Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

After - that is, after his cousin defeats Frieza, after his enemy's enemies use the phenomenal wish-granting power of their dragon to raise a bunch of dead people, after the Namekians leave to go establish their healing temples on yet another hidden planet - he doesn't know where to go. He knows they're out there, somewhere: the wish had been to revive all of Frieza's victims, regardless of morality. All he has to do in order to claim his birthright and become the king is find them, and win a fight against his father. Easy, except that the universe is a very big place.

The Namekians are all gone to their new planet, and his cousin and his cousin's friends are revived as well. He no longer cares. He's got what he came for, and now he needs something else. Kakarot is useless as well as absent, but Kakarot's friend, the clever little builder, is not. She's weak and fearful, but probably she'll be able to build something that will find where the other Saiyans are so he can leave.

When he arrives it's to find her in the middle of her breaking up.

He does not quite understand human romances. They seem to be a mashup of the pity quadrants, or at least that's how they seem to believe it works. He's personally witnessed at least four instances of what he would have called black romance, but they will swear up and down is platonic before hauling each other off for some kismetic fucking. It's only been a week. He's not really surprised that she's breaking up with him. He's wondering what took so long.

It's an inconvenience, though. Even he's not stupid enough to think he can successfully threaten someone who has just dropped a matesprit that has been her concupiscent partner for almost as long as she's been old enough to want one. He turns to leave instead. He's been looking for months. A few more days can't hurt.

"Oh, great," he hears the human male say. Yams-something. "Now you're here too."

"I need to talk to the woman."

Yams immediately places himself between them. "I'm not going to let you hurt her!"

"Did I say hurt?" he says. "I need. To talk. To her."

"Anything you can say to her, you can say to me!"

"Yamcha, shut up," says - all right, Bulma.

"But - "

"I don't need you to defend me," she says. "And you wouldn't be able to anyway."

"I can't just leave you here with him!"

"Yes, you can," says Bulma, folding her arms. "You heard him yourself. He won't hurt me; he needs me. You on the other hand - "

"I'm not leaving," says Yams staunchly.

"Yes, you are," he says. He's having trouble believing that even human men would have the bad grace to stay when they are clearly being kicked out of a quadrant, but then, Yams never does manage not to sink to new lows.

"Uh," says Yams.

"Or I will throw you out," he says. If he still had a tail, he'd be lashing it.

Yams looks between the two of them. Then, like a disobedient hunting beast, he takes a few steps back, turns, and runs.

"All right," says Bulma, once they've heard the door shut. "Talk."

"I need you to build me a ship."

" . . . that is not what I was expecting," says Bulma.

"Tch. None of you want me here, and I don't want to be here. Build me a ship, and I won't be."

"I will not."

"Woman - "

"You like blowing up peaceful planets full of peaceful people for no reason! You like randomly killing people! You're just going to set yourself up as king of a bunch of planets somewhere, and I won't help you!"

He suppresses the urge to punch her. She wouldn't survive, and he needs her.

"No," he says. "Conquering the galaxy was Frieza's dream. It's no fun, conquering a bunch of planets full of farmers armed with pellet-throwers. I'd need a decent opponent. Which is why I want to find where the Saiyans are."

" - what."

"Frieza blew up Vegeta," he says, in small precise words. "The planet Vegeta, where Saiyans lived. They were his direct victims. The wish should have revived them. I plan to go find them."

"Oh," says Bulma. Then she hardens again. "And conquer yourselves a nice little empire? I think not!"

He growls. "Saiyans never left Vegeta before Frieza! We're not likely to now, either. All the good opponents are at home!"

" . . . that's a terrible way to ask for help," she says.

"I wasn't asking."

"Yu-huh," says Bulma.

"Today, anyway. I'll come back tomorrow."

"You will?" asks Bulma, blinking in apparent surprise.

"The ridiculous state of your quadrants is none of my business, but I've broken up with enough idiots to know that you're not going to do anything useful today. I'll come back once you've had some time to put yourself together."

"Oh. Well."

He leaves, and goes to find some food.

He is honestly surprised when, midway through the meal, Bulma sits back down across from him. And smiles.

"What."

"I'm just curious. You were going to leave and not even talk to me today, if Yamcha hadn't called you out. I didn't think anything on the planet could make you be polite."

He stares at her.

"So?"

"I already told you. Your quadrants are your quadrants. Anyone willing to walk into someone else's quadrants without being asked is - is - "

"Rude?"

"A rapist," he says.

"Oh," says Bulma. "Okay, good to know. Now: what is a quadrant?"

It's his turn to stare at her. Even amongst Frieza's military, they hadn't been this ignorant. But Earth is a wasteground, off the main galactic trade routes and useless for anything but farmers with pellet-throwers.

She stares back, meeting his eyes squarely.

He sighs. "The one you and Yams were in was the red one, except for when you flipped black. Which was most days."

"And the other two?"

"Are for curbing each other's worst excesses. Frieza could have used either one."

"So could you," says Bulma.

He takes a deep breath before saying, "That? Was the kind of thing someone says while walking into a quadrant, and hoping for an invitation."

"I'm not - I wasn't - "

"Yes, yes, you're human. And Frieza was Kloflorian, and the green people are Namekian. Every single planet has a word for romance, and no two of them mean exactly the same thing. But," he adds, smirking a bit, "that doesn't make you any less a pervert."

She makes a noise of exasperation. "You are such an asshole."

He doesn't justify that with an answer.

"And I can't just build you a new spaceship overnight. It's going to take a few months."

"The longer it takes, the longer I'll be here, woman," he says.

"Argh!"

He considers it a win, and keeps considering it a win until the next day, when the Namekian - there are many Namekians, of course, but this one is the one who stayed - walks over to him and growls, "Quadrants. Explain."

He tries and fails not to stare. From what he's gathered, which is not much because he really doesn't care, the Namekian is currently in Kakarot's spade. That must be awkward, since he is simultaneously in Kakarot's son's diamond. Or possibly, he realizes with a slightly nauseous jolt, none of them know anything about quadrants, and therefore the relationships might be based instead on the weird stabbing-and-sliming that passes for romance amongst Namekians. He really, really hopes not.

"Was your eavesdropping not enough?" he manages to ask.

"No," says the Namekian bluntly.

On the one hand, he's not the person to explain this, to anyone, at all, ever. On the other, there is literally no one else, so if he doesn't, it's all going to be stabbing or the gross mashup pity party of humans. No.

"I need a fucking drink," he says.

The Namekian finds him a fucking drink, and then hovers there waiting while he drinks it. "All right," he says. "Four quadrants. We consider them as concupiscent and aconcupiscent, and driven by either pity or hate."

"You can skip the concupiscent ones," says the Namekian. "I got that."

He's unexpectedly both irritated and relieved by this. "The aconcupiscent hate-driven quadrant is called ashen. It basically happens when two people are doing something so stupid that you have to smack some sense into them. Usually the stupid is black-quadrant-related." He checks to see the Namekian is still following. He is. "The aconcupiscent pity-driven quadrant is called pale. It's . . . about pacifying the worst urges, yes, but also making them into a better person." For some value of the word better, anyway.

"Huh," says the Namekian. "Thanks."

And he turns and leaves.

What the everloving lunar fuck.

So he goes back to Bulma, hoping that maybe he can ask her about a ship today. She hands him a printed out sheet in weird Earth-style script. He's learned enough of it to be able to understand the shop signs, and as he reads it realizes it's a list of rocks. He lowers the sheet.

"It's going to take at least three months," says Bulma. "We don't have the right supplies on hand, and since someone blew up our ship, we're going to have to start from scratch. I don't trust you not to kill people instead of just buying things, and we'll have to make most of it in-house anyway. Those are the raw materials. Can I trust you to handle going out and blowing a few massive holes in the environment?"

He ground his teeth; he'd expected to have to beg and grovel, and - this isn't worse, surely, but - "Yes."

"Great! When you're done with that, we'll see if those ki blasts can be used to run a smelter."

He spends the next two fivedays flying all over the planet, recovering ores and bringing them to the house. During this time, somehow the information about how Saiyan quadrants work gets disseminated amongst Kakarot's crew. He neither knows nor cares about how, but they all come to look sidelong at him before going away again.

It takes him an embarrassingly long time to notice that they're actually running some kind of protection detail on Bulma. The idea is laughable; of them all only the Namekian would pose any challenge in a fight, and he's the one who isn't helping. They do it anyway. He has to respect that, at least, a crew coming together to protect its weakest member, so he says nothing and pretends not to notice. This is only temporary anyway.

Three-eyed Tienshinhan breaks and asks first.

"Shit no," he says. "I want nothing to do with this backwards planet full of farmers and scientists and weaklings. I'm going home to my world, with my people. Bulma said she wouldn't help me if I hurt anyone."

"Huh," says Tien.

Bulma can use what she calls "conventional techniques" to make most of the parts. Some, she explains, will require glasses of certain compounds. The alloys themselves are straightforward, but she needs them heated to above the solid-to-liquid phase transition and then cooled quickly enough to freeze them without a defined crystal structure. "I think we can do it," she says, "if we have them submerged in liquid nitrogen and you use a - small! - ki blast on them."

The biggest problem is actually getting a small enough ki blast to not vaporize the liquid nitrogen in one go. He's never been asked to do something powerful but tiny before; Frieza had been all about big displays. Bulma doesn't really care how it looks, as long as it does the required thing. And it is a challenge, of a sort, so he sits down and focuses on his own ki. It's a little like learning to sense it without his scouter, but not very: his focus is inward. It takes a number of days before he manages an acceptably tiny but powerful ki blast.

"Great," says Bulma, and makes him do it six hundred thirty-five times in a row, glassing all the solders she'd put on a circuit board. When he's almost done, she swans up with another one.

"I am not your servant, woman!"

"No," says Bulma. "You are a pain in the ass! Who wants to get off my planet and go find your people. If you want to help, help. If you don't, you lose nothing but the time it takes me to build a laser setup to do in months what you can do in minutes."

He gnashes his teeth some more.

Days later, they have all the necessary parts. Bulma says, "Okay, good. Can you hold these things in place while I do the welds?"

That's not difficult, but it is boring. He says, "Frieza never had to spend this much time making ships."

"Are you sure?" says Bulma. "Or was that stuff that happened but you didn't pay attention to it, because it wasn't important for fighting and conquest?" Probably the latter, now that he thinks about it. "Move it up two centimeters and hold it while I tack this in place."

He does, and then says, "Can't you build a smaller ship than this?"

"You want a small one? I just assumed you'd want to be able to train on the way. This one will have the gravitational enhancements."

It's infuriating that she's right. "On the way to where?"

"Ah, no," says Bulma. "That's your job. Didn't Frieza have, I don't know, people keeping track of things? People who will probably be keeping track of a whole lot more things now that he's dead?"

He snorts at that. "As though I wouldn't be 'detained for questioning' the moment His Imperial Majesty catches on to the fact that I'm still alive."

Bulma finished the weld before settling back and pushing up her mask - to protect her weak human eyes, apparently - and says, "His Imperial Majesty?"

"What, you think Frieza just sprang up fully-grown? His father will be trying to find out what happened. Everyone else who was on Namek died, at least as far as they know. I wasn't going to inform them otherwise until," he grins, a little feral, "I'm ready to inform them otherwise."

" . . . out of curiosity," says Bulma. "Is this super Saiyan thing a one-off, like, prophesied hero, that kind of thing, or can any Saiyan do it?"

"Both," he says. "There are stories, about heroes who lived in the past. Some were super Saiyans."

"And clearly not the same person."

"Yes. And also there's a prophecy about the super Saiyan, the one who will be born to lead the Saiyans to conquer paradise."

"Well, that sure as hell sounds like Saiyans," says Bulma. "All right. So you can't ask the, er, the Imperials, and it's not like any of us have any idea, and you don't have the time to wait for the dragon balls to reactivate, so . . . "

"So?"

"So I guess you go to New Namek."

"Why would I go to Namek?" They are a bunch of weird mystics who occasionally produce an adequate fighter.

"Because Porunga presumably knows where he put New Vegeta, and by the time you get there it will have been a Namekian year and the dragon balls will be active again." She pauses, then adds, "Just to be clear, you go, you ask nicely, and then when they tell you where your planet is you thank them. Like a civilized person."

He gnashes his teeth, but the thing is, she's right. The fastest way by far is going to be convincing the Namekians that they can get him to go away by summoning the dragon so he can ask a question. And he might need the dragon balls, Earth's or the Namek's, in the future. Which means not pissing them off now. "Do we know where Namek is?"

"No, but that's not a problem. I just need to build a bigger dragon radar."

" . . . a what."

"To find extraterrestrial dragon balls," says Bulma, like scouters for mystic artifacts are a thing. "I'll need a bunch more osmium, though."

What she means is: I need you to go dig up and smelt a whole bunch more osmium. But he doesn't actually mind blowing up smallish mountain, verging on hill, that she points out to him. Or pulverizing it into a fine dust. It's something to do, anyway, and there's always a meal - a good meal - waiting back at the compound.

His good mood only lasts as long as it takes to get there, though. He doesn't mind the fact that Bulma's crew is her crew, and is making it blatantly clear that he is unwanted. It's just that it's so unnecessary. He's got the message. He has not killed anyone since arriving on this planet, and he plans to continue not to kill anyone until he's at the head of an army, marching on the Imperial Palace, which won't be anywhere near Earth. In the meantime, the humans are just one giant pale orgy and he's not going to participate even a little.

It's the bald one again. He's not even doing anything annoying, sitting quietly on the couch and watching TV. He looks up, sees it's him, looks over to where Bulma is doing . . . something, to something on the table, and then looks back down. There isn't even a hint of challenge.

But, he realizes with a sudden jolt, he wants there to be.

Bulma looks up. "Vegeta?"

He drops the bag of osmium, a solid thunk on the floor. "I do not need your pity!"

"Uh - "

He doesn't bother about the structural integrity; he just flies through the roof, up, away. He doesn't even bother to think about where he's going, or what he's going to do when he gets there, until he's halfway to the (current) desolate wilderness where the Namekian is skulking. He does more or less the same thing as bald Krillin: look up, acknowledge that he's there, and then settle back in to pointedly ignoring him.

Fine. Two can play at that game. He sits down on a nearby rock, pulls up his legs, and settles in to wait.

The Namekian doesn't move for four days. He's obligated to go hunt for himself, which is at first enraging and then, with the hot taste of blood on his tongue, an exaltation. It's not even, he realizes in the middle of the morning on the third day, a test. The Namekian's focus is inward, and it's not really palpable from the outside but if he concentrates he can figure out that there's some fairly violent reshaping of ki going on, just under the surface. It's enough to make him say, "What are you doing?"

"In general?" The Namekian doesn't even twitch an ear.

"To your ki." It's not that he's a stranger to pain. It's just that there is pain that's useful, and pain that isn't.

"Grafting," says the Namekian, which. What the fuck. But he doesn't ask out loud, so after a moment, the Namekian sinks back down into himself.

The next day, the Namekian stands up and carefully says, "I'm going to train. With Gohan. Stay here or don't."

He doesn't. He follows the slug to tiny house in the middle of a huge forest, a long flight away from anything else. The Namekian politely knocks on the door, and waits for a human woman to answer it. They chat for a little while, before Kakarot's brat emerges. He does that weird acknowledge-ignore thing too, and actually says, "Mr. Piccolo - "

"It's fine, Gohan. He's only here to watch."

It's true, he knows, as soon as the Namekian says it. He is here to watch, because the other option is demanding answers from the halfling brat when he doesn't even know the questions. So he tails them out to a plateau, and watches the two of them go through warm-up stretches. Then the Namekian takes the lead, attacking, and - it is almost physically painful to watch.

There's nothing wrong with either of their stances. There is, in fact, a certain elegant economy of motion they both use, using momentum to their advantage so they have to stop and change direction as little as possible. The brat is ridiculously fast for his age. He just very obviously has never had a teacher who knows anything about Saiyans, because of course he hasn't. He's not using the advantages of his heritage. He doesn't even know them.

And - the thing is, he is pretty sure they are moirails. They are not being subtle. But neither of them has invited commentary, and while it's perfectly acceptable for moirails to engage in this kind of low-key spar any time in public, putting himself forward where he hasn't been invited . . .

It's just. So painful.

Ugh. Fine. Namekians don't do quadrants, and humans don't do quadrants, and the brat probably won't even notice. "Hey, idiots!" he calls.

He's right. They don't care. What follows is an hour of a cross between a spar, a physiology lesson, and the most basic of lessons in form and stance. He has to keep calling a pause and then moving in to physically reposition the brat's limbs. They are both following every word, which he knows because they keep asking follow-up questions, good ones. If not always ones to which he knows the answer. "How is that even useful?" he asks, exasperated, when the brat wants to know something about the kinds of foods that used to grow on Vegeta-sei.

"It isn't," says the brat, easily. "I just want to know."

It strikes him, then, how alien the half-breed is. No Saiyan would ever want to learn something "just to know." If it weren't related to fighting, they wouldn't even have asked the question. He is, momentarily, so homesick it aches.

"Er," says the kid.

"Shut up."

"You know," says the Namekian. "You don't have to be here."

He deliberately misunderstands. "I do," he says. "The woman isn't done building my ship."

"Bulma's building you a ship?" The word the brat doesn't say is, 'Why?'

"Frieza killed my people," he says. "Blew up the planet. Which means that they're somewhere out there, now."

"Oh. Well. That's . . . good?"

"Better than the alternative," says the Namekian; and proceeds, in six short sentences, to outline galactic history for the last four decades. He has no idea how he even knows. No one else on this planet seems to.

"Uh, so," says the brat, looking down at his hands. "Mister Vegeta. What are you going to do?"

"Go explain to the Klorforian Empire why anyone with a brain leaves my planet alone. And then go home."

"Oh. When you do . . . "

"Yes?" he hisses.

The brat looks up, and he feels his heart beat. Once. Twice. He's seen that expression before, on warriors who don't have moirails because no one can pacify a warrior who doesn't draw a line at enemies. Or at all. "When you do, tell them the Son family sends their regards." He immediately turns to the Namekian. "I'm going to head home now. Mom said she needed some more meat, so I have to hunt on the way."

"All right," says the Namekian. "Not from the north forest. You've been hunting there too much, and it needs at least a year to recover. Two would be better."

"Yes, Mister Piccolo. Er. Mister Vegeta." He does an awkward sort of bow - not the bow of a subject to his king, or of a slave to his conqueror, just one of the little politeness bows they do on Earth - before he turns and flies off.

He turns back to the Namekian. "What the hell is he?"

"Not your concern."

"Like hell he's not!"

"Why do you care? You're going back to your planet, aren't you?"

"He's - " one of mine, he barely manages not to say, but it doesn't matter. Not saying it doesn't make it less true; it's far, far too late for anything to make it less true. The brat is one of his, like no one on Vegeta ever was, a decade and a half late and thrilling all along his spine. He's terrified, right down to the marrow of his bones.

He turns to look at the Namekian, sidelong, who is just standing there and - yeah. There isn't any way to miss it now that he knows what he's looking for. "Shit."

"Mm," says the Namekian. "Here's my advice - "

"Did I ask you?" he snaps back.

"Go. Find your people. Lead them to take down this Klorforian empire. Do it the right way, which is a lot harder than just killing the heads of state. Do it the way where the people of the galaxy, even the ones who aren't fighters, won't ever bow down before them again. Once you have, when you're ready, come home. And by the way," he adds, turning away, "my name is Piccolo." He flies off, too.

It isn't - quite - a black solicitation. It's prickly and mean, but the - Piccolo - doesn't want to be his rival. Not because he knows he wouldn't survive it the second time any more than he had the first, but because he - he -

Ugh. Fine. Bulma pities him, Piccolo isn't the tiniest bit afraid of him, and if it came down to it, the brat would wipe the floor with him. Also the rest of his crew hates him to varying degrees. It doesn't really matter. He has a crew. It's full of idiots and weaklings, but it's his; and if that means he's stuck with this backwards little planet, then he can . . . come to terms with it, anyway. While he's tearing down the Klorforian Empire, maybe. Piccolo wasn't wrong, after all. He has a duty. On the bright side, he can't possibly fuck this up more than he already has.

When he gets back, bald Krillin has been replaced by the creepy childlike Chiaotzu, who floats around with a worrying perpetual smile. He walks straight through the inevitable acknowledge/ignore, and stops next to the table where Bulma is doing whatever it is she does with that many screens.

She pities him, and, all right, he's not an idiot. He understands that most humans don't, actually, like fighting, even if he can't understand why. If you look at it like someone who doesn't like fighting and doesn't understand why he does, her pity even makes sense. But incompatible worldviews are probably not a good place to begin a matespritship, and even less a place to start a moirallegiance.

"What?" says Bulma.

"Nothing," he replies. "Just . . . the green one. Piccolo. How did he get involved with you?"

"He's not really involved," says Bulma.

He replies to that particular piece of idiocy with a look.

"The same way as everyone else, I suppose. By fighting Goku."

"By losing against Kakarot, you mean."

"I guess. Why? Is it important?"

"If you really, really hate someone, you might go and kill the rest of their family and crew, and then leave them alive to suffer. But only fools do that, because if they're alive they can find a new crew and train and come take revenge. I don't think I've ever heard of a Saiyan who just stops at defeating enemies, and then somehow manages to convince them to join his crew. It doesn't make any sense!"

"Yeah, that's Goku," says Bulma. "Doesn't make any sense, doesn't know the meaning of the word impossible, doesn't understand the concept of hate. What's a crew?"

"A crew. Your quadrants and your quadrants' quadrants. The people you give a damn about, even if you don't like them, because they are yours and you are thiers. Humans don't have crews?"

"Not in the same way, no," says Bulma. "We'd use the word friend."

He snorts. "Raditz was a friend. His death didn't mean I wanted to take revenge."

"You came to Earth and killed half of my friends immediately afterwards," says Bulma, carefully.

"I never hated them."

"You - what?"

"If they hadn't gotten in the way," he explains, amazed that apparently she hadn't gotten this, "I'd have gathered up the dragon balls, wished for immortality, gathered them again, wished my people back, and left to go take down the empire. Actually that was my plan even after they got in the way, except that someone didn't tell me that one of your fighters is linked to dragon balls."

Bulma narrows her eyes. "Really."

"What would I want with this planet, woman?"

"Uh-huh. You do know it takes a year after using them for them to be ready again - "

"I do now," he says. "I would have gone and lost to Frieza in the meantime."

"Uh," says Bulma. "Because . . . Saiyans get stronger every time you survive something that should have killed you, and after you were immortal, that would have been every time. Wasn't he going to notice that you kept not dying?"

"Which is why I deleted this planet from the galactic archive before coming out here. Most of the people on this planet don't know about the dragon balls either, so knowing they exist on some backwards planet somewhere wouldn't have done Frieza a goddamned thing. He'd have to search them one by one, and even he didn't have the men for that. Meanwhile, I'd be training. After I got my people back, I could start training them."

"Huh," says Bulma, looking at him like - she's never seen him before, or something.

"What?"

"I have the gravity module working," says Bulma, ignoring the question. "At least for gravities humans can survive. I need you to go give it a try." When he continues to glare at her, she adds, "It's a weak non-fighter Earth human thing, okay? I promise it won't hurt you."

He believes her, and not only because there is precious little on this rock that could hurt him.

Kakarot's - his - crew does get together, though. They do it while pointedly ignoring him, which he now understands is more because the other option is admitting that he is one of them. Then Bulma tells him to tell them what he told her, which he does in short syllables because Earth is so stupidly far from civilization that they don't know it exists, much less Imperial politics. They listen, and ask questions which are only stupid and obvious if you already know galactic history and culture. He grits his teeth and answers. Then they spend forever talking about it, which he would be annoyed about except Bulma just shoved food at him so he can eat instead of paying attention. It's . . . not awful.

