Before I knew it, four months had come and gone. The triplets had grown considerably. They had begun to stand up, which was pretty amazing in of itself. They could form simple sentances in three different languages, so most of the time; I had no idea what they were talking about.

I loved watching their individual personalities show through. I would spend hours just watching them play with each other.

Aizel, the oldest by three minutes, was so rambunctious. He was constantly pushing the limits of what he could do. He was loud, but almost never said words. It was more like high-pitched screaming. He reminds me of myself when I was younger.

Lysander, the middle child, was much more laid back. Don’t get me wrong, he was almost as hyper at times as his brother, but he was much easier to control. He was so curious as well, and asked questions, to the best of his ability, about nearly everything. He was defiantly a thinker; one of those people that would just sit and think for hours on one subject. Defiantly not my forte, but I could tell he got that from Vegeta.

And then there was the Princess, as Vegeta already began to call her. I had never seen a child that was as calm as Vienna. She was one of those people that were slow to anger and infinitely patient. I didn’t know where she got this from, considering that Vegeta had the patience of a premenstrual teenager, and my fuse wasn’t much longer. But she was as she was. If you asked me, she didn’t seem that cut out for fighting.

What amazed me the most though, was their ability to imitate. They would repeat a lot of things either of us would say, and though they didn’t know the meaning of the word, they would use it anyway.

They imitated a lot of bad habits too. Like they had seen us drop food, and then pick it back up and eat it. Now, they threw their food on the floor purposely, just so they could pick it back up and eat it.

So far, since they had begun to stand on their own, Vegeta had taught them to block, and throw crooked punches, but that was about it. Most of the time when they punched, they would fall over anyway. It was amusing to watch though.

Today, I guess we were teaching them to swim.

They were all in their diapers, while I stood behind them and Vegeta stood waist deep in the water.

He was talking to them in Saiyan, which he often did, but they didn’t seem to be listening. They were too busy digging in their ears and noses to pay attention.

Before I could stop him, and before Vegeta was done talking, Aizel jumped into the water with a splash. He’d taken baths before, so this was just a bigger equivalent to the bath tub.

Apparently the deepness of the water caught him off guard, for he flailed, and his head went underwater.

Vegeta grabbed his arm, pulling him above the water.

As this went on, Vegeta had not paused in his lecture; almost like he expected this to happen. He put the boy back on land and continued without loosing his train of thought.

I didn’t know what he was telling them, but I knew a few words by now. Like ‘Don’t lick that,’ was ‘Alile mun-ya,’. And ‘I’m horny’ is ‘Sowá seleal.’ But the first one was never directed towards me.

I also knew just about every curse word there was. Apparently, there are 16 bad words in Saiyan, while in English there are only 7. So far, my favorite was ‘Binashte,’ which was something like ‘Ass Fucking Whore.’ Three bad words for the price of one.

“Kakorot, did you get that?” He asked.

When I blinked and looked at him, he seemed annoyed. “Sorry, I was thinking about bad words. What did you say?”

“I said, on the count of three, push them in.”

I had no time to think about right and wrong. He was on three before I knew what happened.

They were all soon failing and kicking in the water.

“Don’t save them, they’ll do it themselves.” He said.

I did trust him, but his methods made me… uneasy.

“Julay na rean, ristas.” He called to them, which meant ‘Swim or drown, runts.’

A few moments later, they got the hang of it. They were actually pretty good after just a half an hour.

“Good job,” I said getting into the water myself. “They learn fast.” I said to Vegeta.

He nodded. “On Vegeta, they would have learned to swim before they walked, but the water wouldn’t thaw.”

Spring had just begun. This was their first spring, but they didn’t seem all that impressed. It was funny how I documented everything as a ‘first’.

“Da,” Aizel called as he dog-paddled towards us. They called me Daddy, or Papa, but they always called Vegeta ‘Da’. Dashte meant ‘Prince’ in Saiyan, while Dande meant father.

He mumbled something inherently in a mix of English and Saiyan.

“He says it’s cold.” Vegeta explained.

“We should go inside anyway; it’s almost lunch time.”

