a myriad type of pains: physical, psychical, emotional. During those times, he had acquired the larger part of the abundance of scars left on his body.
While he didn’t mind the physical leftovers of the healed wounds, Vegeta did mind the effect the endless beatings and harsh training he had endured as a child had left on him. His severely stunted physical growth was, without a doubt, the largest and most annoying scar Freeza had left him to live with. (It irked Vegeta to no end having to lift his gaze to look into the face of some third-ass dog. He was a prince! He was supposed to be the one who should be looked up to – figuratively and literally!)
Regardless of that though, Vegeta was grateful to the asshole for all the countless atrocities he had dished out to him. In bearing them, the prince had become stronger. He’d become accustomed to pain, to the feeling of discomfort. It had raised his tolerance to it and thus broadened his horizons in many ways.
For one, it made him prone to training until he was close to passing out. And while those training sessions were brutal and bordering on the insane in a sense perhaps, Vegeta knew for a fact that they were his signature way of getting stronger. He pushed and pushed and pushed his body until he hit the limits of what it could bear and beyond it. And, if he lived, he was a better man for it.
All in all, pain was something Vegeta was very intimately acquainted with.
It was also something he had been used to inflicting on others, during his time as a mercenary. He had enjoyed perversely the way his victims’ faces twisted with agony while he tortured them for information or anything else. The sense of power inflicting pain on them had probably had part in twisting his personality and encouraged his arrogance, though the prince himself would never admit that out loud.
Pain was familiar. It was not comfortable in the conventional sense but it was something he knew well and was thus all right with – all right with enduring and all right with dishing out to others. It suited him perfectly in many senses.
What Vegeta had learnt through experience was that pain was something he did not appreciate seeing Bulma in.
His dislike for that had begun back in the days when he had first come to be interested in the woman and it had only grown more intense the more he found himself caring for her. Whenever Vegeta saw his lover in pain, he felt so compelled to do something to stop it from affecting her that it almost drove him insane. When he’d first experienced this discomfort over another’s suffering, he had found it so outrageous that he did the only thing he knew to do to handle such situations: he stormed out of the premises until the situation had passed.
Later though, as he came to terms with his caring for the frail, earthling woman, he usually demanded what was wrong with her and how it could be fixed.
Thankfully, most times it was nothing serious and it passed on its own soon enough. If it did not, Bulma consumed a small tablet (pain-killer, she had called it), which proceeded to lessen her pains not too long afterwards. The earthlings had many silly creations and contraptions (the earthlings he lived with even doubly so, if he had to be completely honest), but this pill in particular was definitely one of their rare strikes of brilliance, in the prince’s not-so-humble opinion. He wouldn’t be caught dead subjecting himself to using it but he was infinitely grateful that his significant other wasn’t as tolerant to pain as he was and wasn’t too slow in resorting to using the painkillers.
The fact his possessiveness over his wife and his dislike for seeing her in any kind of discomfort growing stronger with the years, coupled with his absence throughout the entire process of Bulma’s pregnancy with Trunks, left Vegeta completely unprepared for the ordeal that was the birth of his daughter.
Through the course of her pregnancy, Bulma had assured him that she was alright and that the child was a calm one, not too prone on terrorizing its mother with its incredible half-saiyan strength. Bulma had also told him that she’d been through a lot worse when she had been carrying Trunks—a piece of information that didn’t sit quite well with Vegeta at all.
And even if the course of the pregnancy itself had been a bearable kind of thing, the birth itself was most certainly not.
For the first time in his life Vegeta felt something akin to pain himself at the sight of his agonizing wife. He had promised her he would be with her through it all this time around, that he’d do it right by her and his family. And he held true to that promise.
However, he was caught completely off-guard by how strenuous the task was proving to be for his wife. And, most certainly, regardless that it was her second time doing it and it was admittedly better than the first, half-saiyan childbirth was unkind to a non-warrior woman like Bulma.
Never before in his life had Vegeta witnessed the heiress being in such extreme pain for such a long time. When the child had finally started coming out, Bulma had fainted repeatedly over the excruciating pain of the experience, only to be woken up again by another sharp stab and another bout of agony.
And even though she had never spent a day of her life in a true warrior work-out, Vegeta had to admit he had been awed by the fighter spirit and the resilience of his small wife. Regardless of how painful and unbearable it got, Bulma ploughed on through with unflagging determination, set on bringing the child inside of her to the world.
Still, it had been brutal. It had been painful to even watch. What had been worse was that there had been nothing he could’ve done to help. All Vegeta could do was stand next to her, holding her hand as she made feeble attempts to crushing his fingers in her death grip.
What had been the worst was the knowledge that he was at fault for her being there, writhing and passing out from the pain of childbirth. He had been the one who had made her a mother to another monstrously powerful by human standards infant.
For his part, Vegeta had never wanted to become a father around the time his son was conceived. He had had no mind or time to spare for such frivolities. All he could focus on was improving, getting stronger for the sake of being the one to defeat the artificial humans and finally avenging himself against that third-class failure.
When he had found out that he had indeed, unwittingly, fathered a son, he hadn’t even spared the child and its mother so much as a glance before he had announced that he would take no part in taking care of the brat. He had no time or attention to spare for such nonsense as childrearing when his pride as a warrior and the fate of his life was at stake.
It was only later, much later, that he had grown to love his son. And he was sure he would grow to love this child soon enough as well.
At the moment of its birth though, he had only burning contempt for it (and frankly for himself, too) for hurting its mother so in the process of leaving her body.