After a while, Piccolo says, "Look, it's not like we can stop him from going even if we wanted to, and I don't really see the point. No one on the Imperial side even knows Earth exists, much less New Namek, much less dragon balls. If he wants to go start a rebellion, good; it'll distract them from figuring out what happened. If he succeeds, even better."

There's a quiet moment while they all digest that. Then bald Krillin says, "Yeah, okay. So what do we do now?"

"You can train if you want," says Vegeta. "It won't do much good, but, you know. You can."

"Nothing," cuts in Bulma. "I'm making the nav system now, but that's an electronics problem, not a go-blow-up-a-mountain-mining problem. Although I'm pretty sure you don't need to keep up the honor guard; I'm the only one on this planet who even could build him a ship."

It's true, he knows. The only other person who could possibly learn is the Namekian, and if he were the mystic healer kind instead of the fighter kind maybe he would spend that time. He still wouldn't build the ship, though. He doesn't pity Vegeta, any more than he fears him.

"Or we can train together," is what he offers instead, and that gets everyone suddenly looking at him. "Look, it's not my fault you're all goddamn weaklings, and I can't train your species out of you. But I can fix it a little. At least to the point that you could buy enough time for others to get away."

"You should take the offer," says Bulma.

"Because you have a crush on him - " begins Yams.

"Because he knows how to fight Sayains," snaps Bulma. "Tactically, I mean, not just one-on-one fights. They enjoy one-on-one more, but when they're fighting to win they won't play fair and attack one at a time; and you can't even beat them when they do - "

"Couldn't," Piccolo interrupts.

Bulma looks taken aback, but accepts the point. "Didn't. So you should take the offer. He knows what Saiyans will do, how they'll fight. If we're lucky, we won't ever have to use the knowledge."

"And if not, we'll be prepared," says Tien on a sigh. "Fine. Let's do this."

It takes him a whole week to pin down what they can do. Well. What most of them can do. He isn't going to provoke the brat into getting serious, and when he isn't serious he's . . . got great control for his age, but he's still a bit clumsy with things Saiyan babies know instinctively. Meanwhile, he gets introduced to the person who cut off his tail that one time and some guardian person-cat-thing, both of whom are also crew; and more importantly, they grow these things called senzu beans which are some kind of concentrated healing ki and are effectively a week in a tank in about thirty seconds.

He asks Piccolo, though, on the grounds that Piccolo might actually answer: "How many more people are there in this crew that I haven't met yet?"

He's right: Piccolo does answer, although he'd obviously tallying them up as he goes. "Gohan's mother, Chi-chi, and Chi-chi's father. Master Roshi, who trained Krillin and Goku when they were younger. Turtle and Oolong generally live with him. Pu'ar, who is Yamcha's - I'd guess you'd call it moirail. Kami, who is a cross between my uncle and my other self, and his servant Mr. Popo. We're probably missing a few. Gohan hasn't filled out his quadrants yet, and most of the humans don't have matesprits, so presumably whoever ends up as any of those."

"Your - what?" he asks, because getting to the bottom of the mess Kakarot has made of their crew is obviously going to take some time.

Piccolo sighs. "He guards Earth from supernatural threats and made the dragon balls. They turn to stone if he dies, and he dies when I die because we're an incomplete parthenogenetic bifurcation of the same original Namekian. Don't ask."

He doesn't, mostly because he honestly doesn't want to know how deeply each and every one of them is a freak of nature. That still leaves him with a crew that is on the ridiculous end of small and weak, and since he can't fix the one he's going to have to fix the other. Once he has their measure he can start adapting the very simplest of pair techniques for them.

Getting them halfway to being a decent fighting crew takes time. Not the actual footwork and stances, of course, those are a simple matter of memorization and repetition. It's more that they don't understand each other, don't know where each one of them is going to be and can't plan their moves around one another. The brat and Piccolo have it, of course, because they've trained together for years, and Tienshinhan and Chiaotzu for the same reason. But none of the others can, and getting them to work together in all the possible combinations long enough to work up to that knowledge is . . . exhausting. Not pointless, because he can feel them absorbing the knowledge and that knowledge gelling into being able to fight together, but after a month of training together a Saiyan crew would be a nightmare to fight on his own. He's still beating all of them, twice a day.

He also, as they decide that he is actually dedicated to turning them into something other than a pitiful excuse for a failure, gets to meet other members of the crew. Master Roshi isn't strong, but no one gets that old without learning a lot of ki control that he's going to want to know too. Oolong is even more useless than Korin and Yajirobe, who at least produce senzu beans. Pu'ar, on the other hand, is interesting in his ability to shapeshift even into inanimate objects, which he thinks ought to be useful in a fight even though he has no martial ability. Kami is basically an older Piccolo, and the less said about the horrifying abomination that is Mr. Popo, the better. Chi-chi -

He can't quite figure out Chi-chi. She's an excellent cook, to the point that, on Vegeta, crews would have fought each other to possess such a slave. She's a fighter, too, of sorts, enough of one that as children she and Kakarot had sparred on an even footing. She's a teacher, or at least has taken charge of the brat's non-fighting education; the fact that he's even getting such an education indicates that she is royalty and has chosen to pass this on to her eldest son. She does not like him - well, she wouldn't, he'd tried to kill her matesprit that one time - but she still makes food for him. For all of them, but she effortlessly keeps up with two Saiyan appetites.

"Yeah, Mom's pretty great," says the brat, when he asks, which was not the question.

"But she hates me."

"When Mr. Piccolo started training me he just stole me away to the mountains for a year. She didn't even know if I was alive - "

"Like there's anything on this planet that could kill you."

" - so in comparison, this is nothing. I mean, she wants me to spend more time studying, but she always wants that. I'm learning to protect the people I care about. She's okay with that."

He tries asking Chiaotzu, who sometimes helps with the cooking.

"Uh. Because we don't have slaves on Earth. And I like to cook."

What the fuck.

Thankfully, after all the two-on-one matches, moving up to three-on-one, four-on-one, and finally five-on-one is comparatively easy. Comparatively, because it still takes them another week each time he expands the group size, and even then they're not as fast and smooth as they could be. They're getting better; he can tell based on the increasing number of bruises he goes to sleep with each night. Still, he's not satisfied with the progress they have made even when Bulma announces that the ship is ready for a shakedown cruise.

"A what?"

"She means taking it out on a trip around the solar system, to test the airlocks and the argrav and the light engines," says the brat.

"Oh," he says. "So you need me for that? Only these idiots are still not anything like ready to face - "

"Vegeta," asks Tien. "What do you think is going to attack?"

He blinks, stupidly.

"You've been training us like you're expecting - I don't know, Frieza, or some other Imperial fighters, to show up - "

"At some point, yes," he says. "That's what they do. They will enslave everyone."

"And you care why?" asks Yams.

It's a good question, is the thing. He shouldn't. "I needed practice."

"What, beating people up?" asks Krillin.

"Training people. You're the least awful fighters on the planet. It can't possibly be harder to train real Saiyans than it is training you. And I'm not leaving it half-done, even if I have to stay here another month to do it."

Everyone turns and looks over at the brat, of all people. In Earth years, he's six; in real years, he's four, and can't be expected to make any decent kind of decisions. But everyone is looking at him, so he says, "I think it's - better. Working together." That seems to be that, because they resume training the next day while Bulma takes the ship on her shakedown and later brings it back to figure out solutions to the inevitable things that went wrong.

It ends up actually taking another two months, because of course it does, and the brat turns out to be the least annoying part of the whole thing. He has - okay, so what he's got are the deadliest of insane killer instincts, being kept in check by his human half. Whatever. He at least understands the concept of trusting your crew like you trust your own breath. Getting Yams over himself is an upward struggle and he seems to lose half the ground he'd won each day overnight. Krillin, he suspects, would not be nearly as much of a problem if Kakarot were here, which - okay, he can't actually be angry at Kakarot's moirail for trusting him more, however much he would like to. It's just a whole lot of stupid.

But half of the delay is because Bulma and Kami and the brat have decided that they're only going to spend four hours on any given day training, and he has to spend another four studying . . .

Queen Shard, his mother, had chosen him to become the prince by teaching him tactics. This is the next level beyond that, tactics meant to win not just individual battles, but entire campaigns. Wars, which Earth people have fought a lot of because unlike sensible people they're all too weak to just fight it out person-to-person to find out who should be in charge; and more alien by far, they don't believe the strongest person should be in charge. He hates it intensely, hates that Piccolo is a much better student than him, hates how it obvious it becomes that skill in this can make someone into a prince amongst princes even if they can't fight. Hates that this is exactly what he's going to need to take down the empire, and they're shoving it down his throat even though they still don't like him because - because -

They call it strategy. He buckles down and learns.

The day they finally do manage to beat him starts grey and overcast before proceeding to actual rain. He doesn't mind rain, but the way his crew complains, you'd think it rained acid on this planet instead of just water. He has to shove them all out the door by main force, and it takes them another hour after that to start fighting seriously. Then they do, though, and in a beautiful moment of unvoiced cooperation, Yams uses himself as bait while Tien blinds him, Krillin distracts him, the brat dislocates his shoulder, and Piccolo lines up the kill shot. He doesn't actually take it, and in fact shoves his shoulder back into alignment as soon as he stops laughing in relief. They can take down any other imperials, Ginyu-level forces included, and now they can take down a Saiyan. They'll be fine unless a Klorforian warrior shows up.

"So it's every Saiyan," says Tien. "Not just Goku. Good to know."

"What?"

"I don't think I've ever seen you laugh before. Actually laugh."

He thinks back, and realizes, no, they haven't. He did the maniacal laughter when he arrived and Nappa was killing everyone, and he's done various kinds of hysterical, but they haven't ever seen him laughing because he's happy.

"Shut up," he says. "I'm hungry. And wet."

"So . . . showers and snacks?" suggests Krillin."

He leaves the next day.

Chapter Text

Vegeta's return to Earth is at the highest speed he's willing to push the ship, racing ahead of the Klorflorian flagship. Rassik squad is converging from a different direction, and Solamnei is on alert to head there as soon as they get out of their tanks, but being capable of beating a Klorflorian in battle doesn't mean the same thing as being able to kill the actual emperor and the abomination he's made of his son. He's more than halfway convinced he's just going to Earth to die, but if he is, it's still a fitting death: amongst his crew, taking down the beast that is the Klorflorian empire.

He lands in the Capsule Corp campus, if it can be called a landing. It's probably not; the ship is going to need a complete rebuild. But Bulma is there, and Yams, and Krillin, and none of them seem to be particularly worried, so he did arrive here well ahead of the Kolds. He accepts the shower and food and inante chatter of his crew, which he fucking missed while he was out there ripping apart an empire.

It's . . . Saiyans always want to go find and fight the strongest opponent; win or lose, it's how to move forward. Even before he was chasing the impossible, real dream of being a legendary warrior, that was his goal. He's done it the way his people had always done it: crushing some weaklings until someone slightly stronger came to try and stop him.

That turns out not to have been the right way, the way that would net the largest number of strong opponents. He went out chasing like that, and what he got was a bunch of slightly-stronger-than-average people, people who weren't warriors but would fight in a pinch, if they had to. Now he's made himself into a shield, spread out over one planet, ten, a hundred; and, like suns caught in a gravity well, the strongest warriors, the best and most challenging enemies, had come to challenge him. After the first half-year he hadn't even been having to send anyone to attack at all, and everyone was still coming back from fighting the strongest of Klorflorian forces bruised and triumphant. The Saiyans are heroes and liberators now, on a thousand worlds. They aren't going to go back, not when this is so much better. That way of life is finished.

It's that his crew was right, that 'doesn't enjoy fighting' isn't even a little bit the same as 'worthless.'

His father had tried to demand that he fight him and his crew, take the throne properly. After giving him the beatdown he was asking for and so clearly deserved, which happened between him and his father and his mother and not their entire crew because he'd already arranged for the rest of them to be in tanks or deployed elsewhere, he'd said, "And you think I want to be king."

He doesn't. Not a Saiyan king. Not anymore.

So instead he's here on Earth, enjoying the stupidest of inane chatter and wondering how the fuck he ended up with this for a crew. Yamcha and Bulma are updating him on how everyone is doing. Krillin keeps giving him sidelong glances, and he knows he's working up to asking about how the war had gone. Way out on the furthest edge of his senses, a presence appears: the super Saiyan who made this mess. Not far behind him and moving much faster, the flagship.

He relaxes. A blaze of glory it is, then.

It's another hour and a half before the flagship gets close enough that they can sense it. When it does it's Kami and Piccolo - psychics who have apparently refined both their reach and control in his absence - who broadcast the warning and tell everyone where to meet. Bulma announces that the latest armor is close enough to being done, she'll bring it along with Vegeta and Yamcha and Krillin. Korin announces that he'll send out Yajirobe with some senzu beans.

"Latest armor?" he asks of Krillin while they fly out.

"Since this is shaping up to be a permanent thing, yeah," says Krillin. "She started by back-engineering your old armor."

"It's kind of weird to wear at first, but you get used to it pretty fast," says Yamcha.

He thinks no more about it until he's pulling the stuff on, and it is pretty weird, like an all-over blood pressure cuff that squeezes and squeezes until abruptly relaxing. Then it's just thick and a little heavy but not so he'll notice after ten minutes, and it breathes all right and moves with him, comfortably snug. "What is it?"

"Well," says Bulma.

"Don't ask," says Krillin. "Just believe me, it's the best armor." His has a little circle sewn on, with Roshi's emblem, and he isn't wearing his day-glo orange gi.

Piccolo and the brat show up a little while later, and then Tien and Chiaotzu. No one says a word while they strip and then armor up. They run through stretches and do a quick warm-up spar, all five of them against him. He's pleased that they still present him a challenge: he hasn't been idle, but neither have they. He doesn't think they could line up a kill shot on him, but they won't embarrass him in front of Rassik either.

Speaking of. "There is a squad of Saiyan warriors inbound," he announces. "They've taken down two Klorforians. Try to make this take as long as possible, buy them time to get here - "

"Got it," says Tien.

They settle in to wait. Chi-chi packed snacks, which are distributed. Yamcha side-eyes him when Rassik gets in range, and he supposes that's justified a little: none of them are as strong as he is, but they're stronger than he was, on Namek. His crew wouldn't win in a fair fight. But then, Rassik got to fight and win against two Klorflorians, and now they have a chance at two more. They won't betray him before that. After, it won't really matter either way.

"So you . . . found the Saiyans," says Krillin, trying unsuccessfully to make it less awkward.

"Yes. We're winning the war, and the Imperials finally noticed. Vegeta is too well guarded now, so this is their attempt to hit me where it hurts."

"Earth?" asks Chiaotzu. "But you don't care about - "

"Chiaotzu," says Tien.

"You do care about Earth?" asks Krillin. And then, "Why?"

He turns an incredulous look to Piccolo. Everyone else takes this completely the wrong way, to mean that he cares about Earth because of dragon balls. It is at least some cover. He leans back on his arms.

The small constellation of ships that is Rassik squad is only a few minutes out when the flagship actually does make it, touching down almost delicately on its insectile legs. Then Frieza and King Cold spend those five minutes making an entrance, with the result that Rassik squad interrupts their posturing by flying through it, giving Vegeta the truncated salute they'd decided on when he'd announced that he wasn't going to be challenging for the throne but was going to stay in charge of the war effort, and their captain Kalit says, "Commander! Your orders?"

He waves hand to where Frieza and King Kold are visibly outraged. "Take your pick."

"You give us the best presents," says Kalit, and turns, and -

There's this boy, clearly not even fully grown. Vegeta can't feel any ki off him at all, not even the usual sort of being-alive ki. He's gotten every Saiyan warrior through needing to use scouters, but less than a third have figured out how to not feel as strong as they are, and in people who can feel like they aren't strong at all, it's only him and Queen Shard and Klorforians. And now this person.

The Kolds look entirely taken aback. "What's this, Prince Vegeta?" calls out Frieza. "Tired of sending warriors to die for you, so now you're sending children?"

He is. He'd like to say he doesn't, but that's obviously a lie given the brat, standing - behind him to his right, automatically guarding without even having to think about it. He can't just admit he has no idea who the kid is, either.

He's saved having to make a decision when the kid says, "Hey, Frieza. Stop talking to him. I'm your opponent."

"You're a brat. I'm here to kill a super Saiyan."

"Any super Saiyan in particular?" asks the kid. "Or is it just, you have a general death wish and want to be sure to die in combat?"

"Very funny, kid," said Frieza. "Out of the way."

The kid sighs. "Right. This is your warning: leave, and I won't kill you."

Everyone stares at him. Finally, Frieza starts laughing. "You?" He motions to one of his minions. "You there. Kill this pest."

"Yes, my lord!" The soldier taps his scouter, notes the kid's apparent power level of five, and uses his blaster weapon.

The kid deflects it. In the instant of ki-on-ki contact, he feels -

"Uh," says Kalit, speaking for all of Rassik. "Who is that?"

"No idea," he says, absently. The Kolds are so incredibly fucked. If they had any sense, they'd start running now.

The kid turns to the elite squads, and says, "I know you're here following orders, so I'll give you the same offer I gave Frieza: leave now."

The soldiers look at each other - all the ones who were going to jump ship already have - shrug, and attack.

"Your funeral," says the kid, and draws his sword.

He has to assume there's combat. He knows that he regularly moves faster than civilians brains' can process, with the result that he appears to flit around the battlefield without passing through any of the distance in between. Most people above a certain ki level can, but even when Frieza had been beating the shit out of him on Namek, he'd always been able to see him. The kid is moving fast enough that he can't track him, using his sword to cut the soldiers' armor off without so much as nicking them, and then finishing them all off with a concussive strike that pulps their organs and won't even leave bruising. It's a gratuitous show of force and skill, but he could have told the kid not to bother; the Kolds won't be intimidated, even with their men collapsing into an ugly pile at their feet.

The kid looks at them. "Last chance. Leave now, or leave never."

"Father, may I?"

"I insist."

"All right, kid," says Frieza. "Would you like to power up? Before you die."

"Sure," says the kid, and powers up, and in fact keeps powering up past the point where human warriors top out, past Namekian, past normal Saiyans. He ends up not looking all that different aside from the blond hair and the blue eyes and the crackling power. His ki control is superb, so there's barely any power leakage even.

Frieza - freezes.

"Dad?" says the brat.

"No, sorry," says the kid. "He's on his way. I'm just pinch hitting."

Frieza says, "No," and launches a massive ki blast against him, "Not those eyes."

He doesn't even move, just takes it, and that's a planet buster, anyone would obliterated by it, except it stops burrowing into the planet, and then the kid is climbing up out of the small impact crater, still carrying it. "This is yours, I believe," he says, and flips it back towards Frieza, who is forced to disperse it.

"No!" shouts Frieza, and attacks. He keeps saying it, all through the fight. No, as the kid counters a flurry of blows almost too fast to be seen with defense that is too fast to be seen. No, as the kid apparently decides how he's going to do this. No again, when he swings into action, using that sword and molecule-fine coating of ki to vertically bisect him, then do it again, and again, and finish it with a single blast that vaporizes the . . . parts.

He lands lightly on his feet, sword not even bloody. King Kold stares at him.

"You wanna try?" asks the kid.

King Kold attacks. The kid goes two for two.

Then he turns and looks right at them, and waves an arm. "Hey guys!"

"Commander," says Kalit, urgently. "What is that?"

"He," says Vegeta, watching the kid power down and jump up to come talk to - the brat, mostly, but Piccolo a little, and Krillin; it is obvious that they're crew, even though they're also complete strangers, "is a super Saiyan."

Kalit turns to him, wordlessly outraged.

"I'm going to go meet him."

"You're - he's - if he is, he's dangerous!"

Vegeta shrugs. "To you, maybe. We're crew."

"That's your crew? Aliens and a super Saiyan?"

"Two."

"What?" Kalit blinks at the total non-sequiter.

"Two super Saiyans. The other one is en route right now."

"And you didn't think they'd be useful in the war?!"

"You try getting a super Saiyan to do anything they don't want to," he says, and walks over.

The kid's name is Trunks, he feels a little more distant than quadrant corners, and he smells like close kin, ridiculously close, Tarble-close. He brought snacks, and he is either amazingly gracious in victory or he is following Earth politeness rules, because he calls all of Rassik over to have some. They come, wary tension in every line of their bodies, but they relax a little when the snacks turn out to be . . . perfectly normal, if not enough to feed a squad of Saiyan warriors.

Once everyone has settled down with a drink and a little food, Kalit says, "So, uh. A super Saiyan."

"Yes," says Trunks, blandly.

"Do you - want to fight?"

Trunks blinks. Definitely Earth-based, then. "I don't think I want to kill you, no. Who are you again?"

Kalit looks at Berj, her second, and then shrugs and says, "Rassik squad."

"Ah. No. Definitely don't want to kill you."

"Not a lethal fight," says Berj. "Just training."

Trunks shrugs. "Right now I'm a little too far on the wrong side of murderous. Wait an hour." He says this with a completely calm expression and a friendly smile. Kalit clearly thinks about this, and about the way he'd looked as a super Saiyan, calm and leaking less ki even than he is now, and decides to let it lie.

"Yeah, so," says Tien.

Trunks gives him the same friendly look. Tien also, wisely, decides to let it lie.

In fact, Trunks seems devoted to making this as awkward as possible by staring at each member of the crew in turn, for ten minutes at a time before switching to the next. He doesn't speak, but doesn't seem annoyed when Tien and Chiaotzu start talking, or Rassik, or when the brat turns to Piccolo. A couple of Rassik look a bit worried when the two of them stand up and start stretching, but only for a little while before they figure out the moirallegiance and relax again. He's pleased to see that they've both improved, the brat growing a little bigger and settling into his heritage, Piccolo because he had to get better to keep ahead of the steep learning curve. They spar in that weird fluid motion way of theirs, all spins and momentum.

After watching them go at it for a little while, Kalit leans over and says, "Commander. That child is a halfbreed."

"I am aware," he says.

"And you didn't - "

"There were five of us at the time. Even a halfbreed was better than no Saiyans."

"But now - "

"Frieza killed his father's moirail," he says. "Right before the fight on Namek."

Kalit's jaw snaps shut with a click.

"Like I said. There are two super Saiyans in my crew."

He doesn't have to say anything more. Kalit had seen Frieza lose it going after Trunks, after all. They sit and watch for a while, but the brat is of course as disgustingly flawless as ever. He would beat any Saiyan his age, full blood or not, like a drum. Kalit comes to this same conclusion after watching them go at it for a little while, and asks, "So the woman. What's she do?"

By which she meant, 'Bulma is not a fighter and she's not enough to give a Saiyan any trouble, so why do you tolerate her?'

"Makes armor and capsules, locates artifacts, and teaches strategy."

Kalit settles back, looking at Bulma with new eyes. She knows practical tactics, of course, but she was never taught. She just survived enough battles to learn. She tilts her head, considering a little, before she says, "Which quadrant?"

" . . . red," he admits.

Kalit's head snaps around to him, then back to Bulma, then him again. "I'm sorry, how? I mean, I get how they're pitiful, but you - you're - "

He shrugs. "I try not to spend too much time worrying about how pacifist species think."

"They're a pacifist species?"

"They think so," he says.

Kalit gives him an incredulous look.

"Bulma taught me strategy," he says, "but it's not a rare and well-guarded secret. They have games to teach it to children. They can achieve a ten-thousand person coordination down to two-tenths of a second."

"That's impossible," said Kalit.

"I've seen them do it," he says, "for fun. They made their first mechanical flight a hundred and twelve years ago. They only started learning ki flight after I visited."

"But!" protests Kalit, looking over to where Piccolo and the brat are going at it. "I've seen your ship!"

"Also built by that woman," he says, flatly.

Kalit looks back to her.

"Right," she says, and stands up.

"Don't be embarrassed or angry when she hits on you pale," he says. "They all do that, constantly; it doesn't mean anything."

Kalit waves an arm.