I carried Vienna at my side. She was by far the quietest of the three of them. She looked back over my shoulder, as if watching the world shrink behind us and then disappear behind a door.

“What do was want to eat?” I asked her.

She did not respond, but she did look as though she was thinking.

“Cookies!” Lysander cried, which was by far, his favorite word.

“That’s what you always want to eat.” I said with a grin. I turned to ask Aizel, “What should…” I trailed off when I realized he was gone.

I put Vienna down and looked all around the room. I had taken my eyes off him for just a moment; he couldn’t have gotten that far.

When I found him, he was with Vegeta in the nursery. Vegeta was standing near the door, watching him.

When I got a better look, I saw that he was trying to stick a fork into the electrical socket.

“Ai, don’t…!”

Vegeta stopped me. “Let’s just see what’ll happen, Kakorot.”

“He’s going to shock himself,” I explained.

“I’m aware. Once he does it once, maybe he won’t do it again.”

I came to realize that this was how Vegeta taught. It was not by telling or showing, but by letting you learn from your own mistakes.

Eventually, the fork did find a place inside the electrical socket.

The boy fell silent, and then the tears began along with the screaming.

“Have we learned?” Vegeta asked over the screaming.

He turned, crying, and nodding his head.

“Good.” Vegeta promptly left the room.

With his tiny face welled with tears, he showed me his hand; his lower lip quivering and his chin tucked low to his chest.

I picked him up. “It’s okay,” I said, “I know. But now you know not to do that, yeah?”

He seemed to be nodding just so I’d shut up and kiss his hand. After I did so, he quieted. I set him down to join his siblings.

When I returned to the kitchen, I found that Vegeta was cooking. I wondered how good of an idea this was, since I couldn’t recall ever seeing him cook anything.

I sat in the living room with the babies, awaiting the sound of the smoke detector. Or screaming. Whatever came first.

We played blocked, which was the most boring game they had. You set eh blocks up, and then you knock them down. There’s nothing further than that. So I grabbed a book.

“How about we read something?” I asked them.

“No,” Lysander cried, “No book! Cookie!”

“No cookies,” I said, “Da’s making food.”

“Cookies!” He insisted.

“Pop and cookies!” Aizel added.

It was times like these that I wish we had a TV to raise them. I know it’s terrible to say, but I do. Just something to keep their attention for ten minutes or so.

Whatever Vegeta was cooking actually smelled good. I became increasingly curious of what he was doing.

Ten or fifteen minutes later, he came into the room with a plate of something that looked really good.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“I don’t know; I saw it on TV at the store.”

“Like a TV dinner?”

“It was like a cooking show or something. It took forever to get through the line, so I was watching it.”

“And you remembered how to do it?”

He nodded. “Wasn’t that hard.”

I went in to get a plate for myself. There was chicken, rice, vegetables, and something things that I wasn’t sure what it was. All I knew was that it was like orgasm in my mouth. It was the kind of food that made you sad when it was gone.

The babies liked it too. Thiers was mashed up into a mess, but they still liked it.

“How come you never cooked before?” I asked as I shoveled the last few bites into my mouth.

He shrugged. “I didn’t feel like it.”

I nodded. Perfectly reasonable explanation.

Now that I knew he could cook, or remember recopies well enough to duplicate them from TV, it really encouraged me to think about getting a TV.

“Well, it’s really good. I’m very impressed.”

“If you like that, you should try Flante. They take giant ground worm larva and they flame broil it so the outside is crispy, then they take this straw or something and suck out the inside and put it in a bowl. It’s really good.”

I swallowed slowly. “What do you do with the rest of the worm?”

“You dunk it in the soup stuff they get from the insides.”

“That sounds like the most horrific meal I can think of.” I said bluntly.

He cocked his head. “It’s really good, though. I’d eat it everyday if this planet had giant ground worms.”

I shuttered to think of how one would harvest giant ground worm larva.

“You guys full?” I asked and turned to them. They all lay sprawled about the floor, sleeping. “I guess they are.”

We carried them into the nursery and put them into their cribs.

“I love this time of day,” Vegeta said out of the blue. “They don’t talk, they don’t fight, they don’t scream. They just lay there, and I don’t have to do anything.” He sighed.

