Chapter Text
Bulma followed Iboc through the shifting house, hurrying to keep up.
“We were on Namek for…” Bulma considered. “...for a long time. Months.”
“I’m aware of the Emperor’s disastrous campaign there,” said Iboc.
“While we were there, my son became, uh, very fond of the Namekians.” They passed through various rooms and hallways, searching by hand. Bulma didn’t know what a mechanical sweep for energy felt like, but since she hadn’t felt one before, she had to accept that she had no way of knowing how periodic they were.
Iboc glanced at her, his expression distasteful. He muttered something about ‘lesser races’, but gestured for her to go on.
“He trained with them,” said Bulma, “and we lived at a temple with the son of one of the Clan leaders. It was a holy place, where precious artifacts were stored. My son was fascinated by it all, and he took part in some kind of religious ritual, with the Elders.”
That got Iboc’s attention. Of course it did. The hideous bastard probably got off on pillaging cultural relics. One of his eyeridges went up, barely noticeable.
“Afterwards,” Bulma lied, “he was able to sense Namekian artifacts. He was… I don’t know, attracted to them somehow. I didn’t notice it at first, and once Namek was destroyed, I thought it was over, but–"
“But, what?” Iboc loomed over her.
“Well,” said Bulma. “You said you house priceless relics on the estate here. If you have anything that’s Namekian in origin, he might have been, well, drawn to it. I want to find my son and I wouldn’t want anything to happen to your collection, of course, so that might be the place to start looking.”
Iboc was truly alien, in a way that Vegeta wasn’t, but she saw him doing the math on Gohan having another little rage fit in his museum or treasure vault or whatever it was. Concern, or whatever concern was to him, flashed across his features.
“Come with me,” he said, and he gestured.
The wall to their left slid apart into a hallway. Bulma watched the gears turning behind it and noted how it worked. It was fascinating artifice, and she wondered if it was a relic of the pre-Frieza empire, the Ulm, Vegeta had called them.
It took about thirty more seconds for Iboc to get frustrated with how slow she was with her injured leg and summon up an elevator, which folded itself into the edge of a landing.
“Hurry,” he hissed the world out.
Bulma tried not to look smug. If he was going to walk her to the Dragon Balls and give them up without a fight, good for him. She tried to tell herself that this was where Gohan had gone, that he'd grown frustrated with the endless waiting and talking and politics and gone to get the Dragon Balls himself. There was nothing else on this planet for him to run off in pursuit of, but the thought of his missing tail made her stomach clench. She still couldn't figure out why he’d hurt himself.
“Some of these artifacts are irreplaceable,” said Iboc, irritably. He was practically pushing her onto the elevator. “Many of the races who created them no longer exist.”
“Like Saiyans?” she asked.
“Please,” said Iboc, and his fingers clacked repeatedly against the buttons, as though that was going to make the elevator go faster. “I am a collector of wonders, and the Saiyan race never produced anything of relevance.”
“There’s Vegeta,” said Bulma.
“You think so?” Iboc regarded her, openly disgusted.
“Frieza probably thinks so,” said Bulma. “Actually, you know what? He probably doesn’t think about anything at all. Hard to do that without your head.”
There was no caustic retort or additional racist remarks. The elevator chimed. The doors slid open. Iboc gripped his robes in both hands and practically fled out. Bulma followed him.
Iboc was right about one thing, at least. He was a collector of wonders. Statues of deities guarded the marble walkway that led up to the main room of a museum-like vault. Some of them were gold and jade, others were stone, but so finely carved that they looked like they were ready to leap off their plinths.
They were mysterious and strange. A blacksmith with four arms, all blackstone ore and darkly colored tin. A motherly figure wearing the moon as a hair ornament. Something unidentifiable, most of its limbs broken off, but whatever it had looked like originally, it hadn’t been remotely close to humanoid. A hairless, sphinxlike cat that stood on its hind legs, like a man.
The gods of dead races, their expressions serene and accusing.
There was more. Weapons and scrolls and tapestries and jewelry. Porcelain vases and crystal amphoras. Predictions written down by great seers and the treatises of long-dead scholars. A temperature-controlled room full of rare plants that had a river-like fountain flowing through it.