She goes and introduces herself to Bulma, in the new way, which is the list of Kloforian forces she and Rassik squad have defeated and the list of planets currently under their protection. Bulma, at least, seems to take this the right way because they start a conversation. At first he's happy, because Kalit is one of his best battlefield generals; and then he's worried, for the same reason. Too late, though. They are already throwing back their heads and laughing together.

Trunks stares at them for a worryingly long time, before he sighs and stands up and says, "All right! Did you guys want to spar?"

That gets all of their attention at once. "Yes?" says one of them, a female named Zukin.

"So," he says. "Let's spar." He takes off his sword, and powers up a little, but -

"Aren't you going to . . . "

"Go gold?" supplies Trunks. "You really want me to? It won't be fair at all."

"Who cares about fair?" asks Kalit. "We get stronger when defeated, not when victorious. Losing to you would be better for our progression that winning against Frieza would have been."

"You wouldn't have won," says Trunks flatly, which is probably true, but then obligingly powers up so he can't be too upset. "All right," he says. "Let's fight."

They fight for about ten minutes. Rassik, the part of them that were in range when he called, is twelve people. They should be more than sufficient to box him in, except that Trunks is ridiculously fast and a side effect of the lack of ki leakage is that no one can even figure out where he is until he's already there. Ten minutes is how long it takes him to get them all down, and if he'd been fighting seriously, they'd all have died. As it is, they are all going to be huge bruises in the morning, and in one case there is a broken leg. Trunks pops some kind of capsule-based mobile medical center after that, though, and proves to be very proficient in setting and splinting the leg.

"Oof," says Kalit, sitting down next to him stiffly. "And you have two of them?"

"The other one is stronger," he says, not really up to explaining Kakarot's outrageous growth curve. He was barely strong enough to beat Frieza a year ago, but by now . . .

Kalit just shakes her head. "You are one lucky asshole, commander."

"Yeah," he says. They're not going to teach him. He is pretty sure it can't be taught; if it could, it wouldn't have passed into ancient legend and the Klorforian Empire would never have risen. But given the progression, two super Saiyans in an equivalent number of years, he's pretty sure that he will be one soon too. If half-breeds can do it, the brat might get there first; but he has no doubt now that so will he. "I'll come beat you up when I figure it out." And do what he can, to get them over whatever that final hurdle is.

"You give us the best presents."

Another hour passes, painfully slowly. Piccolo and the brat finish sparring and go through cool-down, then come over. The brat retrieves a communication device from Bulma, and then goes to - call his mother. Piccolo sits down with Bulma, strips the armored chestpiece, and lets her do whatever it is she does with it while he puts back on his own weighted clothes. Then he comes to sit with them, asks for an introduction.

Kalit inclines her head. "Impressive, for a Namekian. I didn't think your people went in for moirallegiance."

"We don't," says Piccolo. "Gohan doesn't need pacifying."

"Except for when he does," says Vegeta.

"Except for when his Saiyan blood is coming through particularly strongly," allows Piccolo. "But he seems to have accepted me, and I'm not getting weaker because of it, so," he shrugs. It's a reason Kalit can understand. She lies back down, dozing in the sunshine.

Chi-chi shows up another half-hour after that. He hadn't even known she'd learned ki flight, but he's not surprised by the way she flies, straight and deadly as an arrow, no wasted energy. She lands and takes in the situation, Rassik squad lounging around bruised, her own crew not in any kind of distress, and walks over to ask Bulma. The explanation takes time, and midway through it Chi-chi pops a capsule that unfolds into a mobile kitchen, and begins cooking.

Another hour after that, she comes around with some snacks. Kalit gives her a very weird look, but takes the food and takes a bite and her eyes widen.

"No," he says preemptively.

"Commander, you don't even - "

"No," he says. "She is the brat's mother, and more importantly, she is our other super Saiyan's matesprit. Don't go down that path. I'd have too much trouble filling the hole you'd leave in our line. And before you get the wrong idea," he adds, because it had taken him months to figure out Earth romance rules even after he'd been trying, "this isn't flirting. This is just how they do polite."

"Really?"

"Mm."

Kalit hesitates, but then stands up again.

"Kalit - "

"I'm not going to do anything stupid," she says. "I just have questions." She heads, not over to Chi-chi, but back to Bulma.

Great.

But no one starts attacking anyone else, and part of the reason Rassik is so effective is that Kalit, or rather, Kolee and Asni, can talk to pacifist species without going nuts from the emotional whiplash. They talk to Bulma, and when Chi-chi comes back and returns to cooking, talk to Chi-chi. Actually it looks like Chi-chi asks almost as many questions as Kolee, which is frankly a bit insulting. He'd have answered, if she'd ever bothered to ask!

(Unless they're women questions. He'd have been useless for those.)

He is so focused on them, in fact, that he almost doesn't notice time passing until Kakarot gets into range. Everyone feels it. Rassik are distinctly unimpressed even though they know how Trunks feels. His crew, meanwhile, are overjoyed to have their precious Goku back. It's almost anticlimactic when Trunks stands up and calls out, "Okay everyone. Goku should be landing any minute now, right over there."

"Who?" asks Kalit.

"Kakarot went native." He can feel his lip trying to curl in a sneer. Weakness is - a thing, but at least it's something most warriors can recover from, if they spend time training. Going native isn't, or rather, warriors who go native don't want to recover. They're dropped entirely, from the house lists, from crew and clan, from the species. Going native is weakness that you choose.

Only clearly not, because Kakarot is a super Saiyan, and Trunks, whoever he is, is from Earth and also a super Saiyan. Going native might in fact be a necessary precondition. He really hopes that isn't the case.

Kalit gives him a sidelong look, but ambles up along with everyone else and watches while the ship comes and plows itself a crater landing. The airlock hisses open, and Goku steps out already speaking, " - e don't have a lot of time before Freezer arrives - huh?" He blinks like the idiot he is.

The brat flings himself forward. "Dad!"

"Uh. Hi, son. What's going on?"

"He's an idiot," says Kalit.

"Yes," admits Vegeta. "He can't think outside of fighting. I think of his crew as a prosthetic brain."

". . . that's not unusual," Kalit points out, and it's true that most of the time, the strongest fighter doesn't lead their crew. Maintaining their battle prowess takes too much time. Because of that there's only one super Saiyan of myth who led her crew. He's not sure his crew has an actual leader, as such. Kakarot is clearly the heart, but Bulma is the brains, Krillin the voice of worry, Kami the conscience, and Piccolo the voice of common sense. If anyone is making decisions, it is, disturbingly, the brat.

Kakarot flies up and greets his crew and his matesprit and son and - ex-kismesis, if he's reading it right - explain the current state of affairs on earth. He takes the presence of Rassik with equanimity, eats a lot of the food Chi-chi had prepared for him, and then Trunks asks to talk to him privately and flies off far enough that they can't be overheard.

Then they power up, both of them, Trunks first and then Kakarot. Trunks attacks, and it's clear he's more just probing around Kakarot then trying as Kakarot absentmindedly fends him off while carrying on a complete conversation. It's obvious to anyone with a brain, his entire crew and Rassik as well, that Trunks is strong, but Kakarot is stronger and has more experience and would very definitely win in a fight. They both power down again without exchanging more than a couple of dozen blows total, and keep talking.

"Your crew," says Kalit, while behind them Piccolo breaks out laughing for no apparent reason.

"I know," he says, half-ashamed and half-proud. They're, at the least, nontraditional; at worst, they're a blasphemous abomination. And because of them, he's tearing down one empire and outgrown a crown he's fought for half his life, is leading the galaxy's most violent species to build a peace that is going to far outlast any of them.

Trunks flies off after only a few minutes. Kakarot comes back and explains that they have three years to train up to fight some kind of vicious mechanical entities, strong enough to give Trunks trouble. He figures finishing out the war will do that for him, and Kakarot can take care of directing their disaster of a crew for once. He does ask them if they mind Rassik squad staying to help, since they came all this way and everything, but Zukin speaks up and says, "Nah."

"No?"

"This planet is nice and all, but it's already got protectors," says Brej. "And ours don't. Someone's going to try moving in if we're not around, so we'll go home now."

"Although maybe some of us can come around, sometimes," adds Kalit. "To train. If that's alright with the commander."

"Whatever," he says.

"I'd like that," says Kakarot.

Rassik leave later that day. He goes back to Capsule headquarters, with most of his crew. They still have separate homes, in the way of Earth matespritships, but that is undoubtedly their headquarters where they go to plan. They do that a lot. He asks Bulma if she can repair the ship, since he'd kind of busted it getting it here. She totally ignores him in favor of a very long discussion that basically boils down to 'we have no reason not to trust Trunks, and it's not like training is going to hurt any.' He could tell them Trunks is crew through and through, but as usual none of them ask.

The next morning, though, she does take a look at the ship. It does the impossible for a few moments and renders her speechless. "How?" she demands.

"Can you fix it?"

"At this point it'd probably be easier to just build a new one. It wouldn't take any less time, that's for sure. Besides, this way I can add some improvements."

"improvements?" he asks.

It ends up taking less time to build it, this time, but he doesn't mind the mining or refining or even helping in the production. He's left this relationship, along with every other one with his crew, hanging for long enough. They all pitch in to help, which does cut down on the time, but the conversations ends up bulking it out again.

He doesn't actually have anything to say to Roshi, his turtle, the pig, or Yajirobe. He wouldn't thank Korin usually because providing to crew isn't thanks-worthy, but he's doing it the Earth way and that requires a gift so he finds a nepeta plant and gives that.

Chi-chi, who provided to someone else's crew for the sole purpose of making nice, gets a new bathing hut added to the ridiculous wilderness homestead she shares with Kakarot and the brat. The brat thanks him politely and goes away, only to return a few minutes later with an entire dry tree and they chop it up between the two of them.

"It's funny," he says. "I used to think you hated us."

He gnashes his teeth, but this is also something he owes the brat, if only because no one else in his life even knows. "No, you used to think I loathed you."

"What's the difference?"

"You hate your kismesis, but you'd still protect their life, if you had to. You just kill people you loathe."

" . . . huh," says the brat. "And now?"

"You are mine," he says. "My crew. All of you. Of course you protect your crew. They're your crew."

"Even the ones you hate?"

"Especially the ones you hate," he says.

The brat thinks this over for a while. Then he says, "You know my dad has brain damage, right?"

"Obviously."

"No, I mean he really - ask Bulma. She had to sit me down and explain some things when he decided to stay in space. I don't really understand it all yet, and that's just human brains, but . . . he probably can't hate. Anyone. At all. Ever. Those parts of his brain are dead." He pauses, and then adds, "I'm sorry."

"But," he says, blankly. "Piccolo was his kismesis."

The brat shakes his head. "He doesn't have kismeses. Piccolo - the original Piccolo, I mean, not my Piccolo - was someone my dad decided needed to be stopped. Just like he decided the Red Ribbon Army needed to be stopped, and Frieza. And you."

He takes a deep, calming breath. He can see it, is the thing. Kakarot literally can't hate, but he can run the numbers and jump straight past hate and into the cool logical mindstate of loathing on the other side. He doesn't, won't, do it until he's pressed hard enough, which seems to be when someone starts actively killing his crew. Then he fights them until they stop being able to kill anyone, and -

- offers his hand -

"Is literally everyone in this crew someone your father defeated?"

" . . . define 'defeat,'" says the brat.

"If you have to ask," he begins, but the brat is already looking away.

"Yeah," he says. Then, "I have a question. A Saiyan question."

"Ask."

"I get that if I find someone I enjoy hating and want to fight them a lot, that's kismesy feelings. And I get that it's, uh, sort of okay to stop people from doing that - or be stopped from doing that - if it's not a good kismesis, and that's being a good auspitice."

"Is there a question?"

"What's the word for when I just want to beat someone up until they stop being an idiot?"

"There isn't one."

"Oh."

" . . . but it probably falls under auspiticious feelings. You don't pity this person, do you?"

"No! I just think he's an asshole and a moron."

"Then my official answer is that it's probably a side effect of being half-human. You shove way too many people into your red quadrants, why wouldn't you shove too few into your black ones?"

"But what do I do?"

"Ignore it. That's what humans do with black emotions, right?"

"I'm not all human," says the brat, mildly, like - like he's decided that maybe being half-Saiyan isn't something to utterly despise after all. "That's a terrible solution; I'll just kill a lot of people when it finally comes out."

"Then punch him!"

" . . . I'm going to go talk to Mr. Piccolo," says the brat. "Don't let mom convince you to stay for dinner."

He doesn't, if only because trusting her to make nice with outsiders doesn't mean he trusts her not to poison him. Besides, he has to ask Bulma about brain damage.

"Fuck," she says. "Gohan told you about that?"

"He was trying to let me down gently," he says, and realizes it's true. Also, the brat just auspisticised what was, given that one of the parties has brain damage and can't reciprocate hate, an objectively terrible attempt at kismesisitude. Asking about how to deal with ashen feelings was probably a confession, even. He's about the right age to have ridiculous impossible crushes. But Vegeta has never been a cradle robber, and he isn't going to start now. Assuming the brat punches him the next time they see each other, he'll have to find a way to let him down gently.

Or at least make some age-related boundaries, and revisit the topic again later. It's not like he hasn't been forced to learn patience, where his crew is concerned.

"You Saiyans and your batshit romance," says Bulma, almost fond. Then she pulls up a couple of the brain scans she did on Kakarot, and they run into the immediate problem that he has no idea how to understand it. Brains don't look like that, and he would know. Bulma gamely attempts to explain for a while.

"No," he says. "Nevermind. The parts of his brain that let him hate are dead. Fine. What else does it do?"

" . . . seriously impair his judgement," says Bulma. "Since he can't really fear either."

"Saiyans don't fear," he states.

"But you still know when other people who aren't Saiyans would," says Bulma immediately. "It lets you know when there is danger, and then you can plan for it. Goku can't."

It's a fair point. "That idiot really is ridiculously lucky."

"Mm," says Bulma. "Krillin tends to be good enough at reasonable fear for both of them."

Which . . . is true.

"But it also . . . none of us would have teamed up with Piccolo to fight Raditz; we can hold a grudge. Goku can't, so he accepted them help, and it's probably the only reason we were able to win against Raditz."

"If you call that winning," he says.

She shrugs. "He's ours now."

This is also, undeniably, true.

"Just like you are."

"I have a war to win."

"A war against an evil galactic empire," says Bulma. "A war that you and your Saiyan army are already winning, and are going to be winning a lot more once it gets out that the emperor is - "

"Yes."

Bulma nods. "And then you'll come home."

He doesn't say anything.

"I asked. Kalit said you abdicated from being the crown prince. Well, I mean, she didn't know the word, because apparently it's never been done before, but that's what you did."

He doesn't say anything.

"Vegeta. Are you going to come home?"

"Is it?" he asks.

"What?"

"Am I - do you pity me?"

She looks taken aback for a moment, before she understands what he is actually asking and turns thoughtful instead. He tries not to forget to breathe while she works it through in her mind. Finally she says, "I do."

"Why?"

" . . . you like fighting," she says.

"Of course I like fighting! I'm a Saiyan, aren't I?"

She nods. "You like fighting. You don't like other Saiyans much; you're a lot smarter than most of them and fighting enemies you can think circles around is boring. You don't even really hate or pity them. But they were yours, your people, so when you had a chance to undo Frieza's genocide you had to try. Am I right so far?"

"So far."

"You didn't really expect to succeed. On your own, you wouldn't have. Hell, even when you did succeed it wasn't really about you or them; it was because we have different morals here on Earth. But you had your people back, and your planet back, so you had your duty back. You went to do it. You've been doing it. Only it turns out not to really be a duty you like, in the same way you don't like fighting people who can't give you a decent fight. Even when it's an evil empire. It's just a slog, not a fun challenge. Still right?"

"Still right," he grudgingly admits.

"The reason I pity you," says Bulma, "is because there is literally no one else in your species, including Goku, who would understand any of that."

"Oh," he says. He never thought it, never let himself think that. She is absolutely right. "I - I'm going to kiss you now."

"Keep it gentle. I'm not strong like your Saiyan girls."

Which is a lot of the reason he pities her. If she were a fighter she'd be magnificent: his equal in every way. As it is, she's both weaker and smarter than him. She makes up for it by pitying him in ways that aren't even a tiny bit superficial. It's as much a human romance as a Saiyan one, the two of them together more than either one alone, but he already knows they'll be unstoppable. He stands up straight and, very, very carefully, presses his lips to hers.

The next week, while refining ore from the other side of the planet, he stops by the Lookout to talk to Kami. He doesn't really have anything to say, but it would be Earth-rude not to.

"Ah, Vegeta," says Kami, like he isn't unexpected at all.

"I'll be coming back to Earth to settle permanently," he says. He only has so much patience for Earth polite, after all. "Do you have a problem with that?"

"Does it matter if I do?"

He refrains from grinding his teeth. "If you do, you should tell me what I will have to do to convince you otherwise."

"As it turns out," says Kami, "I don't. But as your crew, I require that you heed my advice in the future."

"Obviously."

Kami inclines his head. "Would you like a snack? Mr. Popo has prepared you one."

Mr. Popo is some kind of cosmic horror, and he's not really willing to dig into that, or any of the secondary questions it raises. He just accepts that Mr. Popo sees most things and knows everything and says nothing and uses his actions to convey meaning. A snack is, from him, a friendly endorsement.

"Thank you," he says, because not pissing off the local cosmic horror is better.

Tracking down Tien and Chiaotzu should be a challenge, because those two are good at hiding their ki and move around a lot. As it turns out, he doesn't have to. Chiaotzu has decided to auspiticise Yamcha's attempt to occupy Bulma's nonexistant spade, so they both show up when Yamcha does. There's a lot of shouting, which he mostly ignores, and then some throwing things, which Chiaotzu industriously catches before shaming Yamcha into sitting down and listening to Bulma tell him no, again.

"But it's not safe," he says. "He tried to blow up the world."

"I did not," he says.

"Of course it's safe," says Chiaotzu. "We're his family."

"What?" asks Yamcha blankly.

So then it turns out that Yamcha was completely not paying attention to anything and Tien and Bulma have to explain. They do it kind of terribly, but at the end of it Yamcha at least seems to understand that here is home, and he'll be coming back once he finishes winning this war. Yamcha sits down kind of like his strings have been cut, and puts his face in his palms. "I thought you wanted immortality."

"I wanted to grow strong enough to defeat Frieza," he says. "Immortality was the best option."

"But Frieza is dead," says Yamcha.

"Yes, yes, and the whole thing was pointless anyway, because if I'd explained why I needed the dragon balls you'd have helped me find them and bring back my people. You might even have helped me fight him. I know that now."

"Oh."

He snorts, and turns his attention to Tien and Chiaotzu. "I did kill you that one time. Are we going to have a problem?"

They look at each other. "Nah," says Tien.

"We understand Saiyans are a little stupid about asking for help," says Chiaotzu.

"Maybe don't do it again," adds Tien.

So that's another few down. He really only has Krillin and Kakarot left to deal with, and Kakarot is . . . unlikely to be displeased that he will come home, but only because he's not going to think at all. And he can't just quadrant the idiot properly.

He sighs. A moirail would be excellent right now. He doesn't have one, because he doesn't get to have a good crew, just idiots and assholes. And Bulma.

"So just text him," says Bulma. "Here, I have Krillin's number."

" . . . what should I say?"

"I dunno. No hard feelings? Next time I'll protect you?"

"As if."

"Next time you'll be fighting on the same side?"

" . . . fine," he says.

Actually Krillin isn't terrible, since someone filled him in on the Yamcha thing. He sounds weirdly pleased by the whole thing, like he wasn't aware that he counted as crew despite almost being quadrant-corners. Then he requests that Krillin explain to Kakarot that he will be coming home, and Krillin says, "Uh, yeah. Goku already knows."

"He - how? He's an idiot!"

"A Saiyan idiot. He can smell it on you, or something. He was going to build you a house while you were in space."

He has images of Kakarot's hut in the woods. "Please tell me you talked him out of it."

"Yeah, I figured the amenities are better at Bulma's. Just . . . call me first when you get back, please. He'll either come to fight you or try to throw you a coming-home party, and I don't know which is worse."

He agrees.

And then, before he feels like he's ready to leave again, the ship is ready.

"All right," says Bulma. "Pay attention, this part is really important. I've equipped the ship with a capsule compressor, so you will be able to pick it up and carry it along. Never use it with capsules inside. Applying a compression field to a compression field results in a large crater, if you're lucky."

"If you're not lucky?"

"There are almost a thousand provision capsules in there. An explosion that size? You'll punch a hole through the planetary crust and down to the mantle. The hole will be visible from space."

"And you give these things to civilians?"

"Usually there are safeties and it won't work if there are capsules inside." Before he can react to this bizarre statement, she adds, "And it's going to be pretty heavy even for a capsule. I figured you could handle the weight."

"I can - do you not think I can fight my enemies myself, woman?"

"I think it's always best to have a backup plan," she says. Then she steps in, and kisses his cheek. "Come back, okay?"

"That's the plan," he says.

Chapter Text

He makes it eighteen months that time, and then Queen Shard takes him aside and tells him that either he can go visit his crew, or she will personally break him and put him in his ship to go visit them. She the proceeds to beat his ass thoroughly up and down the training grounds, which brings home how strongly he needs to. Meanwhile, she might not be a strategist, but she can follow instructions. Anyway, everyone who is anyone knows they're winning. The challenge hasn't been to convince planets to side with him; it's been to avoid moving the front faster than the civilian supply trains can keep up.

So he goes home.

He at least sticks the landing, which is nice. Bulma comes out to meet him, asking about a million questions.

"No," he says. "It's fine. I was just getting - sloppy. It happens when you don't assign crews together. I wouldn't let any of my men fight like this, and my mother pointed out - "

"You have a mother?"

" - that in that case I should take myself out of the field. Of course I have a mother. Where did you think I came from, a tank?"

"I didn't really think about it," says Bulma. "Can I meet her?"

He thinks about it. It is, he knows, a very important Earth thing, that parents get to meet their children's matesprits. His mother is certainly curious enough. Rassik had actually been pretty amazing about that, explaining that his matesprit is the one who taught him this strategy stuff and telling nothing about how she can't even throw a punch. But then he runs into the part where he imagines Queen Shard meeting Bulma and finding out she can't throw a punch, and - eurgh. "No."

"Why not?"

"You are not - a very Saiyan matesprit."

"Hmm," says Bulma, sounding amused and fond: obviously she's not a Saiyan. "Are you staying long?"

"A couple of weeks," he says. "Why? Is there something important?"

"A couple of new things I thought you'd want to test, nothing urgent," she says. "I thought maybe we could have a get-together. We've decided to name ourselves Z-fighters, by the way."

"That's a stupid name."

"Stupider than Rassik?"

He doesn't really feel up to telling the myth of the original Rassik. Calling themselves the Z-fighters really isn't as stupid as the name some squads have chosen for themselves. He's thinking particularly of Lliae, who could have chosen not to name themselves after the most useless captive-and-then-dead love interest in any of the epic cycles. He can at least live with it. "I'm hungry."

"Of course you are," says Bulma. "There's instant in the kitchen, but if you take your shower first that will give the deliveries time to arrive."

The relative ki paucity of Earth food means he has to eat comically huge amounts of it. In terms of actual taste, it's much better than the grain-paste rations of the Klorforian empire, or the constant just-too-sweet of Triffle food. He can wait. "I'll shower."

Showers are just good hygienic practice. He hadn't learned about things like massaging shower heads until Earth, though. So he's feeling altogether more relaxed when he comes out, clean and damp and smelling faintly of whatever fruit or flower is in Bulma's latest cleansing fluid, and the food has indeed arrived. He sets to with gusto, and keeps eating until he's physically groaning and his ki reserves have been somewhat replenished. He was, after that, planning to spend some serious time with his matesprit, but doesn't get to because that's when the brat shows up.

