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It's very nice to have these small, few little moments every once in a while.
No unexpected explosion popping through the next city or two, no new batches of injured and dead sweeping across in piles and most importantly (at least to her) was that Trunks could finally stay put and still for as long as she could keep him inside their house.
In a rare, sparse occurrence the androids took a break.
“A small holiday,” I heard Gohan relay to me when fixing up his injuries, what the black-haired one said to him during one of the pair's expected rampages across whatever at the time interested them currently “Indulging too much will spoil your appetite after-all. It'll start losing its appeal.”
Stop losing its appeal? You could do nothing but laugh at that bitterly; The bloodthirsty, psychopathic killing robots—or cyborgs, whatever the hell they were—had some form of humor. It had almost made me impressed that they could feel that much.
But Gohan had just felt so, so very tired.
The type of tiredness that sleep couldn't fix no matter what.
“I always think to myself sometimes,” He had said to her one late night, sitting across when she was deep in her nose trying to salvage a beat-up engine he had brought inside her garage.
“Is there any point to this?”
I paused for a minute, fiddling with the top of my screwdriver. It was good that Trunks was long asleep or absent whenever these types of conversations pop up. Gohan always made sure of that.
“Goku wouldn't have wanted you to think like that.” I answer.
“I know.” He replies just as fast. She almost wants to smack her own face really, really hard for saying that. Of course he'd know Goku wouldn't want him thinking like that. Anybody who had known Goku even for just a second would know that.
“Everytime i fight off the androids,” Gohan had continued, adjusting his bandaged chest to sit properly, “things are always running through me of what Dad or Piccolo would do in my shoes. Would Dad do this? Would Piccolo choose this?” He let out a long exhale and turned his eyes to the run-down ceiling of the garage.
“It's non-stop, Bulma.”
She could understand, but only in a different way. She's always wondering and mistakenly speaking of her long-dead friends in her mind as if they are still alive and breathing (and every so often even pretends they're still here in a little pocket of her head.)
Krillin would've liked that she had once mumbled to herself looking at a bottle of shaving cream when she was scavenging dilapidated stores for supplies.
Yamcha would've giggled at that she half-heartedly mused reading a dirty joke in an outdated magazine.
Vegeta would've—well, she preferred not to dwell on that.
“Is that not normal? They do say the dead will always walk with you.” She grimly jokes, twisting the hinges stuck to the engine she's trying to collect. Bulma wasn't sure what the answer Gohan had wanted, or maybe whether he wanted one at all. Gohan chuckled along at her response “If that had been the case, my life would be way easier.”
I frowned at that, a far too familiar feeling.
Gohan decides to sleep in soon after.
I changed my mind. Perhaps in these small, few little moments, it's actually quite awful. There's a bad, pressing sense of something overhanging just around the corner and taking its sweet time planning to strike when you least expect it whenever the androids give the rest of the world a small break from their presence.
It's nerve-wracking. To suddenly have fun. To forget for once what the world is like for a short time, only for it to be ripped out of your hands and quickly overtaken by what is usual. Maybe this was the main reason those two androids took those sporadic hiatuses when they felt like it?
Lull the populus into a false sense of peace, get them all nice and comfortable in whatever they have left of their homes, let them start rebuilding and get all cozy only to destroy it all again. It had grown into a well-rounded routine I was now aware of.
“There had been no point in tears.” She said time and time to herself when all of this started “you have to keep moving forward.” And slowly but surely, she got used to it. The hard pounding of her heart—the fear of not leading another day by a stray ki blast or getting caught under a flying piece of debris—had quelled and broken down bit by bit until it was somewhere else. It didn't matter where it went, just that it wasn't here.
Where are you all? She pleaded to nobody in particular.
She had heard vague ideas of what the afterlife was like by word of Goku, and the others when they died to the Saiyans attack on Earth and revived with the Dragon Balls. They all respond and get judged by somebody named King Enma when they die to either go to Heaven or Hell.
It's certain, Bulma knows, that Vegeta went to hell. She could say that without a soul of doubt in her body that man is burning somewhere (but alone of course in an empty room placed on the moon far, far away. She wouldn't want Trunks hearing that!)
Gohan had asked one time—in a not-so-direct way—what she ever saw in that man in the first place and Bulma couldn't place her ring on what she felt for him and what exactly drew her in. Not really. until she finally managed to put it into words.
It was because Vegeta was a pure novelty.
An alien from a long destroyed planet born and raised somewhere most definitely different from whatever Earth was to him, and that had captivated her. She was a scientist first and foremost and Vegeta was the bonafide representation of what was out there.
What she saw in her time at Namek solidified it. Scouters, spaceships of all shapes and sizes, advanced buildings, she was nothing short but mesmerised and greedy for more of.. whatever that all was during her time in space. So when she returned to Earth, all that was left connected to such technology and information was Vegeta, alone on that tree like a sitting duck when the Namekian Dragon Balls transported everyone back on Namek to Earth.
Her eyes looked at his.
His eyes looked at hers.
So she took what she could.