“It looks intact,” said Iboc as he hurried through the rooms. He sounded relieved. “The Namekian items are through here.”
Bulma nodded and followed him.
He wasn’t lying. A damaged Namekian ship hung from the ceiling on cables. It looked even more ancient than the one Kami’s attendant had shown her, and that was hardly the whole of it. There were partially reconstructed houses, furniture, tools, even a working water elevator, like the ones she’d seen on Namek. Sacred things, ripped from a temple or an Elder’s dwelling. People’s personal belongings. It looked like they’d raided a settlement and carried everything away.
She was burying the lede, in the center of the room, a Dragon Ball sat on a low pillar. It rested in the center of a plush purple cushion to prevent it from rolling away. It was smaller than the ones on Earth, only slightly larger than a marble. Two stars. She could have closed her fist around it.
The other Dragon Ball was here too. It was too big for a pillar, and it was suspended in its display by an anti-gravity field. Five stars.
It was too big for anything, actually. She’d thought the Namekian Dragon Balls (though, come to think of it, they were all Namekian Dragon Balls, weren’t they?) were big and unwieldy, but this was on a whole different level. It had to be at least ten feet in diameter. A bit of quick math told her that it would barely fit through the loading door for cargo on the ship, assuming they could even carry it. Vegeta and Gohan were probably strong enough, but there was no way to grip it.
Bulma bit down on a scream of frustration.
They were from different sets. She had never even considered the possibility.
No Gohan either. He hadn’t come here.
f*ck.
*** *** ***
“Prince Vegeta–?”
“Shut up.”
“I thought we were searching for your son?”
“I said shut up.”
He sat crossed legged in front of the open storage space, his hands on his knees. It was difficult, he knew, to entirely conceal your energy - near impossible to make yourself totally invisible. Vegeta couldn’t do it, the best he could manage was suppressing it somewhat. The Earthlings had been far better at ki shaping, but still not perfect.
There had to be some way to find the boy. A thread to grab, a tether of energy to latch onto.
Kakarot could have done it.
Urgh. Why was he still comparing himself to Kakarot?
He was the Legendary Super Saiyan. Kakarot didn't matter at all. He didn't have to–
Keep it together.
Vegeta took a breath, tried to steady himself. He could feel a miasma of miserable energy, the Azu’s slaves, he knew. Brighter points of power, sharper and better defined. House guards. They didn’t stand a chance against him, but he worried about the boy. He could hear the house turning and configuring. He was anxious that Iboc and the woman had gone off alone together. He couldn’t concentrate. His head felt crowded.
He didn’t have a plan for this. He hadn’t intended to be alive right now. He didn’t want to deal with the trouble of feeling things about the woman and Kakarot’s son.
He wanted to take them someplace safe, and just be still for a moment so he could think about how he felt and what to do, but there wasn’t going to be a safe place unless he made one for them.
…that and he’d gone and lost Kakarot’s brat.
You f*cking idiot, Vegeta lectured himself. When he’d been a child, Nappa and Raditz had kept better watch over him and Raditz had been a child himself. He knew better than to go to sleep when you were surrounded by enemies, and there were dozens of times that he’d been awake longer in the field.
It had been the woman, though he knew it was idiotic to blame her. She had said he could touch her and he’d been so desperate to do it that he’d let his guard down. It was just a transaction, she’d been clear about that. He was never going to be anything to her other than an enemy, but he’d wanted to pretend, just for a few minutes. Imagine that all of this was over and that she was his and they were together in a place that belonged to them and that–
Stop, Vegeta ordered himself. What the hell is wrong with you? Just focus.
He cast his senses out as far as he could, but still felt nothing. It was pointless.
Being the Legendary Super Saiyan was pointless, actually. Even if he could transform at will, where did that get him? All it allowed him to do was swing his fist harder. It wasn’t going to help him find the boy. He would have traded it away in a second for Kakarot’s talent at sensing energy. At least that would let him help the people he cared about-
Vegeta winced.
…as if that thought wasn’t a monstrous betrayal of his race.
His father would have lost his mind if he’d seen his son fretting like this over another man’s half-breed bastard. He would have–
It didn’t matter, Vegeta realized. His father wouldn’t have done anything. He was dead. He only existed in the past. The Prince took a deep breath, held it, let it out.
