Vegeta's lifelong training to keep his heart-rate low at all times seemed useless as he stepped out onto his balcony. In his closet he'd been so startled by her, he hadn't gotten a good look at the woman. He expected her to be wearing the same thing she wore earlier—a skimpy tank top and skimpy shorts. Hard enough to maintain any sort of sanity when she was dressed that way. The skimpy shorts hardly shielded him from her scent at all.
But tonight she wore the human contrivance called a dress. Her scent flooded out from her like a beacon. Vegeta closed his eyes with pleasure upon smelling her so close, so bare. It was as short as her shorts, showing off those curvy, smooth legs of hers, but it was open. There was nothing between her legs. In his inhalation of Earth entertainment, he noted that almost without exception, it was women who wore dresses (there was one tribe of men that seemed to favor the half version, called a skirt, but the men gave it a different name that he couldn't remember). Vegeta naturally assumed the reason women wore them was to make mating easier, or at least spontaneous sex.
Unfortunately it wasn't the sort of question he could put to the woman he constantly fantasized about fucking, so he was left to speculate about the purpose of this type of attire. The woman's dress was a pale green, scattered with the lovely white flowers Vegeta had at last discovered the name of: gardenias. The color looked beautiful against her creamy skin and with her silky blue tresses. The dress was a light, floaty fabric that danced around her when she moved. It clung to her in all the right places. Little strings were all it had for straps, crossed prettily in the back, displaying the line of her spine that he found so appealing. The woman would have devastated him if she'd had a tail.
She wasn't wearing one of the bizarre breast holsters that Earthling women kept their tits confined in underneath their clothes. Again Vegeta had been left with many questions because it seemed inappropriate to ask the woman why she added a layer of difficulty to both dressing and undressing with a contraption whose only utility seemed to be pleasing the gaze of sexual contenders. Why would the potential mates not want to see the breasts themselves? Vegeta stifled a grunt of pleasure that she chose not to encase her lovely breasts tonight. He could appreciate how shapely they were under the flimsy fabric.
"Vegeta?"
"What? Damnit. I...What?"
"I asked if you want some wine?"
"What? I wasn't whining," he said, frowning.
"No, Vegeta, the beverage. Do Saiyans not have wine?"
"I don't know, what is it?" he said trying to level his voice. It was so humiliating being constantly ignorant that he found it hard to be civil. At every turn there was some thing that was entirely different. Earth had maintained its isolation so wholly. Every other system he'd been in had been fairly unsurprising because they all traded with one another and used the same currency and in general ended up more homogenous than he'd realized until he ended up on this mud ball with all its outlandish nonsense.
She held out a half circle of glass on a delicate glass pedestal. There was a few centimeters of a blood-looking liquid, but thinner. "Here, try it. It's fermented grapes," she said.
"Dear gods, to what end?" he asked and sniffed it. It smelled surprisingly complex for rotted fruit. "Oh, for alcohol. Interesting," he answered his own question and took a hesitant sip. It tasted worse than some sources of ethanol he'd had, but it tasted better than many, so he shrugged. "Why not? These are odd containers, they seem very fragile."
"They are. They're specifically for red wine so it can breathe. You're supposed to let it get a little air before you drink it," she said, pouring herself an equally absurdly small amount, "I never actually do that, because I just start drinking. But I'm not a wine snob, just a wine drinker."
"What is a wine snob?" he asked and immediately regretted exposing more of his ignorance.
"They're assholes that get all uppity about wine and the different 'noses' and 'notes,' that are all just fancy ways of talking about smells and tastes. I bet you would be an amazing wine snob with your sense of smell."
Vegeta furrowed his brow and scowled. Had she just called him an asshole? He was, of course, but still, it didn't bode well for his far-fetched dream of getting laid. Despondency settled over Vegeta that he might very well never get laid again in his entire life. He wanted to die.
"Why are you frowning? That was a compliment."
He cocked his head to the side and said, "It was?"
"Your sense of smell is incredible. Like, makes me nervous incredible. I'm always afraid you'll smell what I've eaten days earlier or the days when I skip showering or—"
"I like the days you skip showering. Your natural aroma is much more pleasant than that overpowering fake-fruit nonsense you coat yourself with," Vegeta said, flaring a nostril, as she was currently covered head to toe in the "lotion," as she called the abomination. He realized too late that now she had paid him a compliment and he paid her back by insulting her toilette. Good gods, he was terrible at literally everything but killing. He needed a ship so he could plead for the Frieza Force to take him back and return him to his only skill: slaughter.
She smacked his shoulder with absolutely no force. He hadn't deciphered the meaning of these blows that had no effect and weren't intended to start a battle. It seemed to indicate some sort of understanding, or camaraderie, but Vegeta felt certain that swatting her back was not the right response. He wished with all his soul to know what the proper response was.
Her eyes sparkled over her wine as she took a sip. She said, "That's sweet."
"It is? It tastes very sour to me, with a dry, woody taste underneath, like some kind of tree. A bit of blackberry and apricot too," Vegeta said, taking another swallow of the less-vile-than-he-originally-thought liquid. "Saiyans do not seem to have the same sugar receptors that Earthlings have on their tongues."
