Vegeta's Christmas

Vegeta's Christmas

Vegeta’s Christmas

“Woman?”

“Woman?”

“WOMAN! Where the hell are you?”

Vegeta scowled as he hunted the house for her. A slight bump on his road to Super Saiyan-dom had climaxed with a severe malfunction in the gravity machine and with all of his training robots... meaning he'd pretty much destroyed the whole thing. Usually when he broke something the shrew was right there to chastise him for giving her and her father more work to do or to see if he was okay – as if he couldn't take a few minor explosions. In fact, lately she'd been underfoot even more than usual, so it was odd that he couldn't seem to find her anywhere now that he actually needed her. She hadn't been outside waiting for him to exit the smoke filled gravity chamber, she wasn't in the kitchen making him food (not that she ever was, but one could hope she'd eventually learn her place), she wasn't even in her lab tinkering with some worthless invention of hers... he wasn't sure where else to look.

As he passed the entrance to one of her family's many living rooms, he pulled up short and took a step back to look inside. As it turned out, his eyes hadn't been playing tricks on him, there was indeed a large green tree sitting in the middle of the room.

Vegeta took a quick glance down the hall in either direction, for some reason feeling that he didn't want to be caught doing what he was about to do, and then stepped into the room for a better look.

What in the name of kami had possessed the humans to put a tree in the middle of their house? A quick check of the base revealed that the tree was not actually planted in the room, but was resting in some sort of plastic base. So, not only had they put a tree in their house, but it was a tree that was going to die... what was the point?

Curiosity having driven his desire to get ol' what's-her-name to fix his training equipment from his mind, he hesitantly began examining the room more closely, glancing over his shoulder every couple of seconds to make sure no one saw him. He was growing ever more certain that the humans were either complete morons - which he'd basically concluded from the first moment he'd been forced to speak with one - or trying to play a joke of some sort on him.

He hated being the butt of a joke.

A fireplace in the room had some sort of large footwear hanging from it, each adorned with a family member's name... or at least he assumed that's what their names were. The first two names he didn't recognize as he was sure he'd either never heard the woman call either of her parents by their first name or never cared enough to remember if she had. Her name, Bulma, had been yelled around the house a number of times, most frequently by that annoying wannabe fighter with the long hair.

What was his name? He thought it might have been somehow related to food... Muncha? Something like that, Vegeta didn't really care anyway.

His eyes turned to the last piece of footwear hanging above the hearth and he froze.

‘Vegeta.’

Someone had placed his name on one of these bizarre things? What were they thinking?

He leaned forward to examine it closer. The stitching around his name was atrocious. In the palace on Planet Vegeta a servant would have been beaten to within an inch of her life for such shoddy workmanship.

“Do you like it?”

Vegeta spun at the sound of the woman's voice, but relaxed when he saw it was only Bulma.

“Where have you been?” he demanded as a scowl crossed his face. “I was yelling for you, why didn't you answer?”

She scowled back as she placed her hands on her hips, the physical sign that she was going to scold him again, as if anything she said meant something to him.

“As it so happens, I was in my room and I didn't hear you,” she retorted. “Believe it or not, I'm not some maid just waiting around to serve you on bended knee. I have a life outside of fixing your toys. I was in the middle of...”

Vegeta rolled his eyes as he tuned her out. Why did he put up with this? It just didn't make any sense. Less than a year ago, he would have killed any weakling who dared speak to him the way this woman did on a regular basis. Sure, she and her father were needed to fix the gravity machine, but he really only needed one of them, right? He could easily blast this shrew into the afterlife and then force her father to do what he wanted.

No, that wasn't true. As long as Kakarot was stronger, Vegeta would have to play nice with the silly human's the third-class liked so much... but when Kakarot's advantage was erased, things would be different.

He turned his attention back to the woman whose rant seemed to be dying down.

“...so stop being such a jerk!”

“Are you done?” his tone implied that he found whatever it was she'd just been saying incredibly boring, which would have been true if he'd actually bothered listening to her tirades anymore. “The gravity machine is broken... again. You or the old man need to fix it.”