"Seriously?" he asks.

"It was me or Kami," says the brat. "And you - wouldn't fight for Kami."

That is probably the best way of putting it, because it is, in fact, true. "Fine. What do you want?"

"Are we going to be dealing with another pair of Klorforians? Or any other enemies you've managed to make?"

" . . . no," he says.

"So you're here why?"

He gives up, partly because the brat needs to know this. "Because it's not healthy to never be around crew."

The brat blinks up at him. "What."

"And I hadn't seen any of you idiots in a year."

"No, seriously, what? How not healthy? Should my dad know about this?"

"Not physically unhealthy," he says, because otherwise the brat is just going to follow him around asking questions. "Just . . . doing things, taking battle risks, that are not acceptable for the supreme Saiyan commander."

"Oh," says the brat, backing down immediately. "Got it. Then, uh. Welcome back, and you should probably come train with us on the Lookout this Sunday. All of us, I mean. We meet up once every other week, spar a little, talk a little, eat a lot. Deal with any home-grown threats. It's a nice day out."

It is basically what any self-respecting crew does, although these days it's more geared toward protecting their planets. His crew, mostly human, would never have come up with it. "Piccolo."

"Mm," says the brat. "It's better. We were friends before, but not really a cohesive fighting force until you started training us. And Dad . . . Dad's better too." He turns to leave, supremely confident that Vegeta is not going to attack his back the minute it's turned.

"Kid," he says.

The kid turns back.

He sighs. "You know I'm not a pedophile, right?"

The kid blinks at him, then blushes a bit. He doesn't hesitate to say, "I know you don't say mean things about Mr. Piccolo."

He snorts. "Of course not. Half the time a person's first moirail is one of their parents. That's fine. An adult can handle anything someone your age could throw at them."

The kid isn't stupid, so he gets it right away. "So all I have to do is beat you in a fight?"

" . . . no. You also have to be old enough that my skin doesn't crawl just thinking about it."

The kid gives him a long look before he shrugs and says, "Fair enough. Let me know when that is, okay?" He doesn't wait for an answer before turning to leave. This time, Vegeta lets him.

He goes back to his original plan of reacquainting himself with his matesprit. This lasts until she begins undressing, which is when he discovers that she is bleeding. He can smell it, and his first demand that she tell him who did it to her go entirely unheeded. "Oh my god," she says instead, and breaks out laughing.

"Woman! Stop laughing and let me protect you! Tell me: who dared to lay a hand on - "

"No one!" says Bulma, and goes off laughing again. She's obviously not going to be any help at all, so he tries getting her naked the rest of the way so he can at least find the wound. She's cooperative there, at least, but he runs into the immediate problem that despite the blood-scent getting stronger and stronger, there is no visible wound. "Oh my god, Vegeta, calm down," she says, and gasps a little. "I'm fine! I think - we may possibly have to talk a little more about the differences between Saiyans and humans."

The ensuing explanation completely kills the mood, but on the plus side, no one attacked her.

"I see," he says, when she finally stops talking. "That's - how does it not drive your men insane? Having a quadrant bleed that much?"

"It's natural," says Bulma. "And I'm pretty sure you have a better sense of smell than most humans."

"It is a stupid way to make a person!"

"What are you going to do, go complain to Kami?"

He stares at her. The idea idiotic for more than one reason, but starting with the fact that Kami hadn't made humans. Then the first laugh tries to come up out of him, somewhere in his chest, and he lets it because - there was no enemy, not here. Enemies don't get to come here. And then once he is laughing, she joins in. It takes them a while to wind down again.

"But really," she asks, eventually, "is it going to be a problem? You were - a bit wild."

He opens his mouth to reassure her automatically, then closes it again to think. Finally he says, "I think it will help if I can - see it. See that you're not injured, I mean."

Bulma blushes a brilliant red, but does allow it. Then they both get to discover that the Saiyan bloodlust that drives kismesissitudes can also, under these particular circumstances, drive a matespritship as well. After that, they curl up with each other, exhausted and sated. Bulma says, "I don't think it's going to be a problem."

The next day, during which they don't ever manage to get out of bed, proves her extremely right. They sleep almost the entire clock around after that, and then his stomach prods him to actually get up. It takes another ridiculous enormous meal and a shower before he feels ready to take on whatever new bullshit the Earth has for him.

Which, it turns out, is paperwork.

"What?" he says.

"I know Saiyans don't do things this way," says Bulma, "but humans do, and I want you properly on the family books as my - husband, matesprit, whatever you want to call it. For that to happen, you have to legally exist."

He grumbles, but he's not actually very upset that Bulma wants to do the thing properly. Permanently. So he goes with her to the office and talks to the fat black woman in the very severe suit about where he is from (planet Vegeta), why he wants to stay on Earth (his crew), and his unusual abilities (any- and everything related to ki fighting, apparently). Then he has to swear an oath to never do anything to hurt Earth and in fact help it when necessary, which he feels comfortable doing because he already has. They leave that building with a shiny new identity card, which proclaims him to be 'Vegeta Briefs,' human-style husband of Dr. Bulma Briefs.

It's nothing like the proper battle and feast that would accompany a Saiyan matespritfasting, or at least it isn't until Bulma takes him to a place she calls an all-you-can-eat buffet. The food is satisfying enough in its abundance. Then she takes him home and leads him, naked, into the pool, and everything is satisfyingly romantic for the rest of the evening.

The next day, she announces that she's found a way to push the argrav all the way to three hundred gs. She does this while cranking it as high as it goes. It pins him to the floor and all he can do is laugh and laugh and laugh, even though after a few minutes even just breathing in hurts. His matesprit is a madwoman, and he adores her so much.

She turns off the argrav six hours later, just when he's getting acceptable at standing up. "There is still time left to train!"

"Sure, but not if you want to be presentable to see everyone tomorrow," she says. "And you did come here to see all of us."

She's right, so he showers and eats and follows here to bed. She's always a little colder than he thinks can possibly be comfortable, even though he knows humans don't run as hot. She doesn't seem to mind his tendency to try and blanket her, though she'll kick him off if she gets too warm. It's . . . really, really nice, actually, even when she's shoving him away with her icicle-toes.

She prods him awake early the next day, and they have breakfast before heading over to the lookout. He can feel the sparring going on long before they get there, and it thrills right up his spine: Kakarot is currently a super Saiyan. It is going to be a good day.

He isn't aware of how right he is, though, until they close enough and he can see that his crew, all of them, even Yamcha, are fighting Kakarot together. Keeping up with group training has paid off, because they're all a single coordinated team, working together to take Kakarot down. Yamcha hs caught up to where Tien used to be, and Tien is fighting a lot more tactically, not using his showy techniques as much but doing more damage when he does. So is Krillin, and a coordinated taiyoken/kienzan combination would be absolutely deadly to anyone who doesn't know to start dodging the instant Tien begins the flare. Chiaotzu, always good at ki manipulation, is putting up shields, which is something that almost no Saiyans ever have been able to do. They fold pretty easily, but buy time for other people. The way they're moving, he's pretty sure Piccolo or Kami or both are keeping an open telepathic channel. The kid -

The kid lines up what would've been a kill shot on his father, and Kakarot, the lunatic, laughs out loud in delight. He jumps in and punches the laugh right off his face.

It is a very good day. At the end of the first sparring match, he's left with the warm glow of the knowledge that if they had to, his crew actually could take Kakarot down. Given that most of the heroes of old could only do super Saiyan in giant ape form, he hasn't even the slightest doubt they'd be able to win against them, too. They'd go straight for the tail, and succeed at removing it, and after that taking them down wouldn't even be a challenge.

They break for lunch before the second match. He's ready to be pretty bored by it, until they start discussing it, breaking down the fight and sometimes lining up for a slow-motion sequence of alternative moves. He starts putting in his own suggestions, and no one even bats an eye.

At least not until he turns to Chiaotzu and asks, "Can you make - hungry shields?"

" . . . I'm not sure what one of those is," says Chiaotzu.

"Your shields crumple whenever a ki blast hitting them contains more ki than they have. A hungry shield eats ki blasts."

Chiaotzu's eyes go very wide. "No, I can't. I - I'll need to work on that."

Everyone keeps giving him sidelong looks, except Kakarot. Then again, only Kakarot, and maybe the kid if he's lucky, know that they are crew, blood-and-bone deep. No; forget that; the kid is probably the smartest one of them, there's no way he doesn't know. He isn't giving sidelong glances, either, like the idea of a shield that could eat ki is just another thing and not a nightmare to fighters like them in the hands of a master like Chiaotzu. He knows: it will be a nightmare, but only to their enemies.

After lunch they go again, and this time he's included in the psychic gestalt right from the start. It's not like a Saiyan crew, six people who know each other very well. It's more like being part of one person with six bodies, ideas offered and considered, weighed and chosen or discarded, almost as fast as thought. With him, they're able to take Kakarot - the greater part of them thinks of him as Goku - after forty sweaty minutes. They break again to dump water over their heads, and when he sits down, Kakarot sits next to him.

"You've gotten a lot better," he says.

"Yes well," he says, "unlike some people, I have been fighting a war."

"Did that," says Kakarot. "Won. But the problem with wars is, even when you win, a lot of innocent people on both sides still die. I decided it's better not to lie about things like that."

He can't argue: it's true. Still. "So, what? I should've just let the Klorforians keep on conquering and blowing up planets whenever it amused them?"

"Why not?" asks Kakarot. "You did."

"That's different!"

"How?"

He wants to say that he has a crew now. He wants to say that he understands about protecting his people, and it isn't . . . wrong. It's just not true. The person he was before he came to Earth didn't conquer and destroy worlds because it amused him; he'd done it because he hated the universe which had denied him everything worth having. It is different, now that he has a crew, but it's not because he didn't understand before why people might want to fight for their homes.

Anyway, he knows, the home he has now really doesn't need him to defend itself.

"I thought so," says Kakarot, as though he's proven a point.

Vegeta does not say the first dozen things that come to mind. Instead he says, "I'm not that person anymore. I don't - I choose not to be. And I could not have left the Kloforian Empire alone."

Kakarot says, "Huh." Then he smiles. "Good to have you, Vegeta. Oh, sweet ice tea!"

It's not a graceful exit, and the tea is ridiculously over-sugared, but he's grateful anyway. If they'd kept talking any longer, he's pretty sure he would have made a black pass, and then the kid would have had to come over and do something about it and - no. Just no.

The third bout involves Mr. Popo, and fuck but Mr. Popo is a beast. It's a mess even with him and Kakarot on the same side. They lose after only about ten minutes, Mr. Popo walking back to his blanket with an air of someone who has done them a supreme favor.

But then, three of them come back stronger after every defeat, so he did do them a huge favor.

After that there is another break, during which Kami comes over and fixes up the worst of the broken bones. He catches Piccolo's eye and says, "Can you do this too, green man?"

"In a theoretical sense."

"You should learn."

Piccolo glares at him, but otherwise pointedly doesn't justify that statement with a response. He isn't worried; Piccolo is smart enough that the tactical value of a battle healer will outweigh any other considerations in the end. He settles back down.

There are a bunch of one-on-one cool-down fights after that, people pairing up by ability: Krillin and Yamcha, Tien and Piccolo, and Chiaotzu and the kid. That last one is a bit surprising until he sees that they aren't so much fighting as the kid is drilling Chiaotzu in math while throwing punches and kicks at him. He doesn't ask. Tien and Piccolo are fighting, but it's more about fine ki manipulation than physical brawling, so it's less interesting to watch.

"Are we going to fight too?" asks Kakarot, from right behind him.

He backflips automatically to get out of range before realizing who it is. "Don't do me any favors," he sneers.

"Aww, come on," whines Kakarot. "It's no fair when I fight them, and Mr. Popo will only do one fight a month max."

"And this is my problem how?"

"But it's boring! I'm bored."

"There's a war you could be fighting."

"No," says Kakarot, going from petulant child to serious warrior so quickly it almost gives him whiplash. Neither side is a lie, is the thing. Kakarot doesn't, not to himself and not to anyone else, either.

"Fine. Then don't fight on the front. Come train with my warriors instead. They're all dying to meet you anyway. They'll love losing to a super Saiyan." Kakarot looks, if anything, conflicted by this. "You can do that teleporting thing, so you can even come home at night."

" . . . I'll ask Chi-chi," says Kakarot.

It comes to him all in a warm glow that he has the better matesprit. Bulma doesn't try to stop him from fighting; she'd gotten him out of bed and driven them here today, after all. She just makes sure he has what he needs. A training room that pushes him to ridiculous lengths just to stand up. An extra hidden weapon, in case he needs to blow a planet and even five minutes' warning in the local ki fields would be too much. His crew.

"You could teach us the teleporting thing, too, you know," he says.

"I've tried! Kami is the only one who even partway understands. It's . . . it involves pulling yourself apart."

He can believe that. Most people, rational people who don't have brain damage, rightly find the idea of pulling yourself apart a little bit alarming. He does, and he's been doing nothing else practically since the first time he heard of Earth. Still. It won't get easier putting it off. "Try me."

So they don't end up sparring, and he has to cut the lesson short when it looks like the kid might wander over. But it's fine; he is frustrated, sure, and Kakarot is there, but he is an adult and capable of not snapping at the idiots in his life for things that aren't their fault. He isn't capable of - unbuilding - himself, not all at once the way Kakarot does. He suspects the species that invented this has to be some kind of hive-mind collective, which can literally take itself to pieces.

After that, it's time to do things for Kami. Or rather, they plan out doing things for Kami, in the sense that he looks after the Earth and these days that involves sending one or the other of them to have a quiet word with anyone who looks like they're going to be trouble. Piccolo the Demon King is apparently particularly good at it. He's not planning to stay this time, but he still comes over and listens. This will be his planet too, after all.

Then it's . . . crew time, he supposes. Time when they're just talking together, not about anything in particular, just being together. Tien and Piccolo talk about geography, of all things, and Chiaotzu goes to sit with Bulma. He doesn't really participate, but he stays close enough to hear and stretches out on one of the tatami mats.

He wakes up to the kid patting him gently on the shoulder, while Krillin and Yamcha hang back. The lookout is always sunny because it's above the clouds, and surprisingly non-freezing despite being above the clouds. It's late afternoon now, the sun falling away toward the horizon, and it's going to get cold soon. He hasn't slept that well in, possibly, ever.

"I'm awake," he says, sitting up and giving the three of them a flat look.

"Good. Mom arrived with dinner, and um. She wants to talk to you especially." He pauses, then adds very seriously, "You're not allowed to hurt her."

"Why would I want to hurt her?"

The kid gives him a searching look. "Is this a Saiyan thing? Because here on Earth, people tend to predict future actions based on past actions, and you blew up a couple of cities."

"When I didn't know you were my crew, sure."

"Humans don't have crews. You almost helped defend the Earth that one time and you built a nice bathhouse, so now Mom doesn't hate you; but she hasn't forgotten, either."

"Understood."

It's with some trepidation that he seats himself next to Chi-chi, even so. She is crew which means he isn't going to hurt her, but the kid has a point: Chi-chi is not a Saiyan, and won't react in sensible ways. "You wanted to talk."

"Not really," says Chi-chi. "But I'm going to say some things, because you need to hear them."

"Okay?"

Chi-chi nods, clearly steeling herself for this. "I did sit down with Mr. Piccolo and listen to him try to explain how Saiyans regard love. It wasn't very clear, but Gohan has explained a little more since, so I almost understand. You have a specific relationship for being an asshole to people, and otherwise you keep the fighting out of your nice relationships."

"Unless someone is flipping quadrants," he says, more or less just to be contrary.

"Even then. If there's fighting, it flips red to black."

"Yes," he says. It's not strictly true, but it is the ideal.

"And you're supposed to have five different people you're married to at once. I'm mean, not married but . . . "

"Yes," he says, mostly to spare them both the awkwardness of her trying to put it into human words.

Chi-chi nods. "Humans don't."

He waits for her to finish, but she doesn't say anything else, so that seems to be it. "Yes?" he tries.

"You are married to Dr. Briefs." It takes him a moment to realize she means Bulma. "Human married, not Saiyan . . . "

"Matespritfasted," he supplies.

"Which means you have to keep to human rules. You don't go off behind her back getting a black rival, I don't care if that's how you people do things! Goku made a promise to me and he's kept it, so I know you can. And you will." The 'or I will break you goes completely unvoiced. He hears it anyway.

His reactions all pile up together, 'but you don't care about conciliatory relationships, even though they are as strong?' colliding with, 'yes, but Kakarot has brain damage,' colliding with, 'of course I wouldn't!' because only assholes fill empty quadrants without consulting their filled ones first. Then it occurs to him that she's acting very defensive of someone who, as far as he's aware, is only a friend. That's the thought that makes it to his mouth. "Are you - her moirail?"

"No!" she almost shouts, and everyone turns to look at them. She colors furiously and continues in an angry whisper, but he's already figured it out: of course she isn't, because - "Humans don't have moirails!"

"Yes. You don't have crews and you don't have moirails. Why do you even care?"

"Dr. Briefs was a good friend to me, even when she didn't have to be."

Of course she did, he doesn't say. She's crew. But she isn't. The group of people he's been thinking of as his crew aren't, not really, not in any sense other than Kakarot chose them. They're working on an entirely different set of rules and obligations. One of those obligations must have just demanded that Chi-chi protect her - friend - from a threat that, he now understands, isn't that she expects him to deliberately hurt his matesprit so much as she thinks he'll do it anyway by not understanding human norms. He can't even say she was wrong to point it out to him.

"I understand," he says. And, "I think I'm going to have to - talk. To your son."

He can see her getting ready to be angry, and - it wasn't like the kid had been subtle.

"No! I already told him he's too young." Chi-chi expression goes startled. "But he's lived here his whole life and can explain your rules in a way that makes sense. I hope."

Chi-chi looks mollified. "It's not like Piccolo is any good at it . . . " she allows, obviously thinking about all the people in their little group and deciding, one after the other, that they're not the right person. The kid is, unfortunately, the best choice by virtue of being the only choice. "All right. You can go now."

He's never been so thoroughly dismissed in his life, and that includes the time he spent working for Frieza. But he takes the exit anyway, because the alternative is much, much worse.

"What was that about?" asks Bulma, when he sits down next to her.

"Differences between Saiyans and humans," he says. That seems to satisfy her, at any rate.

Dinner is, as he is beginning to understand is the norm when Chi-chi cooks, both excellent and plentiful. He is feeling full, not just physically but also in his ki, when they get back in the capsule aircraft to head home. "That was - good," he says, to Bulma, during the ride.

"Being with friends? Yeah. Even Saiyans can't fight all the time."

"Most can," he says. "I could, if I had a few of you with me. We assign crews together, and it's fine. You saw Rassik."

Bulma smiles. "I remember. Trying hard to be good, even when they don't know what good is. Very Saiyan, of course."

"They are one of my most effective units," he says.

"A little condescending towards anyone who doesn't like to fight with their fists, though."

He can't really argue that. He had been, too. He hadn't understood there was any other way of fighting.

It's dark and the stars are shining coldly when they get home, and he sleeps again, entirely at ease beside his matesprit-wife.

In the morning, he pops the junk capsule.

It had started off as a joke, almost. He had a thousand of the things, and once emptied and filled with more ki-concentrated foods, they were incredibly useful for moving supplies around. That was what most of them were still being used for now. But after the first battle of Jenshi, his men had found a . . . something. None of them knew what it was or what it was supposed to do, and obviously it couldn't do it with a blast hole clear through it. There had been some pretty hefty shields around it, too, and that had made him think of Bulma's new armor, so on whim he'd capsuled it. That began the junk capsule. Whenever anyone found some weird bit of tech that they didn't know how to use and their more technologically-inclined allies couldn't figure out, it went in the junk capsule.

Bulma looks over the pile of apparently random junk, then back at him. "Explain."

"I don't know what any of it does. None of our techs can figure it out, but they aren't the smartest person I know."

She looks at it some more. "Vegeta," she says, finally, so he looks her in the eyes. "Did you bring me a present?"

Her expression and her tone are unreadable. "If you don't like it - " he begins, then stops because she just sealed her lips over his. It's fast, just a peck, before she steps back.

"I love it," she says. "Thank you."

"I'll let you - "

"You will eat an absolutely enormous breakfast," says Bulma. "And then you'll go train. I will set an alarm so neither of us forgets to eat lunch, and another for dinner, and you won't train after dinner. We can go to bed instead."

"You want to go to bed right after dinner, woman? What are we, senile?"

"Bed," says Bulma, eyes bright, and he suddenly can't wait. She laughs. "Yeah. Come on you. Let's go eat."

She bleeds for a total of six days. He doesn't spend as much time training as he had planned, and what he does is mostly because Bulma is, in her way, as brutal as he is and won't let him stay in bed once he's exhausted her but not himself. Mostly, she takes naps, but inevitably they talk, in the times between.

"Tell me a story," says Bulma. Her eyes are closed and she looks close to sleep.

"What, like a bedtime story?" he asks. He's never been a father, and anyway, Saiyan warriors don't coddle their children like humans do.

"If you like," says Bulma. "Or a story that fighters tell each other. Or a secret story that you're never told anyone."

That one springs to the tip of his tongue, unbidden, but - this is Bulma. She never does anything for only one reason. "Why?"

"We're married, and you love me, but you don't know anything about me! And I know just as much about you."

"I know the important things."

She smiles softly, a secret smile just for him. "Flatterer."

He sighs, but, well, what was the point of being forced to memorize the whole epic cycle if not this? So he begins, "Speak to me, O ancestors, of Queen Solin first of her name: of her exile, and the trials she found there; and also of her quadrants, hated and held dear - "

"That is not a Saiyan story!" interrupts Bulma, eyes coming open all at once.

"Of course it's a Saiyan story, weren't you listening? It's about the first Queen Sol - "

"Saiyans don't write poetry! And they don't write poetry in dactylic hexameter!"

"Oh," he says. "No. This was written after, by Queen Solin's moirail, so her memory wouldn't be forgotten. He was a Triffle."

" . . . oh," says Bulma. "Okay. Go on."

That sets the tone for pretty much the whole thing. Bulma has no idea of proper etiquette for listening to an epic, so she keeps interrupting. Half the time it's to ask questions, and half the time it's to make some comment on this or that adventure she'd had with Kakarot or Yamcha or another of their cr - her friends. A few times it's to get him to stop talking at all, either because food has arrived and she will insist on wearing clothes to greet the servants, or because she's recovered enough that they can do something else instead. It's one of the shorter poems in the cycle, really only setting up the things that come later, and it's not supposed to take more than a few hours. It ends up taking all day.

"What, that's it?" asks Bulma, when it's over and Queen Solin and her matesprit both die, leaving behind her moirail and kismesis and co-auspiticee and the auspistice who betrayed them all. "Rocks fall, everyone dies?"

"Not all stories have happy endings," he says. He knows this to be more true than most. Then, more to curtail the inevitable questions than because he is curious, he says, "Now it's your turn. Tell me a story."

She tells him the story of how she met Kakarot, and their - first - quest for the dragon balls. She is a terrible storyteller and everything keeps coming out-of-order, garbled. On the other hand, she doesn't mind at all when he interrupts to ask questions or remind her that they've been in bed all day and it's night now and maybe they should at some point actually sleep. She just starts up again in the morning. It's a terrible mess anyway, no clear quadrants and the events so random that he's sure she's just telling him things that happened.

He is still outraged when he hears that the pig wasted the dragon's wish on undergarments.

"He was preventing Pilaf from using it!" she protests.

"Yes, I know, but he could have wished for something useful! One of your pellet-weapons, or something!"

" . . . okay, you've got me there," says Bulma.

"What did you even want to wish for?"

"Nothing."

"What."

Bulma sighs. "I mean, I told anyone who asked that I wanted to wish for a perfect boyfriend, but really, no one's perfect. I think I just wanted to ask the dragon how the wish-granting worked." She stops, then adds almost contemplatively, " . . . which I suppose might've just wished me to the Lookout, so Kami could have told me 'no' decades ago."

