Short update while I work on yet another slow-progressing monster chapter...

ALL GOOD THINGS
by Obsidian Blade

8.

Her amusement with Vegeta barely lasted through the first night, but over the subsequent weeks depression hadn't a hope in hell of slowing Bulma down. It didn't matter that the grey of her father's office never quite seemed to let her go. It didn't matter that she woke each morning to reddened eyes and smothering exhaustion. For the next month, Bulma ploughed through programming with every degree of intensity her coffee-fuelled body could maintain. Her father, mother and, most astonishingly, Vegeta checked in on her from time to time to find her unerringly hunched over her work in an engineering frenzy, though the prince's visits, always clipped and businesslike, stopped altogether when he happened upon one of her teary moods.

'That Yamcha,' she had bawled at him before he had a second to make his usual inquiry after the bots, 'doesn't have a clue how I feel.'

Vegeta had turned sharply on his heel, a muscle twitching under his eye, and disappeared for the better part of three weeks.

Her temper had never been the only aspect of her personality on a hair-trigger. Bulma had noticed early on in her life that she functioned as though her moods sat on an ever-moving turntable, where upset, rage, empathy and happiness filtered through her present state of determination.

Right now, her ambition bordered on fanaticism and her moods surged and plummeted at the slightest provocation. New lines of code raced across her screen even as she cursed Yamcha's name, sobbed over his disappearance and wondered desperately if he was okay. At first she hadn't wanted to admit it but, as all her previous achievements steadily lost their gleam in her shrouded mind's eye, the software had come to support a sizeable portion of her self-esteem.

She had sent a droid with her prototype installed to the new and improved Capsule3 through her father a few days before. For the rest of that evening work had been impossible. She strode from wall to wall, chewing through her polished nails, struck stupid by the hitherto unfelt threat of her own incompetence.

When her pacing brought her to exhaustion, she lay in her bedroom with the balcony doors thrown wide and listened to the crash and crackle of Vegeta's ki in the ship down below. Slowly, the whir of the simulator and the rhythmic sound of the saiyan's workout had eased her back to some sort of sanity.

Vegeta would be harsh. She couldn't get around that. Vegeta would be harsh for at least three reasons: he was Vegeta; his training always left him grouchy; and her program was still in its earliest phase of development. There was no point in fearing the inevitable. There was no point in hating herself for an imperfect first try.

For no discernable reason, she still cried herself to sleep.

The following morning had proved no kinder. Until two in the afternoon she lay on her back in bed, staring blankly at the ceiling. Her mother's words through the door – Bulma dear, I've brought you some nibbles – had elicited a barked dismissal through chapped lips, but the coffee she found on a tray outside did the trick. By the late afternoon, she was back at the keyboard, and the code was ever-growing.

Four days later, the software she had sent to Vegeta was already an outdated relic as far as she was concerned. The newer release was still simple, in Bulma's terms. She had nearly three years to perfect it; there was no point in swamping herself with features before she'd built up the core functions. This early script was intended to recognise and remember patterns in enemy movement, from the frequency of ki blasts to general starting stances. Her friends had uncanny sixth senses when it came to predicting moves; she needed her suit to do that for her.

Of course, recognising moves required advanced video input capabilities. Her program needed to be able to identify different parts of the anatomy. It needed to comprehend three-dimensional space. It needed to calculate the speed of an object moving in any direction at any angle – and consider the potential breaking speed too, in case of an enemy feint. The model currently doing its rounds in the new and improved Capsule3 could just about manage a few of these things, but the newer version would do so infinitely better.

As she sat back in her padded typist's chair, watching her code compile, the lure of the telephone receiver sitting right beside her computer steadily increased. Slowly, she let her gaze trickle over to it. It wouldn't be such a crime to call Yamcha. Without him bumming around the house between training sessions, Bulma had to admit she'd fallen into the incommunicative stupor that seemed to grip all her friends between major disasters. She hadn't spoken properly with anyone in days. Weeks. And he was her boyfriend.

Her hand clamped down on the white plastic handset and lifted it to the side of her head. In a moment of hesitation her breath passed through the mouthpiece and back out into her ear, dislocated and distant. We need to talk, Yamcha had said, a mere moment after she heard that sound last. Her eyes darkened. She punched in a number.

It rang fourteen times before there was a click on the other end, then a thud and clatter. She rolled her eyes and waited as moving air whispered back along the line to her: the distinctive sound of a phone swinging on the end of its cord. Another moment, another thud, and then a ponderous voice through the line.

'Bulma?'

'Hi Dad. Could you do me a favour and tell Vegeta I finished the new droid upgrades?'

'Oh ho.' She could hear him smile. 'That was quick.'

'You know how it is. Once the basics are down, the rest is easy.'