The woman giggled and said, "See, you're a great wine snob already. But I meant that you are sweet for saying I smell nice."
"You haven't tasted me, how could you possibly know that?" Vegeta said, perplexed, but his mind ran wild with the image of her tasting him.
"Silly man, it's an expression that means you're nice," she said and smiled at him.
Vegeta was not nice. How upsetting that she thought he was nice. But then he absorbed the fact that she seemed to think he had complimented her smell, so he tried to steer their talk in a different direction. "Is this the only form of alcohol Earthlings imbibe?"
"Oh, no, definitely not. We drink anything we can turn into alcohol. Some people ferment milk and drink it. It's not for me, but it shows the human ingenuity in their desire to have booze."
Vegeta considered fermented milk. He had grown to love the rotten dairy product they called "cheese" even though the very idea of eating another animal's lactation revolted him at first. Now he wasn't sure what he would do if he left Earth and no longer had access to cheese.
As if the woman heard his thoughts, she produced a whole board of different cheeses. He wanted to weep and kiss her and fuck her and love her and take care of her, but instead he said nothing. This "picnic," as she called it, was also outside Vegeta's etiquette knowledge. It shamed him that he had nothing to offer. He wished he could bring her some of the delicacies he'd encountered in other systems.
Maybe he could, in a manner of speaking. He said, feeling a little foolish for babbling about trivial shit, but the woman seemed happy sometimes when he told her pointless anecdotes, "I confess I found the…premise…of cheese to be categorically disgusting when I first arrived, but it's all delicious. On one planet that we cleaned and traded, they made this dessert that was incredible. It had the most unique texture and the flavor was so subtle and sublime, and it was the color of those bioluminescent bacteria you see here, in the ocean, at times. I gorged myself, Raditz and Nappa ate it until they puked. Then we discovered what it was made from."
The woman's eyes were wide and eager. She smiled and handed him a piece of cheese on one of the miniature pieces of stale bread they called "crackers." She rotated her hand in a circle. "Well? What was it?"
"It was made from the eyes of these giant, repulsive aquatic insects. It's not that I haven't eaten plenty of insects, because I have. I've eaten everything, but these things, oh gods, they came up on land at night to hunt, and they smelled like the foulest fecal matter you can even imagine, but on fire. They were revolting. We couldn't stomach them. But the eyes, apparently, were filled with this gel that they turned into the dessert. So you never can tell what might make a good food when properly transformed."
Vegeta thought maybe, for once, in however long he'd been on this miserable planet, he had managed not to fuck up an interaction with the woman. Her eyes were so happy. She smiled and said, "Holy shit! Did you eat more, even after you knew?"
"It was so good we all packed our pods full of it to eat later. Yree'eguov, they called it. I can't remember the name of the planet, or the people we removed, or even which system it was in."
He stopped yammering and ate his cheese, which was rather nice with the wine beverage. He could have done without the cracker, but Vegeta was always starving on Earth, so he ate whatever was offered. With their sluggish metabolisms, the humans ate so little that Vegeta was left to forage or ask for extra food, which would shame him into an early grave. So he ate quite a lot of Earth animals, most of which were palatable enough. He steered clear of the types the humans had domesticated, since particularly in entertainment there seemed to be a gray area rather than a line between livestock and pets. He didn't care for Earth insects, the ratio of chitin to calories was simply too high. He assumed that eating humans themselves would be frowned upon, which was too bad. There were plenty of them.
The woman laughed and said, "Can't remember who you massacred, but you remember the food. Classic Saiyan."
Vegeta laughed too. It felt so good to laugh. He only ever laughed with humor and happiness with the woman. He derisively laughed at his lessers on a fairly regular basis, but it was less satisfying than this. She popped a piece of cheese in her mouth and chewed, still smirking at him with a soft snickering laugh. "I love hearing your stories from out there," she said after swallowing and she waved her arm at the rapidly darkening sky. "When I was a little girl, I always thought I'd spend my whole life out there. I don't know why or what I thought I'd do. Going to Namek was amazing, but it made me miss home. Do you miss space? Like, are you homesick for…for wherever you lived?"
Her eyes searched his. He was surprised by how…caring…the question sounded. Not that he thought she disliked him. The woman went out of her way to do things for him even though he was a complete piece of shit most of the time. But there was little he had to offer her besides his body and his embittered, dark soul, or what was left of it. He found the question almost upsetting for the realization it made him have.
He said, "I…Since I was six…I've never lived anywhere. This. Here. This is the longest I've been anywhere since I was a child. At times I miss the solace of my pod. The void of space. It helped me keep things in perspective. How little I am. How meaningless. No matter what I do." Vegeta ate another mini sandwich as she handed it to him. He downed the rest of the wine.
She refilled his glass, scrutinizing him. "I don't think you're meaningless."
"Well, you've never been beyond this galaxy. There is nothing out there in a way you can't even imagine. The void. I…at times…at times I could be at peace there. It's the only thing I even know to miss."
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