As soon as we left the room, he turned to me.

“Do you want to play a game?”

I was instantly curious. Vegeta did not ‘play games’, unless there was a reason to.

“It’s called Open Book. You say something about yourself that’s either true or false. Then I have to guess which it is. If I guess right, you have to take off an article of clothes. Then we switch. The first one to be completely naked looses.”

I agreed, and we both left for the bedroom.

“Okay,” I started, “When I was younger, I hit my head so hard I was in a coma for weeks.”

He rolled his eyes. “True. You have to make it harder than that, Kakorot. Now take something off.”

I untied my belt and dropped it off the side of the bed.

He leaned back, thinking. “When I first met you, I despised everything about you.”

“True?”

“No,” He said, “I actually liked your sense of humor.” This statement completely caught me off guard. When silence fallowed, he nudged me with his foot. “Your turn.”

“Chi-chi was my first crush.”

“I know that one, Kakorot. False.”

I sat up straighter. “How did you know?”

“Intuition. You’re first crush was my wife. Go on; take something off.”

He was really good at this game. I was beginning to think maybe it was a bad idea to take the challenge. I took off one boot.

“My first year on Earth, I had to go to the hospital because I stuck my hand inside the garbage disposal and turned it on because I didn’t know what it was.”

This story was so bazaar, it had to be true.

“No, that never happened. When you go to so many different places, you learn not to stick your hand into things if you don’t know what they are.”

“So then it’s partially true; you didn’t know what it was.” I pointed out.

“That doesn’t count; you have to get most of it right.”

“You didn’t say that!”

He rolled his eyes. “Fine.” He removed one glove. “Your turn.”

“My closet’s full of the same orange gi, but I only where one of them.”

He paused to think this over. “False. Your wife seems like the kind of person to buy you clothes, but then you never wear them, and she bitches because she ends up washing the same three pairs of clothes you wear every week.”

I was amazed at the accuracy of his answer. It was like he had been inside my mind already and had grown tired of it. I removed my other boot.

“It seems like I’m winning. All you have to do is get three questions right, and then I’ll have nothing else to remove. But you; you seem to have way more clothes on than I do, and still, you undress quicker.” He pointed out. He paused to think of something to say. “The mark on my ass isn’t a birthmark; it’s where I was beaten with a lead pipe.”

His face was completely serious. His eyes stared into mine, unwavering. I wished for it to be untrue, but I had a feeling it was.

“True?”

“Are you asking?”

“True.” I restated.

His face fell slack. “No, it’s a birthmark. You’re really bad at this game.”

I frowned deeply. I wondered how it was that he kept tricking me. It was something about the way he told the story. It was the attention to imaginary detail. He added little things that never really happened to make the story more believable.

“Okay,” I began. “When I was fifteen, I found a bottle of Ibuprofen and thought it was candy. I ate the whole bottle. When Bulma found me eating them, she dragged me to the hospital to have my stomach pumped.”

He paused for a long time. He knew I was perfectly capable of doing such a thing, but then again I had been 15. “True…” He finally guessed.

“Nope, false. I’m pretty sure that most fifteen years olds don’t mistake pain medication for candy.”

He nodded. “That’s what I was thinking, too.” He thought for a moment longer. “I’m severely dyslexic.”

I tried to recall seeing him read a book, or even write his own name. I could not remember a single instance were he had needed to prove that he could read, or write. I was at a loss. It could go either way. “False?”

He paused and gave me a look. He sat up and removed his shirt. Lean, hard muscles lined his chest beautify. His stomach was tight and perfect for biting. I wanted to touch him, but I knew I had to focus.

“Okay, people have asked if you were my brother.”

He cocked his head. “False.”

“Damn it!” I cried and removed my over shirt.

“I nearly drank myself to death last summer.”

“False.” I said immediately, figuring it would take a lot for a Saiyan to drink himself to death.

He shook his head.

My jaw dropped. “How much did you drink?”

“Apparently too much. I passed out and turned blue. Bulma took me to the hospital and they had to purify my blood. I had an awful hangover the next morning.”

“What… like, what happened?”