'When you work nineteen hour days, I'm sure that's the case. It gets a little more difficult when you're my age, I'm afraid.' He paused, and she heard the click of his lighter. 'What was that about telling Vegeta?'

'Just let him know I've got the upgrade ready, Dad. He's probably bored with the first one by now.' She paused, struck by the need for a longer talk, face to face. 'Hey, I think I might actually come to dinner tonight.'

'You'd have a hard time, dear. You do have a clock in there with you, mm?'

'Well yeah, but-' She glanced at the number in the bottom corner of her screen, on the verge of clicking back into triple digits, and gaped. 'What? When did it get so late?'

Her father chuckled. 'About the same time as always, Daughter. Perhaps you can enjoy your mother's hard work tomorrow, hmm? I'm off to bed. Once I relay this important message of yours, of course.'

She let out a long breath, surprised by her own disappointment. 'Alright, Dad. Sleep well.'

With the phone back on its hook, the laboratory sank back into twilight silence, with only the muted bluster of her computer fan to break it. She couldn't bear more than a few seconds. Jumping up, she paused only to consider and dismiss a quick note to leave on her door. If Vegeta wanted the upgrade right away, he'd just follow her energy signal.

Clearly he wasn't that eager, however, because Bulma was back at her seat with depleted plates of noodles, chicken and crackers spread out on her desk by the time she heard footsteps in the corridor, too distinct to be her father's, too strident to belong to her mother. Trying not to grin too widely with relief at the promise of human – well, not-so-human – interaction, she looked up from her takeaway just as Vegeta strode into her lab toward her. The battered shell of her specialised bot clattered onto her desk from his hand. It bounced and rolled, droplets of oil flecking the last piece of her chicken.

'Hey,' she said around a mouthful of noodles, 'that's my dinner you're defiling, lunkhead.'

'Your program is a disgrace,' said Vegeta, crossing his arms and glaring down at her. 'Any opponent will destroy you in seconds.'

Thank god for the noodles, they kept her from beaming like an idiot. Bulma Briefs: not only a technological genius and a dab hand with a spanner, but a regular modern-day Cassandra. Somehow it eased the blow of producing something less than perfect, predicting this outcome from the start. She'd actually expected more of a rant from him, but the general disapproval was there in force.

She drew a pad of paper across the desk toward her and licked sauce from her fingers until she was clean enough to handle a pen. This was probably, she stopped to realise, the only time she had ever smiled at an insult.

'Okay,' she said, readying the pen. 'What was wrong with it?'

Vegeta's gaze bit into the page with disdain. 'More than you could fit on that.'

'Yeah, if you gave me every last detail, which I'm willing to bet you won't.' She fished a prawn cracker from a plastic bag and twirled it between two fingers, peering up at him. 'Try and be a bit more specific for me?'

He looked about as willing to be useful as a brick wall on a runway, all furrowed brow and dispassionate black eyes, but he hadn't the malicious set to his lips she'd witnessed before. The evil, for the moment, appeared to have been drained out of him, washed away by the same shower that left him standing before her without his usual crust of blood, smelling faintly of almond shampoo.

'Hm.' She tapped her bottom lip with her pen before chewing through the cracker. 'How was it for... reaction time?'

'Slow.' It came out almost like a grunt. He was probably wondering if he was going to indulge her with this little interview at all. It hadn't escaped Bulma that their deal didn't specifically require him to give detailed feedback. She was just about to try and prompt him further when he cut her off. 'It grew faster over time, but only a fool would expect something so sluggish to last that long in a real fight.'

'A real fight, huh.' She smiled. 'Been going easy on my baby, huh?'

He scowled. 'It may surprise you to know that your inferior equipment is more useful whole than as rubble.' Again he cut her off when she opened her mouth to protest. 'Besides, one of your idiot rules was the preservation of this building. If I went all-out there would be no house.' He folded his arms. 'No city.'

'No planet?' She blinked at him brightly, before thrusting her hand into the sack of crackers and offering him a few. 'Hungry?' When he simply glared, she stuffed the lot in her mouth and swallowed. 'Suit yourself. You can sit down too, you know.'

He glanced down the length of the workbench. 'On what?'

She stood from her own plush chair and peered over her computer monitor. The aisle on the other side was empty from wall to wall.

'Oh shoot. Let me find you one.'

She hopped up and glanced around, spying a stack of stools in the corner where her mother had left them. With a grunt, she pulled one free and turned to carry it back, only to stagger to a halt. Vegeta was settled quite comfortably in her own chair, one leg crossed over his knee, his elbows resting loosely on the arm rests. She hadn't seen him so relaxed for the duration of his stay – which undoubtedly meant it was an act concocted for the sole purpose of riling her. She rolled her eyes.

'That's how it's gonna be, huh?'

