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Contrary to what was probably popular belief, Vegeta wasn’t emotionally ignorant. The fact he was emotionally inept and that he didn’t have the capacity for a large array of emotions didn’t mean that he couldn’t recognize them in others. It didn’t take a genius to be able to differentiate compassion, love, devotion and so on from the way people acted and the expressions they showed.
Vegeta could recognize pretty much all the emotions that the people around him were capable of exhibiting. However, that didn’t mean he was capable of emulating them himself.
He knew what compassion looked like but he didn’t possess any of it. He knew the feeling of attachment well but he doubted he would ever be capable of experiencing the deeper forms of it.
Happiness was another emotion that was very easily discernible, even by those of lesser intelligence. Despite the ease with which you can tell it apart though, Vegeta found that one particularly tricky.
At first glance, one might believe that happiness is something the Saiyan prince should be able to grasp. After all, he was a very driven and ambitious man. Accomplishing his goals should be tantamount to the greatest happiness in the world.
And while that should’ve been true, the notion didn’t exactly hold out in reality.
This was due to the fact that, for Vegeta, happiness was supposed to be an emotion defined by its purity. Exactly because it was not in any way entangled with any malignant motives or violent prerequisites, it was a light and cleansing emotion.
For that reason, Vegeta knew himself forever incapable of feeling such a thing. After all, for him, there was always an ulterior motive to pleasure in any shape or size. He felt triumphant after a good fight, but he did because of the fact he’d dominated another, not just for the sheer victory itself. Accomplishing a goal meant that he was getting better and better, closer to being able to finally overpower Kakarot. Being with Bulma brought him carnal pleasure and dragging her with him into the deepest throes of ecstasy merely gave him fuel for his self-complacency. His son’s achievements did him proud, of course, but pride was not happiness. Pride was what he’d lived with his whole life, and something he’d found anew during the time his son had been growing up in front of his eyes.
Vegeta could see his wife and son’s faces twist with happiness every so often and those were the only times he’d ever come to being close to experiencing it himself. It was odd, really, because nothing he’d ever done in his life before that had brought him anywhere near that feeling. And yet the simplest thing as having them grin at him could push him just a little bit closer to it.
Of course, being who he is, those moments are fleeting for Vegeta. They come and go, because emotions as pure and cleansing as happiness didn’t feel at home within his dark, twisted heart. He was too scarred, too warped from years of solitude to be able to experience that for too long a time.
Once, Bulma had asked him why she’d never seen him smile. She’d asked him just after another heated coupling session of theirs in the bed they had been sharing for a couple of years, and it was her immaculate timing that only ascertained her status as a genius in his mind. She had chosen it perfectly because she knew well that it was only during those moments of post-coital after glory with her in bed that he would ever come even close to opening up to her.
He’d shared his thoughts on happiness with her then, his thoughts on the twistedness of his personality. She’d listened raptly, not interrupting him even once until he finished talking, enraptured by the rare moment of honesty and eloquence on his part. He’d told her that he didn’t think he was suited for happiness anyway and that was probably why he couldn’t feel it.
Bulma had hummed thoughtfully and turned on her stomach to look at him.
“I think you’re wrong,” she had surmised at last, smiling when he quirked his brow at her. “I don’t think any of those things you said are real reasons why you never felt happy about anything. Well, defining happiness to begin with is a pretty complex matter in itself but…”
She’d paused, touching a hand to his cheek in a caress so doting and endearing that even he could tell of all the things her gentle touch spoke volumes of that she would never put in words.
“I think that there just hasn’t been anything in your life yet that has made you feel that way.” She’d smiled in a way that he would remember from then on, till his dying day. “The thing that will make you feel happy—I hope that we’ll be able to find it together.”
Several years later, while holding the tiny new born baby that was his daughter, with his wife and son cooing her over his shoulders, Vegeta finally found the one thing that could bring him happiness.
It had been there for a long time and it had been stirring for a while. But the harbinger of it had been the arrival of the last piece that completed it – his baby girl.
Vegeta wasn’t the kind of person one would generally believe to be capable of being “happy”, at least according to the definition he gave to the word.
But if there was one thing in the universe that could make him feel that way, it was the time he spent with his family who adored him, despite his myriad flaws and faults.