He shrugged. “I don’t really know. I started drinking, and then I couldn’t stop. I woke up in the hospital and couldn’t remember anything.”

I decided it was better if we dismissed the subject for another time. “I can lick my elbow.”

He half-chuckled. “True. All Saiyans can do that.”

I glared and removed my undershirt. “How come?”

“How come they can do that?” He thought about it. “It’s probably because when we used to live in trees, it was beneficial to be double jointed and flexible.”

“Oh. That makes sense.”

“Let me see…” He lay down and stared up at the ceiling. His hands came to rest on his chest loosely. “I’ve never been skinny dipping.”

“True.”

“False,” He corrected.

I was in shock. “You? You, the Proper Prince of Saiyans have been skinny dipping?”

He nodded. “And with a man, too.”

I shook my head, unable to get over that. “What were you doing?”

“I was like 16 or something. It was dark, and really, really cold. He bet me I was too much of a wimp to go skinny dipping with him. So I had to go. Then when we went to get our clothes back, someone stole them. It was the worst day of my life for a long time.”

“Fine.” I thought for a long time. All I had left was my pants, so all he had to do was get one more question right. “I went to Vegas once and lost $4,000 in one night.”

“True.” He finally decided.

I sighed. “You win.”

“I always win.” He smirked.

I stood and began to drop my pants.

He began to hum a sensuous tune, as if I were a stripper or something.

I sat back onto the bed and rubbed my arms. It was colder than I thought it was.

“Do you want to continue to play, or should we just fuck and go to bed?” he asked.

“Who said we were going to fuck?” I asked suspiciously.

There was a split second where he thought I was serious, but then he understood that I was kidding.

“We should keep playing until you loose too.”

He didn’t bother to point out that he’d already won. “I only have nine toes.”

I glanced at his feet, which were snuggly tucked beneath him. “Ah… true?”

He unfolded his legs. “Wrong. I do have ten.” He thought for a moment. “This scar,” He ran his fingers across the one on his chest near his shoulder, “Was from an aircraft accident. I almost lost my arm.”

I thought carefully. There was a lot of details to the story, but he seemed to be genuinely telling the truth. “True?”

His eyebrows rose. I thought he was going to take off his pants, and we could get to the sexin’; but he took off his other glove; the one I had forgotten about.

His next statement threw me off completely. I had not expected him to say anything like this.

“I have a fifth child on the way.” He said this almost like it was a question, and not a statement.

I felt trapped. I wasn’t sure if he knew or if he was asking. “True.” I finally just said.

He turned his face away from me to think. “How far along is she?”

I calculated in my head. “It’s nearly time, I think.”

He nodded. “I’ll see her tomorrow.” He arched back with h hips lifted off the bed. He slipped his pants off and dropped them onto the floor.

I could see his skin was dry, but that just turned me on further, as I thought about how he would soon be slicked with sweat and moaning my name beneath me.

I looped one arm around his back and pulled him into a bruising kiss.

He pulled away though to say something more. I continued down his neck. “Why didn’t she tell me?” The question seemed to bite at his mind. “Perhaps… it’s not my child.”

I lightly bit his collarbone and rested my head on his chest. “It’s yours. I know it is.”

“So you’ve seen her? What reason did you have to see her?”

I whined. “Can we talk about this after?”

He pushed me away. “No; why did you go to see her without me?”

I debated whether or not I should tell him. “It was after Urain died.”

He did not respond.

“You were so… upset. I went to ask her if she could help you. I saw that she was pregnant.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“She made me swear not to.”

“So you’ll keep a secret for the woman that hates you with everything she has, and you’ll keep secrets from the only one that still stands by you?” His spite seemed to slip so far into his speech that it almost hurt to look at him.

I grabbed him into a hug, crushing our bodies together. “I’m sorry. I should have told you,”

“Let me go!” He cried, “I don’t want your apologies now!” He pushed against me as he crawled backwards on his knees near the headboard.

“I just…” I paused, unsure if I wanted to tell him, “I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want you to feel like… you had to go back to her.”

He stopped moving at once, freezing within my grasp.

“I didn’t want you to choose her over me.”