He snorts. "Wouldn't've worked. You'd just keep going by to try taking samples from the Pillar."

"You know, I would have," says Bulma. "At least until Mr. Popo told me not to."

"Is that why you don't?"

"Well. He gave me a piece of what he claims is chunk of Pillar material, but I'm pretty sure is a rock-shaped quantum singularity. I can't even get a consistent mass reading on it!"

"So . . . magic," he says.

"Magic," says Bulma with no small amount of disgust.

He laughs.

Later, Bulma literally shoves him into the argrav capsule so she can finally start playing with the junk capsule junk. He appreciates it, really, but she's going to send him off with the new capsule so he can train whenever he likes. He can only see her, see any of his idiots, here on Earth.

Then, about twenty minutes in, a wall of the capsule turns into a screen and Bulma says, "Is this working?"

"Yes," he says, guarded.

"Good! We were a little worried the LC display would crack when the gravity is up that high."

"You didn't test it?"

"The worst thing that would happen was the grav field would top out at four hundred seven gravities, which is still an improvement from your point of view."

"Why four hundred seven?"

"Four thousand meters per second squared," says Bulma, which, he does not even want to know. "I thought this way we'd be able to talk and I can get some work done. Tell me a story."

Over the course of a couple of days, while he works out walking, jogging in place and planks and push-ups, he recites the next poem of the cycle. Bulma responds by telling him about the second quest for the dragon balls, a bit over a year after the first and after Goku finally got a teacher. For all Roshi is a terrible person, he's also a human who had figured out how to do ki attacks on his own, so he's not completely useless. Goku had still been in the lag phase, before he hit his exponential power growth, and foundations are always good. He listens with a strategist's ear, learning about the different types of people who inhabit Earth.

The day after that, Piccolo comes to visit. He pauses, and then says, "Green man."

Piccolo tisks, and says, "I hear I have you to thank for the argument Goku is currently having with Chi-chi."

"They fight?" he asks. As far as he knew, the wonder couple were perfect matesprits. Who, of course, do fight, but only for fun.

Piccolo rolls his eyes. "The rest of us are smart enough to stay out of it, but Gohan can't. He's leaning in behind you, so probably Chi-chi is going to relent."

"Annnd you came to tell me this why?"

"We're going to be quadrant corners eventually," says Piccolo, pronouncing the words as though they're alien science. "I'd like to figure out what that means right now, instead of in the middle of the next crisis."

He can't deny it's a good idea. "What's to figure? I don't like you, you don't like me, but we can tolerate each other for the sake o - "

"You don't tolerate us, Vegeta," says Piccolo patiently. "Please at least try to remember: I've been in your head." Just like he's been in Piccolo's. It's a weird place, because Namekian tentacles are sense organs and Piccolo can get a rough empathic impression just from standing close enough to someone.

"Then why do we need to talk? You're part of my crew, end of discussion."

"Uh-huh," says Piccolo. "Kami's on the galactic deity database, but having read a book entry on Saiyans doesn't really tell us that much. What do quadrant corners do?"

"Conspire to keep the quadrant in question, usually."

"Keep them?"

"It not like you can force someone to feel anything for you," he says, uncomfortable. "Keep them."

"So you mean just continue to be an idiot, as far as Goku is concerned," says Piccolo.

He glares at the Namekian, but the issue is that knowing it's impossible doesn't actually make the feelings go away. "The liver wants what it wants."

" . . . does that mean anything, in Saiyan? Because it's just kind of creepy to me."

He sighs. If nothing else, Piccolo is making a strong point regarding different alien cultures. "The heart is for matesprits; the liver is for kismeses. Anyway, I don't really see . . . look. We don't have to be friends, or anything stupid like that."

"Okay," says Piccolo. "What if I want to be?"

"What."

"Because Saiyans might work just as well with people they strongly hate, but Namekians don't. And you don't hate me, not in the kill-me way and not in the black way. Why shouldn't we try for friends?"

"I don't even know you!"

"Whose fault is that?" asks Piccolo. "We . . . did go looking, you know, Kami and I. There is nothing specifically about you, but given the timeline it doesn't look like you could have had a particularly nice life up until now. I appreciate that you took the time to turn us into an effective team; in return, I would like to help integrate you into it, Earth-friendship-style. Having Earth friends is difficult, but on the whole I've found it worth the effort."

He is left speechless.

"Anyway. It's up to you. Take some time, think about it. You don't have to jump in all at once. I didn't."

"How did you?" he asks. "Decide to have Earth friends?"

"It was less a decision, and more self-preservation. We had to work together to defeat you and Nappa, and then I got to spend a few months in the company of those idiots while we were all dead and training under King Kai. I had to do some work to get them - mostly Yamcha - to stop leaking angst all over the place, and humans will bond with literally anything, up to and including rocks, so by the time I was alive again I was an ally. And then Gohan kept training with me, so now we're friends."

"Humans will bond with rocks?"

"Draw a stupid face on one and give it to Bulma," dares Piccolo.

The whole experience has the surreal quality of waking up one day to discover he's suddenly a giant insect or something, but he does draw a face on a rock and hand it to Bulma later that day. She looks at it, then at him, then at it again. "Er . . . thanks?" she says. He counts it a total failure until he walks into the lab a couple of days later - Bulma asked him to do some ki glassing and it is a decent focus exercise - to find Bulma shouting insults at the rock.

"You . . . know that's just a rock, right?" he says. "I drew the face myself."

"Yes," says Bulma. "But Mr. Mica is a decent enough programming duck, and he doesn't run away and refuse to work with me anymore when I shout at him, so he's still better than half of my lab assistants - did you need anything?"

"No."

The rest of his vacation - Bulma calls it shore leave - finishes along much the same lines. He eats and trains, and Bulma eats and does science to things, and they spend a lot of time talking while they do it. She's practical, his matesprit, and they work through some strategic and logistical problems that have been dogging the war effort. He finishes reciting the epic cycle, even with all of her questions. It's . . . he enjoys it, for the most part, even if he progresses more slowly than he would if he were focused exclusively on training.

It won't work in the long run, he knows: he's not a human and can't have his matesprit and his moirail be the same person. He explains this to Bulma, and asks that she talk to the kid about it while he's gone.

"His name is Gohan," says Bulma.

"I am not going to call any person 'cooked food,'" he says.

"Good grief," says Bulma.

In the short run, though, it is a lot of fantastic sex and good conversations and better sleep. They get to know each other properly, as people. He teaches her to throw a punch and manipulate her own ki at least enough to dodge; she teaches him vector math, so he can lay in a stellar course by hand if he has to. As they eat and sleep and talk some more, they build a place for him here, on this world.

It's still small and fragile when he gets back into his ship, though. Or rather, onto his new ship, the one with five hundred gravities. It has food and fuel and enough capsules to blow a medium-sized planetoid: all the gifts Bulma can give him. Everyone shows up to see him off, too, even old Master Roshi and the kid. He hasn't quite earned them, not yet, and there's still a war to finish, but at least he knows what his happy ending is going to look like.

Chapter Text

Kakarot gets punched in the face the first time he shows up to train with Vegeta and his warriors. It's an automatic reflex on finding someone so far inside his personal space, and he recognizes crew too late to pull the punch completely. Kakarot wasn't expecting it, had his guard down, so he goes flying. Vegeta's lieutenants all move to flank him before he waves them off and goes over to offer a hand up.

"You've gotten stronger," remarks Kakarot, apparently not even a bit annoyed at the punch. "Who are these?"

"Crew captains," he says. "Of Rassik, Lliae, Solamnei, Vignis, and Metox. This is Kakarot - "

"Goku," says Kakarot.

" - my cousin and crewmate. He teleports."

"He teleports?" asks Lekk, who is the weakest of his crew physically but strongest tactically. "Why don't we - "

"I tried learning it," says Vegeta. "You're welcome to as well, if you can get him to teach it, but I think you have to be at least a little insane for it to work."

"Aww, but I came here to - "

"Fight, I know," says Vegeta. "Since you interrupted a tactical planning session, you have to wait. Why didn't you call ahead?"

"On what, my space phone?" asks Kakarot.

"On Bulma's space phone," he says.

The squad leaders, all but Kalit, are looking at Kakarot - who is currently powered-down and hiding his ki - with varying degrees of incredulity. They don't know much about his crew, aside from the facts that they exist, that his matesprit chose him to be a king of kings and taught him strategy, and that there is a super Saiyan somewhere in the crew. Kalit, of course, chooses then to helpfully say, "I can call Asni to take him to the training grounds, commander."

He looks at her in annoyance, but Kakarot lights up. "Yes please!"

He sighs. There's no point trying to keep Kakarot from doing whatever the hell he's going to do. "Fine. Don't fight like my warriors are Klorflorians, Kakarot. I know you'd love it and they'd love it, but I need them to actually be able to fight in battle tomorrow."

"But - "

"Did you bring senzu beans for everyone?"

"No - "

"Then you fight like a Saiyan," he says. "Or you fight in the war. Your choice."

Kakarot huffs a frown and whines out, "Fine. I'll hold back, I guess." He turns back to Kalit, but Kalit has already tapped her comm up to call Asni. They get back to business, and a short while later Asni appears to lead him away.

"That's really the kind of person you accept in your crew?" asks Lutol, once he's out of earshot. "He's - childish."

"When he isn't fighting seriously," agrees Vegeta.

"Of course, when he is fighting seriously, he takes down Frieza in single combat," says Kalit. "Doesn't he, commander?"

He smirks a little rather than responding, and everyone in the room stares, trying to figure out if it's a joke. Except Kalit, of course.

They get through the planning part of tomorrow's battle - planetary defence, which is never exactly fun - in record time. Then everyone makes excuses so they can go watch what Kakarot's doing on the training ground. He goes more slowly; he already knows that Kakarot will be beating them, possibly more than one crew simultaneously, without even trying very hard. Instead, he calls the kitchen - run by the inhabitants of this world, not his own people - to warn them about how much food Kakarot is going to eat later, and gets on with his day.

Lekk calls him later, outraged that Kakarot had beaten his Lliae and Kalit's Rassik together. He says, "What do you want me to do, tell him to go easy on you?"

"Tell him not to!" snarls Lekk.

"Not yet," he says. "When we're done wrapping up this sector, maybe, and I can spare any crew for that long."

" . . . he really beat Frieza?"

"What do you think?" he asks, and cuts the call.

Kakarot shows up intermittently after that, generally at least once a fortnight. He does call ahead most of the time, presumably when he or someone else in the crew remembers that he should, and gets punched the rest of the time. His soldiers immediately begin coming up with ridiculous rumors about the man, none of which even come close to how terrifying Kakarot can actually be. Most importantly from a strategic and tactical standpoint, it focuses them like nothing else to have a single warrior - a single Saiyan warrior - who can take on multiple crews at a time and is just as delighted when they win as when he does.

A few people inevitably make romantic overtures to him, which he more or less totally ignores. He's so easy-going that just about everyone figures out he's already got a moirail, and a good one, so ignoring those makes sense. Once the red ones get blatant enough that even he can't pretend ignorance, he says, "I'm already married," which gets the questions redirected to him until he says, "Human matespritfasted," and that stops that. Matespritfasting is a big commitment, after all, and not the kind undertaken by people who cheat. He only has to punch a couple of people before they figure out that he's already spoken for, ashen-wise, and Vegeta doesn't share. He gets asked about that, and explains that the auspitice-apparent is currently five. Not many people are patient enough to wait, but he had to wait longer without even knowing he had a crew, so in comparison five more years is nothing.

And then someone - more than one someone - tries hitting on him black, which of course does nothing, not even get a reaction of loathing. He's asked about that, too. "I really have better things to do than answer your questions about my cousin," he says.

"Does he just - not hate people?"

"Yes," says Vegeta.

"What."

"He doesn't hate people. He can loathe people, if you push him far enough that he decides you need to die, but he doesn't hate. Word of advice: don't kill anyone in our crew."

Brej looks horrified. "Who - did that to him?"

Vegeta shrugs. "Someone who is dead now. I try not to let it bother me. Kakarot doesn't seem to feel like he's missing anything." Kakarot, in fact, is probably a hugely more effective fighter because he doesn't get inconvenient romantic urges in the middle of battle for species that don't or can't feel the same way.

He can practically see Brej thinking it through. On the one hand, Kakarot is, in a very important way, a cripple. On the other hand, it's not actually making him any weaker; it might be the critical factor that lets him push over the invisible line and go gold. And it isn't like crews throw out people who have weaknesses, as long as they have commensurate strengths in other areas and work to overcome those weaknesses. Just about everyone in this part of space would beg for him to join their crew, goofy smile and lack of hate and all, if they thought there was even a tiny chance he'd accept the offer.

" . . . good talk," says Brej, and the news that Kakarot is either taken or uninterested in all four quadrants finally seems to penetrate.

That is just in time for them to wrap up with that sector. Imperial space has been shrinking for a while now. It's definitely a good thing that most of the galaxy is either on their side or at least in open revolt, but it does mean his side has much more territory to defend and Klorflorian warriors continue to be a huge fucking pain. Furthermore, a small volume means they don't have supply lines nearly as long, and they can pivot much faster than he can. Finally, they are still an empire, not a coalition of allied forces, and don't need massive amounts of diplomacy to be happening to coordinate the war effort.

So despite the progress being good overall, it's getting harder, too, as the Klorforian client races run out or change sides and they start facing actual Klorflorian warriors in battle more and more often. It's doable; Rassik can reliably take on single Klorflorian warriors and win, and if he throws enough coordinated crews into a battle they can take out groups of Klorflorians. That's not going let them take Klorflor, though. He's pretty sure that's not doable, which means his only option, right now, is . . . Bulma's last resort.

It's going to mean no Klorflorian empire, ever again, but it's also going to mean no Klorflorian warriors, none of their scientists or epics, none of the records of who, exactly, the coalition is going to put on trial for the empire's many crimes. And . . . he understands, now, that people who don't like fighting aren't weak. They just chose a different kind of strength. The non-warrior Klorflorians, who are the vast majority, don't necessarily deserve the same fate as the Imperials.

He doesn't see a way around it, though, not unless Kakarot can figure out a way to teach something that has never, in any single one the epics, been teachable.

He goes into his ship to train for a few hours every day. Some of the time, he invites other people in there with him: crew leaders and rarely his father and less rarely his mother. She'd walked in and even a mere hundred gravities had pinned her to the floor, where she'd just laughed and laughed. "And your matesprit made this for you?"

"She's very smart," he'd said.

"Yes she is," said Queen Shard. She . . . had been his first moirail, when he was that age where it was acceptable, and even when he'd gotten old enough to realize they didn't fit and dumped her - it had been a relief for both of them - they had stayed close. They are close again now. He knows exactly how she will react when she finds out that Bulma isn't a warrior, and is going to avoid having that shouting match for as long as physically possible.

Today, however, he trains alone. He does that sometimes too, which is weird for anyone with a moirail but pretty normal for anyone else. At least, as far as his people are concerned. He calls Bulma almost the second the airlock shuts, and before he even begins dialing up the gravity.

She picks up on the third ring. The view is of the ceiling of her lab. "Hold on a sec, babe," she says, so he waits patiently while the gravity dials up and Bulma finishes whatever thing she's doing and says, "Okay. What's up?"

"We finished clearing the sector," he says.

"Good?"

"Which means we're going to pause to consolidate the territory, let the coalition get the new civvies registered, that sort of thing. It usually takes a few weeks. I suspect this one will take longer, because we're about to start attacking Klorflorian home space."

"Ah?"

"If Kakarot wants to come over and beat up my army properly, now's the time. I'd . . . appreciate it if you pass that message along."

"Yeah, okay," says Bulma, and, "So? Tell me about the new planets."

He tells her about the new planets. He's okay at strategy; she's better than okay, and telling her what the planets can provide, once they've been integrated into the coalition, helps him figure it out as well. She doesn't offer advice, and wouldn't even if he asked, because she did have that talk with the kid and then did some science to it and is very careful about the boundary between matesprit and moirail.

Then, once he tells her all about how the war has been going, she tells him about things that have been happening on Earth. She has apparently gained custody of the kid during the week, due to however training and . . . non-warrior training work on Earth, and the Capsule Corp building being significantly closer to better training grounds than Kakarot's wilderness retreat. This also means that Piccolo is spending a lot more time hanging around, which he wouldn't have expected. "Is he bothering you?"

"No! He just hovers there meditating, most of the time. The rest . . . did you know he has a sense of humor? He's actually pretty hilarious!"

"He's definitely the only one with any common sense," he agrees.

Krillin, meanwhile, has been dumped, again. He doesn't really see why the man keeps going after civilians when he obviously needs a strong warrior matesprit. Bulma says, "There aren't that many female fighters, Vegeta. In female ki fighters, it's pretty much only Chi-chi."

"And you."

"I can dodge and run away," she says. "That doesn't count."

She has a point, but instead of admitting it he changes the subject. "And? Tell me about the most recent thing you've done to screw over the laws of physics."

She back-engineered more of the junk pile. The big thing with a hole through it is, it turns out, a shield generator. "They don't do anything to stop ki attacks, though."

"Then what even is the point?"

"Pop one on a burning building to starve it of oxygen," she retorts. "Pop one under the windows to catch the people jumping out of said building. It will do a lot of people a lot of good. Thank you for bringing it."

He finishes training feeling pretty good, and this good mood lasts all the way to the next morning, when Kakarot shows up, gets punched, and bounces back like a puppy. "I get to fight for real?"

"One crew at a time," he says. "And they have to all be out of the tanks before you fight the next one."

"Aww, but that will take - "

"Are you going to fight the Klorflorians?" Kakarot shuts up. "I don't have enough warriors to spare. One at a time, or you bring enough senzu beans for everyone. Your choice."

"Korin refuses to grow them," says Kakarot, and sighs. "Fiiiiiiiine. One at a time."

They saunter to the training area, to give everyone else time to get there ahead of them. News of when Kakarot is around travels almost faster than light, so basically every squad that's on-planet is there when they do. "Not Rassik," he says. "That wouldn't be fair to everyone else."

"Lliae?"

"Lliae," he allows. They're weaker than most of the crews under his personal command, and Kakarot must have noticed because he tries to spar with them every time he's around. Injuries that heal up overnight in a tank, however, don't make for nearly as much improvement as Kakarot can deal out.

"Lliae squad!" calls out Kakarot, and a ripple of disappointment and excitement goes around as Lliae squad gets up.

"Going to stop going easy on us?" asks Lekk, taking his position in the middle of the group as they all begin to power up.

"Something like that," says Kakarot, and also starts powering up.

"Finally," says Lekk.

Kakarot has practiced, he can tell. He doesn't need to psych himself up and get angry anymore. He just draws on his ki, silent even as all of Lliae stare, feeling the ki coming off him and realizing exactly how much Kakarot has been holding back. The Kakarot goes just that one step further, across the line that differentiates warriors from legends, and there is a sort of collective gasp from everyone but Rassik squad. Vegeta holds up an arm, and instantly has everyone's attention.

"Just so you know," he says. "Kakarot doesn't fight in wars because people who don't like fighting get caught in the crossfire. But we like fighting, and he is just fine with defeating every single one of you, as many times as it takes to get a halfway decent opponent." He smirks a little. "Have fun," he adds, and drops his arm.

Kakarot attacks.

The whole spar takes about seven minutes, but he doesn't pay attention to it because he is mobbed by a dozen crew captains, coming over to demand if Kakarot is really - ? "Yes," he says. "Of course. How else was a common nobody going to defeat the imperial crown prince?"

"Much less the emperor . . . " says Urat, in considering tones.

"Oh, he's not the super Saiyan who defeated King Kold," he says mildly. "Word of advice: do not fuck with my crew." They fall over themselves protesting that no, of course not, they would never. "How stupid do you think I am?" he interrupts. "You'll come for the fun of fighting, and that's fine, but you will ask first and only come one crew at a time and never, ever, ever hurt any native of my crews' planet. Do I make myself clear?"

Kakarot makes his first KO punch at that point. Everyone else is mostly silent while he finishes out the match, if it can even be called that. "Whoo," he says, walking over and powering down. "That was pretty fun."

"Really?" asks Vegeta.

"Well, yeah. Lliae aren't good yet, but they will be! - is there any food around here?"

Vegeta sighs, and leads him to the local mess. Kakarot eats his way through most of it, answering random questions from the crowd of warriors who followed them both the whole time. Then he grins widely and says, "So you'll call me when they're all out of tanks, right?"

"Yes."

"Great! Ooh, scary lady! Bye!"

He turns and finds that the 'scary lady' in question is Queen Shard. She looks . . . more thoughtful than angry, if very regal. "That's your co-auspiticee?"

"When our auspitice gets old enough," he says.

"Hmm," says Queen Shard. "Let your father and me know when he's next coming around."

"Not a chance," he says. He absolutely doesn't, a fortnight later when the last of Lliae get out of the tank and he calls home again to tell Bulma to tell Kakarot that he can come back and beat up more of his men, or three weeks after that, or any time thereafter.

In the meantime, he's kept busy with the coalition. They're not particularly eager to press forward, now that imperial space is a small enclosed volume. He points out that fighting to a standstill is not the same as fighting to victory, and if they want to fight this entire war again in five years' time they can call it a day and go home now. Or, alternatively, they can finish the godsdammned war. The smarter planetary representatives are all behind him, but there are many more stupid ones, so most day's it's an upward slog.

From this position, he can kind of see the appeal of dictatorship. All he'd have to do is announce that he is actually going to challenge for the crown, and . . . But the thing about dictators, the thing that the Klorflorians don't understand and he can't ever forget, is that they aren't rightful rulers. A rightful ruler sees to it that all of their subjects get things like food and crew and battle that will help them progress. A rightful emperor has to learn all the things that all the species under their banner need and want, and do their best to fulfill them. Dictatorship is just giving orders without doing any of the work, and he can do that. He just won't ever be able to go home.

No.

By the time Rassik climbs out of the tanks, though, the latest round of supply and support ships have arrived and they're readying for the final offensive. Kakarot calls to ask if he can come again, and he says no, and instead of hanging up he just sort of stays on the line and fidgets at Vegeta.

He sighs, then gives in to the inevitable. "What."

"You should come see Bulma," says Kakarot.

"I am not delaying this invasion so I can go home to lounge around with my matesprit!"

"Just for tonight," says Kakarot. "I can bring you, and then take you back in the morning."

He is so distracted by learning that Kakarot could have been solving half his logistical problems that he almost doesn't hear the offer. "What?" he demands again, outraged.

"Unless you don't want - "

"What I want doesn't change the fact that the supreme commander of the coalition forces can't vanish right before the final assault on Klorflorian space!" he snarls. "And you are an idiot for thinking it does!"

"Oh," says Kakarot, and the call cuts out. He sighs again, pinches the bridge of his nose, and stands up. There are a million things that need to happen before the invasion, and he's already delegated every one of them he can. He has work to do.

That goes all right for most of the morning, and he goes to eat in the common mess like he always does, only to find Kakarot there, and Chi-chi, the kid, Tien and Chiaotzu and Yamcha and Krillin, Piccolo, Bulma -

Who is, extremely obviously, pregnant.

The first thing he thinks is, well maybe her kismesis, before he remembers that she and Yamcha aren't kismeses because humans don't have those. By the time he's done with that, his slightly more logical brain has counted time back, days and tendays, and months on Earth are shorter and of course when they say 'nine months' they must mean nine Earth months, so even the timeframe fits. She hasn't even noticed he's there, yet; she's talking with Kalit and Asni and Koll and Xiant. She looks up, unconcerned, when he approaches, and then hops up. "Vegeta! Finally!"

"Finally?" he asks. "Bulma, what are you - all of you - doing here?"

"Oh, I'm only staying a few days."