He thought of Nappa instead. His bodyguard’s auras had been matte white and unremarkable. Nothing to them. With Nappa, what you saw was what you got, but Vegeta couldn’t remember a time when they had been apart. He had stood inside Nappa’s auras for his entire life, and at some point he had stopped feeling them and they had simply existed as background noise. He’d been sensing energy long before he’d known it was possible to sense energy.
It was difficult to call to mind something he didn’t remember doing, but Vegeta had never shied away from difficult things before. He modeled it exactly in his mind, the blunt crackle of Nappa’s auras. The way they’d looked when they were ignited. The constant presence of them, since before he’d even been born. The contrasting absence of them now.
You f*cking murderer.
No, that wasn’t helping.
Namek, now. How it had felt. The taste of the air and sound of the water. The blues and purples of its energy. The way water flowed down into its oceans. The green sky. The way the sunlight had filtered through it, indistinct and buttery, like the atmosphere was a canopy full of leaves. Kakarot’s son didn’t have Saiyan auras.
Purple. That was the right color, and they felt like water. Not destructive, like Saiyan auras were.
… do you think we could learn to heal people?
Vegeta was fairly certain the boy would grow to be strong enough to do whatever he wanted.
You’re jealous.
He was.
Jealous that Gohan’s father had at least had the courage to die rather than let Frieza take him. Jealous that that boy had been loved and cared for his whole life. Jealous that he’d been surrounded by people who had nothing better to do than coddle him, shower him with affection, nurse every little cut and bruise and bad feeling–
Vegeta let it wash over him, held the thoughts in his head, acknowledged they were real, then let them go. As they passed, it felt as though his perception expanded. Instead of the hazy gray cloud of negative emotions, he could see individual auras. The sticky tar-black of grief, the pointed reds of anger, the brittle yellows of fear.
There was the vaguest sensation that Kakarot was holding his hand, their fingers linked together, and then it vanished.
Jone, the assistant, was saying something, but she seemed very far away.
He saw it, closer than he’d thought, a drop of cool water in the magma sea of negative emotions that permeated this place. Relief washed over him. Kakarot’s brat was alive.
“Prince Vegeta?” Iboc’s assistant was still here. Wonderful.
“Not now.”
“It’s only that your wife previously mentioned needing some items from her home planet,” said Jone. “We have your ship here. Perhaps your son was in need of them as well, and he went to retrieve them.”
“He’s not on the ship,” said Vegeta, wondering if she was actually trying to be helpful.
Probably not. All that mattered to her was his promise that he wouldn’t interfere with their business if he was Emperor. At least she was honest. He shoved himself to his feet.
“With all due respect, how can you possibly know that–?”
“I don’t have time to explain myself to you,” said Vegeta. He pointed. “He’s in that direction. Open the way or I’ll do it myself.”
She looked concerned, but she gestured. The house reconfigured, a hallway opened.
*** *** ***
The slave quarters here were better organized than the ones on the planets run by Frieza’s officers, and a far cry from the ubiquitous slums that sprang up in the lower decks of the orbital stations.
That it was slightly nicer didn’t matter. It felt awful. Being able to feel it felt awful. Vegeta tried to ignore the sensation, but whatever it was that he’d managed to wrench open inside himself couldn't be closed. It felt like being in his pod, caught in the tiniest gap of safety, with the crushing blackness of the Void all around him. There were so many others, and their energy pressed in close.
For f*ck’s sake, had Kakarot just walked around like this? All the time?
Vegeta supposed he had, and if Kakarot could do it then so could he.
“How could your son have gotten through to here?” Jone asked, as they passed through the alley-like spaces between the dwellings. “We’re outside the main estate.”
“He’s a Saiyan,” said Vegeta, curtly. “Don’t underestimate him.”
The people in the slave quarters were scared of him, Vegeta realized. Some of them knew who he was, some of them had seen him before–
Of course they’d seen him before.
Vegeta ignored it, and he kept walking, following the boy’s energy. He stopped and pointed at a cluster of buildings behind an arch.
“In here,” he said.
“Ah,” said Jone. “Iboc keeps the Namekians here.”