As she plonked the stool beside him and clambered onto it, he glanced at her. Seen from a full foot above him, the shadows under his eyes resembled black, mottled bruises. There was a definite glassiness to his pupils, and when he blinked at her the movement was slow and drawn out. It occurred to her that he might well have just come from one of his fifty-six hour training sessions: focused on her work, she hadn't paid his ever-bizarre, ever-masochistic sleeping patterns a moment's heed for the past four weeks.

'Congratulate yourself,' he said. 'You actually found something in this pigsty.'

She smiled prettily. 'And you get the added bonus of sitting right where my gorgeous girly bum was just seconds before.' She winked. 'Score, Vegeta.'

He turned his head away with a sound of disgust.

'You're such a prude,' she said, snagging her pen and paper.

'A classless creature like you would think that.' He scowled.

'Hey, I am a classy lady. Only classy ladies look this good.' She tapped the blank page. 'Let's give me something to work with.' She glanced fleetingly at the remains of her dinner. 'And if you want any of that, help yourself. I need to keep an eye on my figure, you know.'

He gave her the scornful, slightly perplexed look she was starting to recognise as his typical response to human vernacular and made no attempt to reassure her as Yamcha would have. Her leftovers, too, went untouched.

'The damn thing's reaction time is almost a secondary concern. It insists on responding incorrectly,' he said instead, and pushed on with the facts.

As she took notes and posed the occasional question, Bulma became aware of her earlier intensity slipping away altogether, the same intensity that had protected her for weeks. The mere thought of it sent a shot of upset through her guts. Why did he go, what did I do, who does he think he is?

It didn't last. Vegeta was so unlike casual, warm, charming, yellow-bellied Yamcha that she couldn't keep her boyfriend in mind while she focused on her housemate's words. There wasn't a shred of familiarity or friendliness in Vegeta's demeanour. His delivery was concise, almost military, and he glowered at her whenever she fell behind and begged a moment's silence for catch-up. She wondered about excusing herself to snag the dictaphone she'd left on the back desk, but somehow she doubted Vegeta would concede to its use. There was something transient about him. Nothing he did suggested any desire to belong anywhere. Recording his voice would be too permanent. She wasn't sure she could allow it.

She blinked and realised her pen had stopped moving, leaving a pool of blue ink on the page. Vegeta was talking about the bot's limited capacity to dodge – only a fool would feint left every time – and she wasn't sure how much she'd missed.

'Hey, Vegeta. Could you say that again?'

'No.' He stood and cast her a disapproving look.

'But I need information to improve the code,' she started, before a glance down at the notebook revealed just how much she already had to work with.

'You've had enough of my time.'

'Huh.' She flicked through the pages. There were only three sides of A4, but each line was packed full with her own narrow script. 'I guess I have. Sorry, Mother's genes showing through.'

She looked up to find him already halfway to the doorway.

'Hey!' She snatched up the newer droid and ran after him, brandishing it in front of her. 'Vegeta! You forgot this.'

He paused in the hallway and gave her a withering glance.

'Where do you expect me to put that?'

Capsule3, she had meant to say, but logic stopped her short. The exhaustion, the shower, the replacement of his training shorts with the navy flannel trousers Bulma had only just noticed: it actually looked like Vegeta might spend the night inside the house for once. Walking the droid to the ship sounded like the sort of detour the prince could make in a split-second, but would shun in favour of belittling stares and the odd mutter about servant duties.

So she shrugged. 'Bedside table. Hey!' Her eyes lit up. 'I could install an alarm clock in these babies, that'd be useful. For waking up – that's obvious – but timing things too. Dinner, exercises, those brilliant showers you take monthly-'

As far as her silly human eyes could make out, the bot teleported from her arms to Vegeta's hand. He gave her a glare that, with minimal amplification, would likely cut through steel.

'Earth joke,' she clarified. 'We do a lot of friendly ribbing.'

'I am not,' he spat, 'your friend.'

'Oh, I know.' She smiled at him, deepening his scowl, and turned to head back into the laboratory. 'Sadly for you, I tease friend and foe alike.'

'Huh.'

He exhaled the word scornfully. The next thing she knew, his departing footsteps left her once again in stifling silence.

For a moment she stood on the threshold and looked out over the benches and workroom detritus, past the blue haze surrounding her computer screen to the dark skeleton of her combat suit against the far wall. Four weeks working herself to the bone in this long room, and she hadn't looked around in all that time.

Steadily, she exhaled, closed her eyes for three slow beats of her heart, and started a lap around the various switches, turning off lights and downloads. Beside her computer, she picked up a trailing cable and carried it over to the suit. It pushed easily into the side. Behind her, the computer gave an acknowledging beep. Bulma set her hands on her hips and grinned. If talking with an antisocial prick like Vegeta could pick up her mood this well, who knew what a proper conversation with a fully-functioning human being would do. Tomorrow, she was going out.

She left the room in darkness, save for the low gleam of the progress bar on her computer screen.