He tilts his head at Piccolo, who obglinginly answers the damned question. "We talked it through, and decided that even if this is your war, it's not only your war. You have the whole coalition, and it's against an evil empire."

"We came to help!" adds the kid.

He turns to Kakarot, who laughs in his stupid bleating Earth way. "I figure, any Klorflorian warrior coming at me with ki blasts is probably not someone who's just stuck in the middle."

"Wonderful," he says, and it is really. Having the super Saiyan fighting on their side is going to do more for morale than the entire successful campaign thus far, and that's without counting the effect of having the super Saiyan fighting on their side.

"And I brought some armor," adds Bulma. The best coalition scientists haven't been able to so much as scratch his armor, which means sampling it and reverse-engineering it is totally out of the question.

He gives up, and right there in front of everyone he walks forward and pulls Bulma into a kiss. This close he can smell it, that it's definitely his child. "Why didn't you tell me?" He's called her at least once every five days since his last home visit.

"I didn't want to worry you," says Bulma.

"Worry me," he says, like a child isn't a gift he'd thought lost and now returned beyond all hope. "Woman - "

"Chi-chi has been helping a lot." It at least explains Chi-chi's presence. She isn't really much of a fighter. "So! I'm just going to set up over there and start fitting armor. You should eat. We also brought some senzu beans, but I figure you'll want to save those for the actual battle."

"Yes," he says.

It actually works somewhat in their favor, that everyone and their kismesis wants to come gape at commander Vegeta's crew. They can and do, and when they do they get shoved into line to go get fitted for Bulma's armor. He, meanwhile, eats, and then pulls Piccolo and Tienshinhan over to join in the tactical planning and with the rest of his crew captains. That leaves the rest of them to get to - talk - with other crews. People are horrified to realize the kid is a halfbreed, up until they find out that Kakarot, the super Saiyan, is his father; then they're still horrified but more quietly. Comparatively, they're fine with finding out that the rest of his crew is some kind of alien or another, but then, anyone with a brain must have known that already. They don't show their fear, even for a moment, despite being vastly outnumbered by people who could defeat them in single combat with laughable ease. It's fine anyway, because his soldiers are more curious and interested than battle-hungry.

He has almost managed to relax back down to what he considers only 'properly paranoid' when his mother shows up, and he is instantly back on high alert. The rest of his crew notices too, and Piccolo offers a thread of psychic connection, which he takes gratefully and instantly uses to transfer everything he knows about how his mother fights to the rest of his crew.

"Okay," says the kid, out loud. "Now: why do you think we're going to have to fight your mother?"

"Well," says Queen Shard, thoughtfully, "I do need to make sure you're an acceptable crew for my son," and she's about to attack.

"Hold it!" shouts Chi-chi, and everyone - his crew, Queen Shard, Bulma, all the watching Saiyan warriors - turns to look at her, tiny and in bright clothing, stomping over to stand up to Shard's almost titanic proportions. "Not inside! I know there's a training ground around here someplace. Go do this there!"

Queen Shard smirks. "A sensible point."

There is a brief moment of chaos while everyone in the mess tries to head for the training ground, only to find Bulma has planted herself in front of the door. "Get. Back. In line," she orders. "Unless you don't want invincible armor for the battle. I'll send a drone fleet to go record the fight in full-surround 3D. You can watch it in real-time from here."

About half the warriors slink back into line, while the other half, already kitted out, head for the training ground. Obviously Bulma, who is still armoring everybody up, isn't going to fight. Everyone must notice that Chi-chi stays with her, but no one says a thing.

On the way, Piccolo provides an open channel. He knows how his mother will fight to a point, but she's a better tactician than he is. Piccolo and Tienshinhan dissect his information, and Chiaotzu and the kid reconstruct it, so by the time they're at the training grounds there is a plan of battle, complete with six different opens depending on who she goes for first. Or at least as complete as any battle plan ever gets before contact with the enemy. Queen Shard lines up across from them, except for Kakarot, because of the completely unstated but understood fact that a fight against a super Saiyan won't tell her what she needs to know.

She goes after the kid, because she's as prejudiced as everyone else. She clearly isn't expecting him to dodge around her, using her own momentum to his advantage and taking the opportunity to punch her twice before moving out of range. By that time Piccolo has gotten into range, and he's a much more obvious threat so she refocuses on him.

It takes more than a few minutes of battle to get to know a person, but getting the basic sense of a crew like that is usually doable. It's especially true with his crew, because when they're fighting as a group they stop being half a dozen people who know each other very well and almost become one composite person with multiple bodies, courtesy of Piccolo's telepathy. Kakarot - Goku! everyone else thinks at him almost reflexively - isn't participating in the battle per se, but he's in the gestalt, watching and analyzing and offering his conclusions to the rest of them.

They all decide that she's a good fighter, and better at tactics than Vegeta, but nothing they can't deal with. Krillin, Piccolo, and Chiaotzu simultaneously come up with lethal ways to beat her. A moment later, the irritated sense of the kid - I'm not that young - you're five - he's nine - offers a nonlethal plan, which he vetoes on grounds that he might need her to be able to pull oozaru tomorrow and tails grow back but not overnight. It's another half second before Krillin considers just lining up a lethal hit on her, which will probably get her to stop since this fight isn't about actually winning.

So they do that. It takes five minutes, but on the plus side, Piccolo's gotten better enough at it that he doesn't have to spend the entire time standing there like an enormous fucking target. Instead he cycles into the active part of the fight less often, while Chiaotzu starts popping off shields. He's figured out how to make them vampiric, even, which Queen Shard visibly reacts to by jumping back to get as far from him as possible. Then she targets Chiaotzu, which is . . . not ideal, but they can defend him and it mostly does get her attention off Piccolo until he's ready to fire.

The makankousappou passes one and a half centimeters under Queen Shard's left ear, and it's extremely obvious that he missed on purpose. Shard freezes in the middle of punching Tienshinhan. "That's a hit?" she asks.

"Lethal," he confirms, as the gestalt drops away.

She straightens up. "I see. How many ways did you come up with to beat me?

"Four," says Kakarot, in the tone that means he's come up with another two. "But we're not going to have to, I hope."

Queen Shard snorts. "If my son wanted a crown, he'd have one by now. No. I'm not stupid enough to make that attempt. Although," she adds, pointedly, mostly to him, "if he doesn't stop keeping me from fighting you I might have to beat him up."

"As if you could," he says. These days, he mostly does win against her, homesickness notwithstanding.

"Hm," she says. "Well? Aren't you going to introduce me?"

There isn't much else to be done. He introduces her to Krillin, Chiaotzu, Tienshinhan, Yamcha, Kakarot -

"Really? Kakarot who is the lost son of Bardock?"

"I go by Goku."

"You are my nephew," says Queen Shard. "Vegeta! Why didn't you tell me we had another living relative?"

"They're commoners."

"They are incapable of royal thought; but there is nothing common about the first warrior in twelve centuries to fulfill the legend."

He sighed. "And this is - " he stops. He hadn't really thought about what to call the kid, only what not to call him.

"You're my great-aunt, right?" asks the kid.

"I am?" says Queen Shard.

"He's my son, yes," says Kakarot, while Queen Shard's eyes widen. Saiyan numbers have never been large, and crossbreeding weakens the blood still further. Or so the orthodox thought goes. Vegeta is almost entirely sure that the orthodox thought is completely wrong in every possible way, but they don't need to have that discussion right now.

"Then you can call me Satoru," says - Satoru. It's more philosophical than any real Saiyan name, but he'll accept 'enlightenment.' It is light years better than 'cooked food.'

"Satoru," says Queen Shard, and looks to Piccolo.

"Piccolo," says Piccolo. " - Satoru and I are moirails."

"You're a Namekian," says Queen Shard flatly.

There is no point denying it, so he doesn't. "Yes."

"He's mine," says Satoru, in a tone made of steel and diamond, and Queen Shard looks at him again, startled. Satoru hides it, most of the time, and hides it well; but even the stupidest warrior only has to hit his core once before coming to the conclusion that waking that sleeping dragon isn't worth it. Queen Shard is far from stupid.

"The lungs know what they want, I suppose," says Queen Shard. "Vegeta, this can't possibly be your whole crew."

"It's all the ones who will fight with us," he says. "Except Bulma."

Queen Shard's eyes narrow dangerously. "The same Bulma who built your ship? The one who taught you your 'strategy'? The one you collect the junk for?"

Gods grant me patience, he thinks, with perhaps a bit of a wry push at Piccolo. Piccolo looks started, and then smiles a little. "My matesprit, Bulma."

"She's not even a fighter!"

" . . . if she'd been in charge of this war, we'd have won a year ago," he says.

Queen Shard stares at him, and then her image blurs. He has only a moment to figure out what happened - she's gone to go attack Bulma - before Kakarot resolves from a blur to a man, holding her. "No," he says. "You won't hurt any of my friends."

"I'm not stupid," hisses Queen Shard. "I want to talk to the girl."

"Just talk?" asked Yamcha. He's gotten over Bulma's choice, but he's never gotten over his protectiveness.

"I'm not stupid," repeats Queen Shard.

"She really isn't," says Satoru. "Dad, you remember what granddad was like, right?"

"Oh, is that all?" says Kakarot, although he doesn't let Queen Shard go. "Well, come on. I'm sure Bulma wants to meet you too."

Bulma blinks twice and says, "Your mother?" Then without waiting for an answer she turns to Queen Shard and says, "They way he was about keeping me from ever meeting you, I thought you were two hundred fifty centimeters tall and breathe fire, or something!" She holds out a hand. "Nice to meet you. I'm Bulma."

Queen Shard looks at the hand. "I've heard about you."

"Only good things, I hope," says Bulma.

"Not bad ones," allows Queen Shard. "Vegeta, what am I supposed to do?"

"You shake it. Gently."

Queen Shard, a little tentatively, takes Bulma's hand and shakes it a little, back and forth.

Bulma stifles her laugh by saying, "What do Saiyans do?"

"A handclasp," says Queen Shard. "For people you like. For people you don't, a punch."

"Of course," says Bulma. "You can all stop hovering, you know. I'm just going to fit her for some armor, since I haven't done that yet, and we're going to have a nice talk while I do."

"But - "

"Chi-chi can stay."

"Bulma - "

Bulma narrows her eyes. "Now," she says, and Kakarot goes, and once he does, everyone else has to. Bulma keeps glaring until they're just out of hearing range, then determinedly turns to Queen Shard and says something.

Chi-chi stands there and glares at anyone who tries to get any closer the whole time Bulma is - he didn't really pay attention before, but she seems to have brought a whole factory for making the stuff to each individual person's measurements. There's a screen, but Saiyans aren't squeamish so they've mostly just been stripping down to underwear right there in the mess. Queen Shard does, too, the scars of her life carved into her. Bulma says something that makes Queen Shard throw back her head and laugh, and somehow, Vegeta knows, it's going to be fine. He relaxes, almost against his will, and so do the others.

Once Queen Shard is in her new armor, doing stretches and punches and kicks to get a feel for how it moves with her, Bulma holds up a hand and waves them all over. "All right, I think that's it for the day. Where can we go?"

It is, on the face of it, a ridiculous question. There are dozens of ships, each one sized for a thirty to fifty man crew, and any of them would be palatial for the fewer-than-dozen of them. Except he's not stupid enough to try kicking any crew off heir own ship, and all the warriors would revolt if he tried. His ship is the one Bulma had built for him, with one bedroom and one bathroom and not much of a kitchen because most of the internal volume is circuitry or life support or argrav. They could all fit in there, he is pretty certain, but it wouldn't be much fun.

"Dude," says Yamcha. "We brought capsules. We just need someplace to deploy them."

"Capsules?" asks Queen Shard. As far as she's aware, Capsule 3 is the name of his ship, and also what he carries provisions in when he's travelling. The idea of multiple capsule-type ships . . . and she hasn't ever seen Earth-style capsules, either. He sighs. They're not going to get her to stop following them around, now that they've piqued her curiosity.

"Come along, then," he says, and leads them to one of the empty landing areas. The people of this planet - they call themselves Tause - had taken a look at the coalition-approved food requests, done some simple calculations, and prepared for an army ten times the size of the one he actually had. He'd been using the extra space to keep unfriendly crews away from one another, but it meant there was plenty of room for his crew to set up their camp.

The first buildings are a kitchen and a bathhouse, followed by several capsules that link up together to make one large building for sleeping in, in a U-shape, with the kitchen off one end and the baths off the other. There are rooms for everyone: Kakarot and Chi-chi, and right next to them, Satoru and Piccolo. On the other side of the open courtyard, he and Bulma are next to Tienshinhan and Chiaotzu. Yamcha and Krillin get the two smaller rooms on the short side. He idly wonders why Pu'ar didn't come, since while he's not a warrior he also doesn't take up much room and won't get in the way of a fight.

"Can I have a word with you?" says Queen Shard, sightly strangled, while everyone else is going inside and taking out the futons, and Chi-chi is taking over the kitchen. He looks over, and -

"Mother," he says, carefully, so as not to offend her, "would you like to spar?"

" . . . I would," says Queen Shard. "That is exactly what I would like."

So they walk back to the training grounds and get into a one-on-one ring and go at it for a while. She's here, far away from King Vegeta or Nappa or Ursard or any of the rest of her crew, and she's fighting in unfamiliar armor. Meanwhile his crew, or at least the useful part of his crew, has just decided to step up. Also his matesprit is pregnant. It's not even a contest, really.

"All right," he says, when he offers her a hand up. "Are you ready now?" Ready to talk without taking his head off, he means.

She goes over to the bucket of water and drinks a little and dumps the rest over her head before answering. When she turns back, Queen Shard has managed to harness some of her anger. "She's . . . weak. She's no warrior. She can't even punch someone!"

"I know for a fact that she can: I taught her how myself."

"That's my point!" Queen Shard is almost yelling now, working up to a really good screaming match. "You shouldn't waste yourself on - "

"I'm not wasting anything!" He pinches the bridge of his nose. "If she were in charge of this war, we'd have won it a year ago."

Queen Shard stops yelling, at least. "What?"

He shrugs, uncomfortable, and leans against the fence. He's had time and reason to consider this, and none of his conclusions have been . . . "There is strength, and there is strength. The strength of a warrior - even a warrior like Kakarot - isn't the same as the strength of a king." Getting royal princes wouldn't be anything like as difficult as it is, otherwise. "The strength of a king isn't the same as the strength of a mother." Queen Shard smirks at that; she carried two babies, who'd turned out to be Vegeta and Tarble, and most Saiyan queens don't get lucky enough to have two royal babies in a row. "The kind of strength Earth people have . . . it's not our kind, obviously. It took me a long time to even notice it exists. But it does, and just like weakness in one area doesn't mean weakness in another - Bulma chose a different kind of strength, and then chose to share it when she chose me."

"Mm," says Queen Shard, which means she doesn't want to believe him, but on the other hand, a Saiyan king wouldn't be winning this war. She would know: she is kismesisfasted to the king who definitively lost it. Instead of arguing it, she changes the topic slightly. "And it's obvious that she pities you as strongly as any woman ever pitied any man. Because you don't have her kind of strength?"

"Because I do," he says.

Queen Shard freezes up for an instant. Then she says, "Oh. I haven't accepted your abdication, you know. I know you don't want to, but can you imagine Tarble ever raising a banner against the empire?" He has to admit, he really can't. "The people need a leader, and you - you don't just unite the clades," she used the excessively ancient formal word, "you lead planets of other species into alliance with us! You're the best option we have, and you beat your father, fair and square, so you are the king."

"Mother!"

"If you can find a different Saiyan who's better for the job, you can hand the crown to them," she says, judiciously. "But you will have to come back before your father dies and claim the crown properly."

"Mother!"

"Or you can stand aside, and watch as our troublesome people destroy everything you've built, I suppose," says Queen Shard, softly, and . . .

She's right. He knows his people, and they won't keep the peace he's established, even though the food is better and the fights are better. Someone will do something to upset the people on one of the thousands of planets they defend, and get kicked off it, and the offense to Saiyan dignity will be enough to spark trouble unless he's around to keep them from being idiots.

She always was the better tactician, anyway.

He sighs. "Fine. Let me know when father's about the kick the bucket." Which won't be for years yet, if he's lucky. Father is stuck on Vegeta because Vegeta is here, and only an idiot puts both the king and heir in the same place during a war. "I'll come deal with it."

"Good boy," says Queen Shard, and, "Do you know how long they're staying? I'd like to get to . . . know them better." By which she means she wants to figure out what he sees in Bulma - in any of them.

Still. It's better than the alternative.

He spends most of the first night lying with his head pillowed on Bulma's belly, listening to her heartbeat and, beating syncopation to it, the baby's. "We could talk about names," says Bulma, idly, running a hand through his hair. "I was thinking maybe Trunks, but if it's traditional to name the firstborn Vegeta - "

"What if it's a girl?" he asks.

Bulma's hand pauses in his hair. "I had an ultrasound, Vegeta. He's a boy."

Of course. Because inventing things so they can look inside a pregnant woman without harming either mother or child is an extremely Earth thing to do. He's too busy feeling his heart constrict to really be thinking about that anyway. "Trunks," he says, trying for calm and failing.

"Really?"

"It's - one thing for me to have picked someone who isn't a Saiyan, but my people won't accept a half-breed as a prince. He'll be a defender of Earth. He should have an Earth name."

"Mm," says Bulma. "Trunks it is." She stops talking after that, and a few minutes later her hands stop in his hair as she falls asleep. He keeps on listening to the heartbeats.

Bulma picks up where she left off in the morning, making armor for his warriors. Queen Shard hangs out until Bulma shouts at her to find something useful to do, and then she ends up, somehow, in Chi-chi's kitchen instead. He doesn't learn this until lunch, when Satoru shows up to come fetch him and his mother is there, now sporting the most baffled expression he's ever seen on his proud and perfect mother. He at least gets it this time: Chi-chi isn't a slave, she is Kakarot's matesprit. He leans over and says, "As if she'd ever let anyone else feed us," and Queen Shard straightens up and gives her a compliment.

It isn't that he's unhappy that there wasn't any real shouting. He's just smart enough to know that it's not a good thing that it's going in the opposite direction, and his mother is making an effort with his crew. It means she's curious, and reserving judgement, and fairly soon she's going to want to see some proof that they really are worthy of him.

Everyone is weird about Satoru. After the initial trial of defeating the greatest warrior on one's first planet, children are sent home to training camps where adults don't have to think about them unless they're doing their corvee duty as trainers and babysitters. Enough of his men had been doing that when Frieza destroyed Vegeta, and then again when the wish had brought them back, to know that Satoru is light-years ahead of his full-blooded peers. He's obviously not a junior member of his crew, either. A couple of young fools try to bully him, which goes about as well as could be expected, but when his reaction is, 'yes, and?' everyone seems to get the message because they shut up about him being a half-breed. They still make comments about weakness, but he consistently wins in one-on-one combat, even against adults, so he knows that's just sore losers.

They start hanging around the capsule-house-courtyard instead, which is almost always occupied by someone in his crew training. After only a couple of days, a few fighters without as much ki power sidle over and ask Chiaotzu how to make a vampiric shield; he counters with an offer of how to make a shield, period, which results in the phenomenally strange sight of a bunch of Saiyans trying and mostly failing to learn meditation. It's not bad, and it might result in fighters with shields, so he supports it.

That's the day when Bulma finishes up with armoring everyone. Kakarot will take her back home in the morning, and he's feeling conflicted about it. On the one hand, she and baby Trunks will be safe on Earth, well away from any fighting. On the other, having her here - having all of them here - has soothed a part of him he doesn't get to favor much. Everyone else is staying, even Chi-chi although she plans to be in one of the medical ships, and Kakarot and Satoru are here, but being separate from quadrants is never fun. He cuddles up around her, which she allows until she gets too warm and kicks him away. She does reach out to hold a hand, though, so that's fine.

The attack comes as he's drifting in the space between drowsy-loved-awake and dreaming-loved-asleep. Piccolo is on watch because Piccolo is never not on watch, Namekians don't sleep so much as go into a meditative trance, and he feels the incoming ki because no one detects hiding ki like an empath. He broadcasts ALERT/DANGER/WARNING, not just at them, but the entire camp. Everyone is therefore awake and falling out of bed when the Klorflorians figure out their cover's blown and stop hiding their presences.

Bulma, who's not a ki fighter but did learn, right from the beginning, to sense ki instead of use a scouter, says, "Vegeta - "

"I know," he says, pulling his armor on. Piccolo offers them both contact, and he takes it immediately. Bulma takes it a little more slowly, presumably because he's never done this with her before and they're having connection issues. Then their crew settles into place within them.

Kakarot was already powering up even as he threw himself at the Klorflorians. It means there's going to be a big shiny target for them, but it also means the only one capable of evacuating Bulma to safety is busy. Piccolo has the rundown: twenty-five Klorflorian warriors, each individually less than half as strong as Frieza but an insurmountable challenge massed together like this. They're already turning to track the massive ki that is Kakarot, but others are focusing their attack on the Capsule 3. No kidding.

Klorflorians are so strong that they mostly fight alone, but if they fight together it's in groups of five, which they call a hand. If there are twenty-five of them, it'll be a hand of hands. The first thing to do is break up the hands, and then break those down into warriors. Kakarot can take one, and Rassik and Solamnei can each handle another. He's already running through his mental tally to see which crews are up to fighting the last two, and which he's going to have to sacrifice to distracting the other hands while they do. He avoids the last thought, which is that there aren't enough of them.

There's a very brief exchange that, in words, probably would've been something like, "I need to be angry right now, Mr. Piccolo," followed by Piccolo's assent, followed by Vegeta getting to see, from the inside, exactly what that dragon looks like when it finally wakes up. Maybe there are enough of them after all.

Then Chiaotzu gets outside and puts up a shield - a vampire shield - over the whole capsule courtyard house. Chi-chi has the senzu beans. Tienshinhan has an idea. It's the only real option so they're going to do it despite how objectively terrible it is in every other possible way.

Bulma has another, different plan. It'll take a few minutes, so they'll have to cover her in the meantime. Before any of them can object, she drops mostly out of the gestalt, enough so they can all still feel her but not much more. There's really no time to berate her about it, so instead they all turn to the battle.

The crew disperses through it, not really fighting. They don't move like Saiyans, fast and silent, and they're instantly recognizable. Each one grabs someone from a crew as needed, and gives out the assignments. Some of them seem grateful that there's a plan, but the others proceed to ignore the orders in favor of going after the nearest hand of Klorforians. They are, at least, an effective distraction, but they're not a distraction that's going to last very long if they won't take orders. Vegeta growls as he begins doing his own circuit of the camp.

The part of them that is Kakarot is having a great time, even though there's a full hand of Klorflorians on him. He's leading them well away from the camp, at least, so they only have twenty Klorflorians to deal with.

Right. Only.

Then suddenly there's a sense of triumph from the place where Bulma is still busy doing something else, and a heartbeat after that the scouters on every single enemy warrior don't just fritz out, but actively explode. It's only a small distraction, but against crews who know what they're doing, a small distraction is all they need. A shout goes up as one of the crews - Solamnei - gets first blood. It's short-lived, however; as soon as they do, another two warriors from the same hand are on them, and they have to break and scatter.

It takes Vegeta one circuit of the battlefield to get all the crews lined up and pointed in the right direction, but he also growls out the order that they're supposed to listen to his crew, too, which will hopefully solve that problem. Then he has to start dodging about: the real target here is the coalition commander. Chiaotzu sticks like glue, because with the amount of ki being thrown at him Chiaotzu can keep them both shielded forever. But being shielded isn't going to win this battle. A coordinated assault of a five hundred crews, maybe. They have a hundred and fifty -

So change the battle, thinks someone distinctly Kakarot-flavored. What can a crew do that a Klorflorian can't? Aside from coordinate wordlessly, of course, that's a given. There are six crews for each of them, which means that if they tag in and out properly, those six can hold them for a while. But they need more people who can reliably kill Klorflorians, and there are only three units on this battlefield. Those three will tire quickly.