Vegeta cursed himself for not just asking about that in the first place. Of course they had to have encountered Namekians somewhere. They had a pair of Dragon Balls, after all. He strode under the arch and looked around, and although he could sense their presence, none of them came out. This close, the boy’s energy shone brighter. Radiant and more dynamic somehow.
Even as he tried to figure out what to say, Jone’s voice trilled out.
“Gohan! Your father is here! Don’t make me punish whoever’s hiding you!”
A door opened somewhere above them. Vegeta glanced up as he heard footsteps.
The boy came to the railing that framed in one of the upper levels, awkwardly climbed over it (no surprise there, it was probably difficult to walk without his tail), and flew down. He looked hurt, something beyond the obvious physical injury. His dark eyes were accusing. Plenty of people had looked at Vegeta like that, but he had never cared before.
“You sold these people to the Azu.” The words were out of the boy’s mouth before Vegeta could scold him for running off.
There was some part of Vegeta that wanted to protest. To point out that he hadn't flown around capturing people and clapping them into chains personally, but that was just deflection, wasn’t it? He had surely gone to their planet and killed everyone capable of defending it. Called the fleet to come down and process whatever was left. Caught a beating if he’d been too slow at doing either of those things. He didn't even remember doing it, couldn't have named any of the individual planets. It all ran together in his head, an ugly smear of memories.
There was another part of Vegeta that wanted to slap the sh*t out of Kakarot’s son for even making that accusation, because what right did he have? He’d grown up clinging to his mother’s skirts, sheltered from every bad thing. He had no idea.
…and he’d cut off his tail because he didn’t want these people to know he was a Saiyan.
Vegeta bristled, furious. He was going to–
No, he thought. Stop. None of this is the boy's fault.
“I did, Vegeta confessed. He went to the boy and knelt down, so they were at eye level, took him by the shoulders. “We’ll talk about it later. You can’t run off like this. The woman was hysterical.”
“How did you find me?” the boy asked.
“I can sense energy, remember?” Vegeta stood up. “Come along.”
The boy didn’t move. He shook his head. “You have to help these people,” he said. “We have to take them with us.”
“Listen to me–”
“I already told them we were going to help,” said the boy. He gripped the leg of Vegeta’s bodyglove and tried to shake him. “I had to cut my tail off to get them to listen. Please, Vegeta, we can’t leave them in this horrible place.”
This wasn’t even close to the most horrible place he could have left them in, but it wasn’t the time to debate that with a toddler. Vegeta could feel energy moving, and he caught glimpses of the Namekians peering at them through slatted windows and shadowed doorways. They were emaciated and strange, a pale yellow-green, their veins oddly prominent. They didn’t look like the ones from Namek or like Kakarot’s ally at all, more like withered plants than warrior-sorcerors. Vegeta admitted he didn’t fully understand their physiology, but he was fairly certain they were being deprived of something essential, like sunlight or water.
Jone, the attendant, had been standing to one side, emotionless and disconnected, but she sharpened up at the mere suggestion that someone was going to cut into her profit margins.
You know what? f*ck her.
“I’m taking the Namekians too,” said Vegeta. The brat hugged his leg, tiny fingers dug in.
“Where?” asked Jone, coolly. “It’s not like you have anything, Vegeta–”
He sensed something at a great distance. A flicker of energy, blunt and darkly red.
“–and furthermore–”
Bonyu? There was hardly anyone else in the Frieza Force he would have known well enough to sense. Jone’s fingers pointed as she lectured, something about an alliance.
“–don’t even own any land–”
Gods, was Bonyu in high orbit? What was the f*cking range Kakarot had been able to sense energy at? No wonder he'd seemed like a distracted idiot half the time.
Wait. Hold on. There was absolutely no reason to be anchored at high orbit, unless they were–
“They’re up there!” Vegeta said. He seized the boy and picked him up. Gohan flailed, confused.
“I–” Jone blinked. “What?”
“High orbit,” said Vegeta. “They’re launching warheads–!”
It would have been pointless to run, so he covered the boy’s head with his hand, felt something inside himself that hadn’t been there before, the hard gold edge of a power that words would have been inadequate to describe. He grabbed for it as he ignited his auras in a flare of blue-gold light. Jone was doing something enormously complex, additional arms extended from beneath her robes, casting some kind of spell.
It was the last thing Vegeta recalled before the world exploded around them.