Yamcha wants to know if it counts as victory if they don't beat the Klorforians strength-to-strength. The rest of them thinks, of course, because the thing that matters in battle is winning, not honor. Yamcha replies with a thought Vegeta had had during their team training session on the Lookout, enemies against Tienshinhan and Krillin, and the Klorflorians seem to have really good eyesight. The timing's going to have to be precise, but -

Krillin is already informing all of them who don't know it how to make a kienzan, just like Tienshinhan is telling them how to do taiyoken. Neither one is really difficult, and Piccolo knows how a little fine ki control can slim down the kienzan to an edge that can shear diamond. Satoru, who is ruthless like this, reminds everyone to cut on the vertical because Klorflorians can still do ki attacks as long as their brains are intact. Then they pick the targets who are most closely penned in, get the kienzan ready, and light up the battlefield with the taiyoken.

All of the attacks connect. Some of them connect, unfortunately, with Saiyan warriors. Six connect with Klorflorians also, five bisecting vertically. They're getting down to ground and moving before everyone else's vision clears enough to realize what just happened. The Saiyans raise a cheer. The Klorflorians, who are now down by a whole hand, get angry. A few of his warriors die.

Having thirty crews free to start attacking, though, means having thirty crews free to start attacking. They do, immediately, and the one who'd only lost his right arm is dead moments after that. The others are - destroying the ships, when not defending against Saiyans. Because without these ships, the invasion will have to be delayed by months while they get new ones. Sure, they've taken out a fifth of the attackers, but even twenty Klorflorian warriors is still an unbeatable force. Barring a miracle, the ships are a loss. Even super Saiyans can really only take Klorflorians down one at a time, and the only one of those they have is -

Okay, being fair, the crews are doing an admirable job getting in the way of that hand, which is allowing Kakarot to get in and deliver some pretty devastating blows before getting out again. They are weakening, and pretty soon they'll be in the range where ordinary warriors can take them down. It's just not happening faster than the Saiyan warriors are tiring, so by the time they win their allies won't be support for the next hand. If they had enough senzu beans, they could maybe win this.

Bulma is down there on the ground. Bulma, and Chi-chi, and Trunks who hasn't even yet been born. Vegeta knows the imperial forces will glass the surface as soon as there is no one left to stop them. They're just going to keep coming, for his people, for his crew, for him, and nothing short of changing the nature of reality will stop them.

So change the nature of reality, thinks - oh, fine. Goku.

He knows hate, which is the emotion that makes him crave the power to pin his cousin to a wall. (Ew, gross, think the rest of them.) He knows rage, which is the hot force driving them right now, Satoru's especially. He knows loathing, which is the way he felt when he decided to take the chance on killing Frieza. This is beyond that, simply a crystallizing understanding that for the future to be the way he wants, he has to start fucking up the laws of physics. It shouldn't be too hard. Bulma does it all the time.

With me, he requests, and Bulma pauses in what she's doing to grab him and show him, soul-to-soul, the place where the laws of physics break down and other laws take over.

He doesn't really shout; he's already as angry as it gets. He feels it first as a weird compression, as gravity in his vicinity goes haywire, and then a weird distortion in the way he sees things as light does as well. Last and least, electricity, the bonds holding electrons to their atomic nuclei, and he just floats there, crackling with it.

Then he turns to the nearest Klorflorian. How dare these pathetic assholes attack his ships? He punches them. His crews? He kicks them. His quadrants? He rips the limbs off one, gore splashing across his new armor, and at about this point the Klorflorians seem to have caught on to the fact that there are two legendary warriors on the field, but have no idea what to do about it.

Goku does, though. Goku knows a lot of two-man battle techniques that he couldn't use without a second man who is equally fast and strong and determined.

Almost done, thinks Bulma, mostly incongruously, even while Satoru thinks, oh. He can feel the child piggybacking on his understanding, but knowledge is the one gift he can give and give and still have when he's done, so that's not a problem. It's a distant concern anyway, now that he and Goku are making their way across the battlefield and maiming the Klorflorian forces as they go, although mostly it's just him on the maiming. Goku, after all, doesn't understand hate enough to ever really want to kill anyone. He has no such problem.

Neither do his fighters, and they're angry, too. The Klorflorian warriors, meanwhile, are so unused to being hurt in battle that, for the most part, a sudden major injury distracts them badly enough that, moments later, the existence of injuries doesn't matter at all. They're cheering now, his people, and with his usual dry wit Piccolo points out that he's never getting rid of the crown.

Fine, they think, all of them together, and then Bulma has finished and gives a very specific set of instructions, narrowly directed at Goku. Goku teleports off, getting the thing, and flies up, carrying it like a beacon, before turning to just - hover there. The Klorflorians pause, looking up as if to make sure that he really is going to just sit there like target, and then more than half of them break off.

The Saiyans immediately move to stop them, but - "Disengage!" they shout from eight throats at once, and his people don't understand but they do it. It's just the Klorflorians up there with Goku when he depresses the capsule and teleports away, so it's just them in the blast radius when a gap in the laws of physics meets and pair-annihilates with another gap in the laws of physics.

There isn't even a shower of debris.

The rest of the Klorflorians seem to notice that they're down to four, and begin trying to run. It's really pretty gratuitous, at that point, for Satoru to finish his climb and cross the line himself, but he does. The reaction from the Saiyan troops, when they realize that they don't have the super Saiyan on their side, or even both of them, but all three, is just a solid wall of noise. The first thought Satoru contributes to them, though, is: don't let them get away. Bulma and Tienshinhan and Piccolo all immediately echo it, so from then on it's a deadly serious game of tag.

There isn't really any question about the end result, though. The crews are good at blocking them too, and fear, like pain, is something the Klorflorians know nothing about. There's a small moment, when Satoru goes for his first kill and Piccolo, implacable like a star, refuses to let him; but then the boy acquiesces, and goes back to just hurling enemies back into the massed warriors below instead. By the time Vegeta gets to the last one, broken and bleeding, killing her is really just a formality. He does it anyway, because he knows his crew is squeamish about that kind of thing, and then he turns to his people - his people, safe and alive - and there's no reason to still be fucking up the laws of reality so he lets that go, too.

Queen Shard is the first one to kneel, but it ripples out from her, all of them going to their knees until the only ones standing are the ones in his head. "My king," she says, but she doesn't use the word 'king'; she says 'denkai,' the old word for the legendary warrior-king, the one who's supposed to lead them all to conquer paradise.

"No, I'm not," he says, and, "Get up. There's work to do."

There's work. Thankfully there had been Tause in range of Piccolo's alarm, who'd reported on the battle. The medics started preparing triage as soon as they knew, which means there are tanks ready for everyone who isn't outright dead. His warriors who'd lost fingers and limbs to the kienzan attacks are even having them reattached.

The losses aren't small, though. Every crew has lost someone. Kalit is dead, and Ruga, and Chuy. Two crews are gone entirely. They're still nothing like a direct attack by twenty-five Klorflorian warriors should have cost, and it's a loss the Saiyan army can take. The Klorflorians can't. Their I-Class warriors are mutants, one in a hundred million, with the imperial family the one that won the genetic lottery and got a stable mutation. Twenty-five was excessive, and now that they've won they've probably reduced the total size of the enemy army by one-fifth.

So they put together a huge funerary feast, and pyres for the dead. Basically all of the humans leave as soon as they start cutting out the organs, and Goku, but Satoru and Piccolo stay. So does Bulma, even though she looks green around the edges.

He leans over and says to her, "You don't have to stay."

"I'm okay. As long as no one expects me to eat anyone."

He snorts; their entire crew came out of it just fine. They don't have anyone to mourn and celebrate and take into their own being.

About halfway through, Queen Shard comes over and, after offering both of them a bow - subject to sovereign, because she's decided she isn't letting this thing go - she says to Bulma, "Queen, ah, Bulma. I'd like a word."

"Queen Bulma?" asks Bulma, and turns to give him a look of outrage.

He pinches the bridge of his nose. "Mother - "

"No, my son. My king. You may have not completed the rites, but that fools exactly nobody. You are the king, and this woman is your queen; she has a right to know the queen's secrets."

Bulma looks startled, but also curious. She leans forward. "I'm game."

"Not here," says Queen Shard, with an obvious glance at him. "These are things the king shouldn't know."

"How about the Capsule 3?"

So Bulma doesn't end up staying for the full feast after all, and after that all his people start calling her 'Queen Bulma.' They don't start calling him 'King Vegeta,' but only because he's made abundantly clear what happens to people who do. He can't, however, object to them calling his matesprit the queen, not now that his mother has publicly inducted her into that line. It's not even like he didn't want this outcome. It's just that it gives Dowager Queen Shard another opportunity to hammer her point home.

Chi-chi insists on also cremating their enemies, and he can't really disagree with the desire to get rid of the corpses so no genius can 'rebuild' them. Once all the fires finish burning down, he goes and makes a speech for the coalition, and another for his people, scattered throughout coalition space and camps like this one, preparing for the invasion. A few days later, the coalition officially decides to move the invasion forward, while the Klorflorians are still reeling with the massive loss to their forces and wondering if it isn't somehow propaganda.

Bulma is useless for that, so she comes to tell him she's going to have Kakarot take her home. He hugs her, and she hugs him back just a fiercely, his strong wife, and says, "You had better come home, mister." Then she's gone.

The Saiyan camp releases a collective sigh, because, well. Five crews had taken out a warrior on their own, before his crew had done their group attack. Goku and him between them had injured another few badly enough that they'd been killed without too much trouble. Four had been left for the forces afterwards. Bulma's bomb had gotten all the rest. She's not a fighter, his matesprit, and she is anything but weak.

People have stopped making half-breed comments, too. Of course, knowing that half-breeds are capable of going gold probably has something to do with it. As does Satoru's cheerful, "Oh, yeah. It's - well, I can see where the mindset is difficult for Saiyans, being so focused on individual strength. But it isn't for humans. They do it all the time. I bet you anything every human halfbreed hits super Saiyan before we hit puberty," when asked about the transformation. That's going to be a new headache later, of course, because when people start visiting to fight him and Goku they're also going to try to get human quadrants. He can already tell he's going to be the one stuck explaining that humans are only interested in one and a half quadrants, at the same time. Also somehow on the Earth end he's going to have to explain Saiyans to a global population that is broadly unaware of galactic civilization, what joy.

But he doesn't really have to think about that just now. He has an invasion to plan, after all, and an evil world-enslaving empire to destroy.

Chapter Text

He comes home on a rainy day in the middle of winter to find out that he missed the birth and there's a five-kilo bundle of screaming shit named Trunks to deal with. Trunks has blue eyes and purple hair and smells exactly like the crew member he met two years ago, the one who defeated Frieza and King Kold both within the space of about five minutes. It's nice to know that Bulma is eventually going to find entirely new and creative ways to fuck the laws of physics. Also that Satoru was right and he's going to become a legendary warrior before he becomes a teenager.

He tells Bulma immediately, of course. She tells him to learn how to change a diaper, hands him his son, and crawls into bed. Fortunately, Bulma's mother helps with teaching him diaper things and bottle things. Babies don't have enough stomach, so obviously they need to eat often and shit often. That makes sense. On Vegeta this would be a slave job, but this is the kind of slave job that, he thinks, falls under the 'we really shouldn't let our enemies do this' category. So he does it instead, feeding Trunks a little bit every hour or so, and lets Bulma catch up on sleep.

She does, almost an entire day. He sleeps in naps like Trunks, twenty or forty minutes at a time, and feeds him whenever he cries. After a while Truks seems to get the message, because he stops crying so much as making sort of hiccuping snuffling noises when he's hungry. It's a quiet day. He's never really quite seen the value of quiet, before. It isn't even so much the war; it's that the right way, the way that doesn't lead to another empire and war in a generation or two, involves a lot of time spent with people who aren't fighters.

He's on the tatami mats in the guest room, flat on his back, with his son cuddled gently up to his chest, when Bulma comes in and stops with a startled intake of breath. He looks up at her, but her expression is - soft and pitying, and he understands. "Are you feeling better?" he asks instead.

"Mm," says Bulma. "Chi-chi was a big help, and Piccolo does his best but apparently Namekians aren't ever actually babies. They hatch already ambulatory."

"Piccolo is here?"

"No, it's a weekend. It's actually pretty hilarious: everyone at his school thinks Piccolo is some kind of bodyguard and Gohan's one of the demon-king's people's children, and instead he's there to learn basic math and reading in kanji."

"But not during the weekend."

Bulma shrugs. "There's no school on weekends. Gohan trains with Goku instead. To tell you the truth I think he prefers school."

Of course he does. Satoru is much too smart to find punching things, even clever things like Goku, very exciting. "I see. I'm sorry I didn't make it back here in time."

Bulma says, "What you were doing is important. How're the coalition talks going?"

"We're calling it the Union now," he says, and, "Why is good government so difficult?"

"Because it's easier to not give a damn," says Bulma. He groans, even though he knows that this, too, is why she pities him. "Did you want me to take Trunks back yet?"

"No," he says. Trunks is theirs, both of them, but she's had months with him that he hasn't.

She smiles. "All right."

Trunks is extremely quiet: he doesn't kick or flail or cry, nothing like a full-blooded Saiyan baby. He just sleeps, or stares at the world with his unfocused blue gaze. It's good he is so peaceable, though: he hadn't been aware it was possible to be this tired, not in his body but in his soul. He just spends time horizontal on whatever surface is closest to Bulma, and hold Trunks. This would go faster with Satoru and Kakarot and everyone else, he knows. They'll come if he asks.

He doesn't ask.

A day later Satoru comes anyway, briefly in the morning and then again in the afternoon. Piccolo comes too, and they sit at the table in front of the couch and mess around with papers for a couple of hours before dinner. Dinner is from a capsule, but still contains enough food for Satoru and Bulma and Bulma's parents and him as well. He takes about two bites before recognizing it as Chi-chi's cooking, and then he digs in with gusto. Later, when he's feeling less empty, Satoru turns to him and says, "Welcome home, Mr. Vegeta."

There are a lot of other things he doesn't say, ash-love and mine and crew, that Vegeta hears anyway. But Kakarot isn't here, so he can safely pretend he doesn't. He grunts, then considers the opportunity to ask about Trunks. "Are human babies all so quiet?"

"For the first few months, yeah," says Satoru. "I can ask Mom, but I think I was pretty quiet after that, too."

"Momma's boy," jokes Piccolo.

"And tailless?"

"Uh. I wasn't," says Satoru.

"Really? What happened to it?"

"There was a full moon and I did some damage, so Mr. Piccolo cut it off." Which means he can, in theory, regrow it, if he needs the extra power boost. He is already a super Saiyan, though.

"That doesn't bother you?" he asks. He doesn't miss the too-intense feeling of someone touching his tail, exactly; he's just pretty sure it would feel different if it were Bulma. But he's a super Saiyan, too.

"What, my moirail pacifying me?" asks Satoru, which . . . is fair, if that's how he's going to think about it. "I have the sword around somewhere."

"What."

"I don't make matter out of nothing," says Piccolo. "And it was pretty obvious that a lot of his latent ki was wrapped up in the tail, so I turned it into a sword. He eventually got over needing it to control his ki."

"How does that even - swords are metal! Tails are flesh! How?!"

Piccolo shrugs and wiggles his green fingers. "Magic."

"See! This is what I'm talking about!" says Bulma, indignant.

"It's magic," says Piccolo. "And I'm kind of shit at doing spells still. Kami's the one you want to ask."

"I did! He told me to go do yoga and meditate a bunch!"

"Did you?"

"The yoga I did already. The meditating, no. I don't have the time or the patience."

"Well, there you go. Fighting isn't the only thing you can do with good ki control; but you're not going to get that control without practising."

" - Oh," says Bulma. "Huh."

Trunks takes that moment to make his I'm-hungry noise, so he hands the baby over to Bulma. She opens her blouse a bit to start feeding him.

"I guess Trunks just got lucky," muses Satoru, watching.

That's one way to think of it: the extremely alien, human way. "Lucky?"

"Tails are kind of a huge crutch, ki-wise. Aside from the obvious weakness."

"Besides which," adds Bulma, "giant ape is only okay when it's wilderness well away from anybody or your lunar orbit has one full moon every thirty years. It wouldn't be okay here, in a city, on a planet where we get a full moon every month."

" . . . no, I suppose not," he allows. Saiyans don't have cities, but on planets with both moons and large civilian populations, the solutions have had to get pretty inventive. Including, in one case, moving them all to the moon, once a month.

"So I'm just as happy we didn't have to do that to our infant son."

He has to agree.

Satoru and Piccolo stay in one of the guest rooms during the week so Satoru can go to school in the city. In return, Chi-chi apparently cooks a lot of meals and sends them capsule-packed. It's . . . good, having most of the people in his half-filled quadrants living with him. He gets less tired a lot more quickly, until that weekend, which is a Lookout weekend.

Everyone knew he was back already, on the basis of his ki if nothing else. What this means in practice is that Kakarot wants a one-on-one warm-up spar before they really get going. They don't really need to: they'd gotten enough fighting in, after he'd decided to stay at least until there weren't any Klorflorians left to fight. In a solo spar it's mostly going to be him and Kakarot ghosting one another until someone makes a mistake and someone else punches them. But it's the kind of low-stakes welcome back he expects from his cousin, and it's better than a party, so he accepts anyway.

This time, Kakarot makes the mistake first, so he's the one nursing a bloody nose when they both sit down to watch everyone else. Satoru has, unsurprisingly, improved again, even in the few months since they'd last seen each other, and Piccolo got better to match. Krillin and Yamcha are still in the same place, physically and ki-wise, but they've worked out new two-, three- and four-man strategies to help compensate. Tienshinhan and Chiaotzu have also not changed physically, but their ki is . . . very, disturbingly different.

"What the hell have you done to yourselves?" he asks.

"Told you he'd notice," says Chiaotzu, cheerfully throwing Tien under the bus.

"You'd have to be blind not to!"

"He's a jiang shi anyway," says Tien. "We just . . . once you can make a vampire shield and a spirit bomb, the next step is kind of completely obvious. We did ask Kami first, though, and Korin."

He stares. "Did you just say Chiaotzu is a vampire?"

"Jiang shi," says Chiaotzu, insistent.

"What's the difference?"

"One's a blood-stealing evil dead person, and the other is a person who's been restored to life through the generous donation of ki by loved ones," says Chiaotzu. "They didn't know about dragon balls."

He stares some more.

"So," says Tien, moving the conversation forward by main force, "we learned how to draw on ambient ki. It's kind of weird at first, but as long as we don't take too much, it doesn't hurt anything."

"But it's not yours," he says.

Tien shrugs. "Like I said. Kind of weird."

Chiaotzu says, "I can wrap a shield around someone now, and then it doesn't really matter how strong they are."

His eyes narrow almost without any input. "Show me."

The thing Chiaotzu produces is a nightmare, for anyone who depends as much on ki sense as he does, and throwing ki at it just makes it stronger. Satoru wanders over and says, "That's how you lose."

"Yes, thanks," he replies back coldly. It doesn't actively steal ki, but throwing anything at it - well, most Saiyans would go unconscious from ki depletion fairly quickly. He isn't most Saiyans; he's the crown prince, and he gets bored with enemies who come at him head-on and then go down with one punch.

So: the way to lose is to throw away ki. Obvious. Not throwing away ki doesn't mean victory, because he is still in a box. He can't kick or punch through it, and any kind of ki-assissed motion at all is limited by how far he can get before it saps the ki. He isn't immobile, though, and Chiaotzu is standing right over there . . .

It isn't that easy. He is pretty sure it was that easy when Satoru did this, but Chiaotzu learns from his mistakes so now he can move while holding the shield. With Tien guarding him, it takes more than a little bit of tricky maneuvering before he can line up a shot on Chiaotzu. But then the pebble, thrown with only a little more force than a human could manage and with no ki of its own, is more than enough to break his concentration, and thus the shield.

"Oww," says Chiaotzu, rubbing at the bruise on his forehead.

"It's just a bruise," he says.

"Gohan told me jokes," says Chiaotzu.

Of course he did. "I'm not Satoru." Then, as it occurs to him, "Good job. That'll work on most Saiyans. If you can do something so it's less obvious that you're doing it, and you're with us, our enemy won't even know who to attack."

"Yes," says Chiaotzu. "It's pretty hard, but I'm working on it."

He smirks. "Good."

They all line up to go against Mr. Popo, in which, as usual, Mr. Popo beats them within fifteen minutes. It's gratifying to know he was right, Mr. Popo was going easy on them, and irritating to know he still is. Granted, if he weren't going easy on them he'd kill them all and possibly shatter the entire planet by accident. Mr. Popo, after all, is nothing like a Saiyan; he's not going to beat them as often as he can to get a worthy opponent. He's going to beat them once a month like clockwork, for his own incomprehensible reasons.

"Mr. Popo," he says, and the abomination looks back. "There is room over here. And food."

Mr. Popo, among other things, doesn't have readable expressions. After moment, he turns around and walks back over and sits down, cross-legged. He reaches over for a cup of tea. "I was wondering if that was going to happen."

"What was?"

"Humans will bond with anything," says Mr. Popo. "Saiyans . . . will only bond with crew."

There's something there, he knows; Mr. Popo just told him something important, and isn't going to tell him anything else until he figures that out. He has no idea what it is. He has known Mr. Popo is his crew almost two full years now. Of course he was going to bond with his crew, they're his crew.

It's not even that uncommon, it turns out. Once it became common knowledge that Crown Prince Vegeta's entire crew, except the super Saiyan, are aliens or at best halfbreeds, a lot of crews had stopped hiding their aliens. But even then, most crews only had one or two, not the entire thing. No one had dared submit their halfbreeds to the planetary program, either, but they also exist. He'd only had to beat up a couple of assholes before it stopped being a gossip topic, except in the usual who's-in-whose quadrants. Everyone with an alien in their crew is bonded to them and violently protective anyway. That's what crew means.

"And who will you bond with?" asks Bulma, whose mind is much faster but goes in different directions.

"Mm," says Mr. Popo, which is not in any way an answer. None of them are brave enough to push it.

Later, Bulma says, "He did come sit with us, though."

"Hmm," he says. He's holding Trunks because Bulma is flying the plane. "Do we have any idea what he is?" Aside from terrifying.

"Species-wise? He looks like a djinn, but that's almost certainly because he wants to."

"Yes."

"I don't let it bother me. You and Korin are at least as weird." Which is an extremely human thing to say.

He does feel better, though, after time spent training. He's not worrying too much about these android things. He has a crew, and they took down a galactic empire, and they haven't slowed down on becoming more dangerous. Two opponents won't even rate. So he takes time, between his normal maintenance training routine (it wouldn't do to shirk, after all), to get to learn a bit about the Earth.

He tries learning about their epic cycles, only to learn that they aren't culturally uniform and have two-hundred-odd. Then he tries learning history and, for fuck's sake, they reproduce like rabbits and don't seem to have anything better to do that fight each other. With armies, because individuals aren't strong enough. The result is that they are very good at war. He knows enough, now, to know that the empire wasn't. It got by on overwhelming strength, not on strategy, and it toppled the first time it came up against a force that was just barely matched. At least to start.

He tries different cuisines, since they exist. Some he likes and some he doesn't. Fried plantains are amazing. Salmon is pretty good. Rice is comparatively bland. He listens to different music while using a punching bag, and some of it is even good. He holds Trunks a lot, enough to get to know his son's budding personality and for his son to get to know his scent. It is, overall, a nice few weeks.

Then the first crew - Lliae, because they still need the most work - arrives and settles into Earth orbit to wait for instructions from the ground and the entire planet freaks out.

"Why is everyone so worried?" he asks.

"Oh my god, you asshole!" shrieks Bulma, but she's half-laughing so he doesn't believe it.

"They think they're here to conquer the planet," explains Piccolo.

"All of them?" One Saiyan baby is what it would take.

"They're assuming aliens are more or less human, and since most humans don't even know about ki fighting - "

"Are we going to meet them?" asks Satoru.

"That was the plan. We need a remote wilderness that doesn't have ecology or geology that anyone cares about," he adds, looking to Piccolo, just as the phone starts ringing.

He has to tell Chiaotzu, Korin, Master Roshi, Chi-chi, and Yamcha that his people have just come for some training before the phone rings and it's not someone in his crew.

"Finally," says the person on the other end. "Does literally everyone you know call you when your husband's space friends show up?"

"Er," he says, trying to remember her name.

"Did you somehow forget that we're trying to keep the existence of aliens a secret, Mr. Briefs?" asks Walker without even a hitch.

"Why?" he asks.

"The entire planetary populace is panicking!"

"Yes, but just because you don't know about them doesn't mean they aren't out to get you," he says, then realizes how that sounds. "In general. It's better to have the panic now, when it's a false alarm, then real panic on top of a real invasion."

"It's a false alarm," says Walker, flatly.

"No one is here to invade. This is a friendly visit."

"Uh-huh. And what do your 'friendly visitors' plan to do here?"

"Get their asses beat, by me, in training. Then go home."

Walker sighed. "Well, this cat is well and truly out of the bag, so I'm sure you won't mind explaining this to the concerned citizens of Earth."

He does mind, actually, but Bulma ignores his protests and Piccolo outright laughs at him. He knows Walker can't do anything to hurt him, but she can probably make his life a lot more difficult. It's easier just to do this. He's done it the unfriendly way often enough; how bad can the friendly version be? "Call off the military," he says. "This will be easier without trigger-happy idiots."

"News?"

"News is good."

He directs the Lliae to go land in Piccolo's desert, and they fly out to meet them. They arrive well ahead of the reporters, because this place is remote to anything that might be of any value to anyone and Earth telemetry isn't that good. He's out and exchanging friendly greetings with the Lliae when Goku and Krillin arrive. Piccolo and Satoru came along with him and Bulma, and no one else is likely to find a training match with them fun, or . . . need a watcher. He's done with the greetings and has more or less explained the situation when the reporters show up all in a mob.

Then, hilariously, the reporters don't seem to know what to do until one intrepid or particularly foolhardy soul comes forward with a mic. He holds it in front of him almost like a shield, looking around like he's wondering where the exit is, and says, "Er. Mr. Alien - "

"Vegeta," he says, shortly.

"What?"

"It's his name," says Satoru, cheerfully. "You're Jimmy Cho, right? I liked that piece you did on the Myanmar War."

Cho looks flabbergasted to find a child here, and at ease amongst all the aliens. "Er. Who - who are you?"

"Son Gohan," says Satoru, patting his armor a bit. "I think I have some paper somewhere, can I get an autograph?"

"But - what about the aliens?"

"I don't think they want autographs," says Satoru, hilariously and deliberately missing the point. "They're really only here for Vegeta, and maybe my dad."

"Definitely your dad, kid," calls Lekk. "And you, if you're up for it."

Satoru makes a pained face. "No."

Lekk shrugs: like most Saiyans, he doesn't really get why the vast majority of the galactic population doesn't enjoy fighting. He can accept that Satoru falls into that category, barely, but that doesn't mean he isn't going to ask the scariest legendary warrior for a match whenever they meet.

Cho swallows and looks at Satoru. "What do they want with your dad?"

"Same thing they want with Vegeta. To lose to him in a fight."

"To - what? What?"

Satoru sighs. "Vegeta! I'm not auspiticising between you and the entire planet Earth; get your tailless butt over here and start talking."

On the one hand, it's an almost scandalous thing to say. On the other, he has a point. "I," he says, talking more to the camera than to Cho, "am Crown Prince Vegeta, of the Saiyan people. I married and found my family on Earth, so I moved here. But my people are still my people, my responsibility, so they're here to visit."

Cho blinks twice. "You're not here to - attack? Any of you?

"Why would I?" he asks, sarcastic. "If I wanted to rule a planet, I'd let my father retire already and inherit the throne. Meanwhile, this is home, and I'd be a piss-poor resident if I didn't defend my own home. Lliae squad here are all Saiyans; they'd defend Earth too, if I ordered them."

"Even if you didn't," says Lekk. "Defending planets is what Saiyans do."

It's only been 'what Saiyans do' for two years - three, in Earth years - but no one here needs to know that.

" . . . I am so confused," says Cho.

"I advise sitting down, at a safe distance, to watch," says Piccolo.

Cho double-takes hilariously and manages to stutter out, "D-d-d-demon King Piccolo!"

"Just Piccolo," says Piccolo. "Demon King Piccolo was my father."

"Ah? Are you here to . . . " he gestures toward the knot of Saiyans. Who have all just started flying away, taking their places for an 'ambush.' Along with Goku, who is their opponent because the Saiyan Crown Prince has some diplomacy to be doing. "Are they flying?"

"Looks like," says Piccolo, his usual dry humor.

"But - " Cho looks around, baffled. "But there are no cranes, no wires!"

"Hmm," agrees Piccolo.

"That's impossible," says Cho. "People can't fly!"

In response, he floats himself up about a meter, and says, "Really? Do tell."

"But - but - "

"We're not human," says Vegeta. "We don't play by human rules. Which do allow for ki powered flight, if any of you bothered to train your ki - what are you doing?"

Cho jumps back from where he'd been waving his arms around Vegeta's back. "Ch . . . ecking for wires?"

Vegeta snorts, and grabs his belt before jumping - "Ohgodohgodohgodohgod - " and hovering for a moment. Then he comes back down, slowly, and drops Cho onto the sand. Cho starts hugging it. "Really. It isn't hard."

"And I'd have caught you," says Satoru.

"You're just a kid!"

"Ki flying has nothing to do with actual weight," says Satoru, slowly, like he's explaining to an idiot, which he is.

"And Satoru is faster than me," he adds. "He'd have caught you."

Cho looks between the two of them, back and forth, and says, "You - you know each other?"

Satoru snickers. "He's family," he says, and points to when the light show is starting up. "That's my dad. He is Vegeta's first paternal cousin. We're pretty close as it is, and now I get to have a second cousin too!" He gestures over to Bulma.

Cho drops the mic. "Dr. Briefs?"

Bulma turns, and waves at him with the hand that isn't holding Trunks. "Hi, Jimmy. Isn't this a little outside of your usual beat?"

"A possibly hostile encounter with aliens?" says Cho, walking over to her with every sign of relief.

"Hostile?" says Bulma. "Lliae squad?"

"Well, uh," says Cho, and then, "Is that your baby?"

"That's right," says Bulma, holding Trunks up proudly. "Aren't you, Trunks? Yes you are!"

"Um. And Son Gohan's second cousin?"

"They're not mutually exclusive," says Bulma, still dandling Trunks. "He's both."

"But that means you - with - an alien!"

"An alien prince," says Bulma, voice going hard and sharp and queenly. "Also my husband. Vegeta covered this already."

"When did you get married?!"

"Not that it's any of your business," says Bulma, "but fourteen months ago."

Jimmy Cho is not stupid enough to keep questioning along that line. Instead he says, "How old is he?"

"Five months old tomorrow," says Bulma, voice deceptively relaxed.

Cho obviously does the calculations - five plus nine exactly equals fourteen - and visibly decides not to ask. "I see. Is he going to be a Saiyan prince too?"

"Depends on who he is, I suppose. He'll be good at fighting, but Gohan proves just because you're half-Saiyan and good at fighting doesn't mean you have to like it."

"I found the paper!" says Satoru with excellent comedic timing, blinking into the space beside Cho.

Cho jumps away, then registers it as the kid who promised to catch him if he'd fallen. He takes the offered pad and pen and signs it. While doing so, he looks Satoru up and down. "And how old are you?"

"Nine," says Satoru.

"So then - there have been aliens living on Earth for a decade?"

"A lot longer than that," says Piccolo, appearing on Cho's other side. "Trust me, I would know."

Cho jumps away from him too. Because he can't jump into either Bulma or Satoru, this means he jumps straight at the camera. The cameraman fumbles and little and they crash over in a tangle of limbs. Satoru just about falls over laughing.

"You did that on purpose," grouses Cho, while he and the cameraman disentangle themselves.

"It was funny," says Satoru.

Cho stares, and says, "Aliens play pranks?"

"Half-alien."

"Yes," says Piccolo. "And Son Goku. And me. Getting Vegeta to play a prank is almost impossible."

"It is an insult to the dignity of - "

"So we generally leave him out of the prank wars," finishes Piccolo as though he hadn't spoken. "Lliae squad is pretty good at pranks, though," he adds, as in the background half of Lliae is punted into a sand dune by a single attack from Goku.

"They . . . seem to be losing pretty badly. Should we go help them?"

"No," says Vegeta.

"My dad's much stronger than them. Saiyans get stronger when someone beats them, so they're always looking for opponents who can. They come all the way to Earth to lose to him," explains Satoru. "Or Vegeta."

"Vegeta is - that strong?"

"Stronger," he says.

Satoru rolls his eyes. "Weaker but smarter, so in a straight fight he wins more." Which . . . does explain things, he has to admit. Why it's so much harder for him to find a good opponent, than for any of the soldiers in his army. Why he's the weakest of the super Saiyans, full stop. He looks over to where Bulma is still holding Trunks. It's absurdly romantic, that this barrier is the reason she pities him, and suddenly it's more impossible than not to walk the few steps over and kiss them both.

"What happened to upholding the dignity of the Saiyan - "

"I'm not allowed to kiss my family?"

Bulma spends only a moment longer looking at him, then mentally shrugs and drops it. "So, Jimmy. Have any questions for our esteemed Saiyan prince, while Goku finishes off Lliae?"

That's about the time the whole mob of reporters, having decided it was safe to join in . . . join in. They have about a million questions. Where are Saiyans from? Planet Vegeta. Why did Vegeta come to Earth? He was looking for a way to defeat the evil galactic empire's forces. Did he find it? He found Bulma, and he found Goku, and he just got back two weeks ago from the war to depose said evil galactic empire. What empire?

So he spends the rest of the time, while Goku beats Lliae and they come staggering back over, explaining about the Klorflorian empire, and how he and an army of his people have been fighting more or less nonstop for the last three Earth years to bring it down. Jimmy looks over at the section of dessert where Goku and Lliae squad are still glassing huge strips of sand, and gulps. Vegeta continues on to say that, now the war is over, his people are moving into a peacekeeping role; space can get pretty wild, especially in less well-traveled regions. Earth is in a particularly backwater region, which means the threats this planet faces are going to be both more common and stronger than deep within Union space. He will, of course, protect his home, along with his cousin and their mutual ki fighter friends.

"This is really kind of unbelievable," says Cho, readjusting his glasses for the umpteenth time.

He shrugs. "The truth is the truth, whether or not you believe in it."

"And they're really just here to - train?"

"Well, we'd also like to meet some humans - "

"No."

" - but my prince doesn't want us to."

"Not yet," he growls. "The idea of aliens is too new; they're all going to be a little insane about it for a while. Once that settles down, then you can go out in public."

"Oh, right, this," says Bulma sweetly, directly to the cameras. "I'm sure all of you know about Capsule Corp security?" A few of them wince back. "Right. Those security systems were for civilians. I am married to the person who recently overthrew the rape-pillage-burn kind of galactic empire, so I redesigned them, from the ground up, to handle the kind of imperial loyalists that might come after him, me, or our son. They are not nice and nonlethal and suitable for civilians anymore. They won't cause anyone who is following the rules any trouble, of course."

Cho gulps and says, "I think I speak for us all when I say none of us were stupid enough after you put Mrs. Muromachi in traction."

"Good," says Bulma. "And before you try anything cute with the Son family, please remember that Goku is the single best martial artist in the galaxy, Chi-chi is the Ox King's daughter, Gohan takes after both of them, and Piccolo tends to hang out at their house as well. Am I understood?"

"Perfectly."

"Good! Glad we had this talk," says Bulma, utterly dropping her interest in the cameras.

All the little gods, she's amazing.

"My queen," says Lekk, giving Bulma a short bow. "We'd also defend you. How long until we can start spending time with humans, do you think?"

Bulma looks to Vegeta. "You can explain proper romance to them, if you like," he says sarcastically. "I was going to give them a month to get over aliens in general before explaining quadrants, but if you want - "

"On second thought, we're going back to the ship," says Lekk quickly, practically dragging his crew with.

"Aww, they aren't sticking around?" asks Goku, coming in for a landing.

He sighs. Of course he can't really blame Goku, not having been there for the entire previous discussion. "No."

"Oh."

"And neither are we," he adds to the flock of reporters. "Buzz off."

They don't, really. They back away a bit while Bulma pops a capsule, and - it's the Z-Capsule, which is a crew ship for their ridiculous crew. "I didn't know you'd finished this."

"It's spaceworthy," she says.

Spaceworthy is about all it is, being mostly a mess of wires on the inside. He holds Trunks because she has to pilot. "How bad was it?"

"Not too bad," she says. "You got all the important things in: Saiyans aren't here to attack Earth but might sometimes be here to defend it, you're living here with me because we're married, and there is a whole galaxy out there full of people who mostly don't care one way or the other about anyone here."

"That might not be true."

"Don't care about them, then. And that aliens have been living here on Earth peacefully for a long time now, without bothering most people. And that you are people, although mostly that was Gohan."

"Tch."

"So I think it will be fine."

What happens actually is that the Capsule Corp compound gains a semi-permanent watch in the form of one or two news vehicles which are always parked across the street. It's annoying, but not more annoying than, say, a Union constitutional meeting, so he ignores them. He doesn't go out that much anyway, because he's busy training. There's only so far a person can get just doing workouts, even at five hundred gravities, but Satoru is right: he needs a kismesis who is both strong and smart, and Earth can't really provide any more than Vegeta can.

They try following them to the Lookout the next week, but they don't have aircraft ready so they lose them before they've even left the city. He trains, with Goku and Tien and Chiaotzu and even Mr. Popo. They eat. He can't ever remember having been this settled before, this complete.

The week after that, the Ekum arrives, and the people of Earth . . . go slightly less nuts than they had the first time. They're still met at the desert by a whole pack of reporters, but this time he goes out to fight so he doesn't deal with them. He comes back to find out that Satoru is, standing in a circle of cameras and reporters while Piccolo stands off at a distance, probably to avoid the noise but also keeping watch.

"You know it's not your job to auspiticise between me and everyone on this planet, right?"

"I know," says Satoru, mildly, and makes absolutely no comment on how he is acting - jealous, like a jilted weakling, even though he is the one who - "I wasn't. I was trying to explain a bit about quadrants."

"That's not your job either," he says.

"I want people to know! I want a matesprit someday, and . . . and maybe a kismesis. I need them to know!"

"You're not getting a kismesis out of Earth," he says flatly. This planet doesn't have the stomach for them. Satoru is hands-down the strongest of the super Saiyans, although he will keep using Piccolo to prevent himself from using all his monstrous power.

" . . . eh," says Satoru, too polite to outright state Vegeta is wrong, and, "I don't want a rival who can thrash me physically."

Which is extremely alien and shows extreme self-awareness for a six-year-old and is therefore absolutely typical of Satoru.

He sighs, and turns to the cameras. "How far did you get?"

"I've just about gotten across the difference between a matesprit and a moirail," says Satoru.

"And this young child is in a relationship - a romantic relationship - with Demon King Piccolo!" cries out Cho. "Such a thing - it's immoral! Loli! Evil!"

He gives the man an unimpressed glare. "You do realize that Piccolo is only about four years older than Satoru? Earth years."

Blink. Blink.

"Namekians and Saiyans don't age the same way humans do, and Piccolo cheats."

"But - you mean - he's only thirteen?"

Vegeta says, "And Satoru is six regular years, but here on Earth he's nine."

"Almost ten!"

"You can't really go around judging things by appearances. Or Earth morals. You . . . don't want to see what Satoru's like when he doesn't have someone to restrain him. No Saiyan would ever step up. Piccolo did, and it works for both of them. That's all I care about, and it's all any Sayain will care about."

"So . . . who restrains you?" asks Cho.

"I don't have a moirail. Plenty of my people are willing to move to Earth, but there are not many who can deal with . . . "

"Royalty," says Satoru. "Vegeta's the heir, and his dad wants to retire. It's not the usual set of problems. A human would have to be a pretty good ki fighter to help with the Saiyan stuff. He's kind of stuck."

"Thank you," he says, acidly, but it isn't like it's untrue.

"What about a different kind of alien?" asks a woman reporter.

"A different - what, like a Klorflorian?"

"I don't think so," says Satoru. "They're kind of . . . " Self-righteous assholes. Even the ones like Chill, who'd been smart enough to surrender, only remain on good behavior out of fear. "But someone else, maybe. There are a lot of planets in the Union, aren't there?"

"There are," he says.

"So it's a good idea, although, personally, I think you do a good job controlling yourself all on your own."

It is a ridiculous thing to say of any Saiyan; but he'd had to, in the long years between Freiza destroying his planet, his people, his home, and Earth with its hope of restoring all of them. It is second nature now, for all he learned at the hands of a cruel and unforgiving warlord. He doesn't need a moirail. He doesn't need a kismesis either, not if Bulma is happily matespritfasted and willing to produce children until she gets an heir. He just wants them.

"I could be the conciliator," he suggests, just to be contrary.

Satoru manages to stifle most of his laughter, but a breath of it gets out. "So when's the next group coming?"

The next group arrives a fortnight later, after another crew Sunday on the Lookout. It's a kind of routine, alternative weeks between fighting his crew and fighting other people's crews, unless Goku thinks it's going to either be a very easy fight or a very hard one and shows up to do that for him instead. The regular people of Earth get over having aliens show up to fight on a regular basis.

Or rather, they get really invested in having aliens show up to fight, and there are never not five or six cameras recording while in a studio somewhere someone does live commentary. Bulma finds watching them hilarious, because naturally people who don't know anything about ki fighting don't know anything about ki fighting. He finds it useful: not the commentary, but the recordings themselves. He takes to watching them afterwards, to see if he could see things that he couldn't, in the moment. What he learns is that his people make a lot of a mistakes, getting by mostly on brute force, he makes a few, especially when pulling off fairly complicated plans, and Goku never makes any mistake more than once. Satoru, of course, doesn't fight.

Which makes him, belatedly, wonder why always shows up to these things. He'd explained quadrants, true, but now that is over. Vegeta can even begin to think about letting one of the - not weaker, but . . . gentler - crews come and visit Earth for longer than an afternoon. So why does he still bother to come, him and Piccolo both, and watch the fights but never participate?

He is distracted from asking, the next time around, by the arrival of a whole convoy of not-news trucks, including one playing music and one actual limo. The music truck plays a fanfare and shot of little confetti streamers, and out of the limo steps . . .

"Oh," says Satoru.

"Do I want to know?"

"Mr. Satan. He's hilarious!" says Satoru.

He crosses his arms.

More music plays as "Mr. Satan," walks up the red carpet and comes to a stop in front of him.

"Well?" he says.

"I, the great Mr. Satan, winner of the 24th World Martial Arts Tournament and strongest non-ki fighter on Earth, have come to become your student."

He looks at the fool, trying to decide if he's serious.

"It's true that I'm the strongest human on Earth - "

"Not even close," he says.

Mr. Satan stops, dumbstruck, then tries again. "I'm the strongest regular human on Earth! And I've dedicated my life to becoming Earth's strong protector! But since you Saiyans have come, I've realized that my strength isn't enough. So I decided to come over here and become your number one student!"

" . . . pass," he says.

"Mr. Satan," says Satoru, popping up on his other side, "Can I have your autograph?"

"Of course, little bo - wait. Aren't you Son Gohan?"

"That's right," says Satoru, holding up a pad and a pen.

"The mysterious son of Son Goku? A ki fighter at the tender age of nine?"

"Five," says Satoru, as Mr. Satan signs.

"What?"

"Mr. Piccolo started training me when I was five. We beat Vegeta when I was six."

"Er. That Vegeta?" he asks, pointing at Vegeta.

"Yeah! He came to Earth looking for a way to defeat the Klorflorian empire, but he didn't tell anyone that's what he was doing, so we thought he was here to invade. Well, you know what they say about making assumptions, right?"

Mr. Satan stares first at him, then Piccolo, then Vegeta, then back to Satoru.

"It was a really pointless battle. Anyway, thank you for the autograph," says Satoru, doing a little politeness-bow.

"W-wait. Kid!"

"Un?"

"Can you ask him to take me as an apprentice?"

"Why would he want you as an apprentice?" asks Satoru. "You're loud and rude and you're much too weak - he'd have to pull every single punch, and Prince Vegeta is a Saiyan. He won't remember to pull every punch. So he won't, because if he does, he'll accidentally kill you." This was said in Satoru's usual cheerful, matter-of-fact tone.

"B-but I'm the strongest man on Earth! I have the trophy to prove it!"

Satoru shakes his head. "Only because my family was off-planet, fighting a war against the Klorflorian empire, during the last tournament. Don't get me wrong, you're a good martial artist, and you won the trophy fairly. But you're not the strongest man on the planet, not even close, and you shouldn't be lying to people that you are." He paused, then added, "If you really do want to learn ki control, you should take up tai chi and meditation and read up on physiology a bit. Here, I'll even tell you some books to read. Most are wrong but a few get some things right."

Mr. Satan blinks a couple of times, as though he cannot believe what he is hearing. Then he draws himself up and says, "Meditate!? Tai chi!? I, the great Mr. Satan - "

Satoru moves too fast for the cameras, much less a normal human eye, to follow. He jabs Mr. Satan three times in quick succession, strikes that aren't intended to do any permanent damage but in the short-run completely block even Mr. Satan's weak human ki. He resolves back into human visibility just as Mr. Satan starts to slump, catches him and lowers him more gently to the sand. He says, "The paralysis will wear off in about half an hour. You should drink some water and fast for the rest of the day, and if you can you should also get a massage or a jacuzzi bath to get your ki recirculating. I'll write you that list now. Only come back once you've read the books and can move your own ki at least a little, and talk to me, not Cousin Vegeta."

Then he walks away to go sit down next to Piccolo, relaxing.

All the news people are staring. It's only natural; they hadn't known that Satoru was more than a child, and a ki fighter only in that he can demonstrably fly. Now they've seen him take down their greatest fighter with no fuss and no trouble. He is calmly sitting near Piccolo, who still worries them for some obscure reason. Then, almost as one, they all decide that asking him is a bad idea so they'll ask Vegeta instead.

"I told you already," he says, impatient. "You don't want to see what Satoru is like when he doesn't have someone pacifying him. That wasn't him getting angry: that was him getting annoyed, and making a point."

They look at Satoru again, at the still-paralyzed Mr. Satan, and then back at Vegeta. Finally Cho, who really is the brave one, gulps and says, "Then, prince Gohan - "

"He's not a prince," he interrupts, even though that isn't strictly speaking true. "He's a child who is too clever for his own damned good."

They - approve of that, he can tell. It doesn't make any sense, but then, humans never do.

"And," he adds, just to be sure they got the message, "he just saved the life of your great Mr. Satan. I wouldn't have left a body, much less a live one."

Later, he asks Bulma.

"Oh, well," she says. "You're the clan head, but you don't really act like one."

"I'm not the captain," he says. Their crew doesn't have a captain.

"Clan head. It's different. Anyway, they were worried because no one seems to discipline Gohan ever. Oh, I know he doesn't need it, and you know he doesn't need it, but - he looks younger than he is. They were worried, and now they know you do care for him, so they're not."

"Of course I care for him. He's mine."

"Just as you are ours." She smiles at him, a particular tilt to her head that means she wants -

"What about Trunks?" he asks automatically.

"Sleeping, and my mother agreed to watch him the rest of the day. No one will bother us. Come to bed."

He does.