DISCLAIMER: I DON’T OWN DBZ OR ANY CHARACTER OF THE SAME. I’M NOT RECEIVING ANY MONEY FROM THE WRITING OF THIS PIECE OF FAN FICTION.

WARNING: ALL YE UNDER 18 GO AWAY NOW! This fic contains violence, adult themes, sex, and profanity. It is not my usual romantic drama/adventure, and has some very dark, disturbing imagery and themes related to rape. If this is not your thing, don’t read it.

FORWARD: This is a WHAT IF scenario that Toshiba and I discussed initially, and from those conversations grew this dark, dark story. I've been accused, on occasion, of having a very evil imagination. I may have outdone myself here. For all those who enjoy the often-used theme of "Bulma is taken to Vegita-sei as a slave and catches the eye of the Saiyan no Ouji", here's my version of the tale.

The faces of the Royal Councilors were carefully expressionless as they watched him slowly take a seat on his father's right hand, hiding the fact that they had just seen him stumble and nearly fall, trying to mask their knowledge of his shame, his defeat. He fought to keep his hands and body from trembling with rage and humiliation, knowing they would see it and think he was on the point of collapse. They needn't have bothered with this discreet foolery. They knew what every sentient being in the Empire knew.

He had been defeated in battle, in single combat. Jeiyce of Maiyosh had beaten him like an animal within an inch of his life, and worse, left him alive out of contempt. The day had been lost, his soldiers decimated. His first lieutenant slain...

His gut twisted again at as the image of Nappa falling from the sky, impaled by Jeiyce's Ki bolt, dead before his great body struck the ground. That knowledge, the stark finality of it, had been slow to sink in as he had lain weak and too injured to rise. The big man was gone. The sure, rock-steady presence that had been a constant in his life since---since well before his own birth, was missing. And the absence could not be shouted down, threatened, blasted away or ever taken back. Irrevocable. His father's eyes, sharp and all seeing, watched his son's gaze fall on the empty Councilor's chair Nappa would have occupied.

"Nappa's body has lain in med-stasis while you were recovering, boy. He was your faithful servant, and would have wished you to build his pyre."

Vegita nodded silently, his face like stone. "I will see to him this evening. Atop Cho-Tal mountain."

The other members of Council murmured in approval. A warrior who died in defense of the Royal House should be burned atop that speared peak reserved for Kings and heroes of Vegita-sei. Ottoussama broke the solemn-faced silence that followed, his own face growing hard.

"We are arresting every Maiyosh-jin that is to be found within the breadth of the Empire, and bringing them to Vegita-sei. They will be thoroughly questioned by the Minister of Intelligence." His eyes turned to the pockmarked, mottled face of Mousrom. The Inquisitor nodded with a kind of ugly eagerness that set Vegita's teeth on edge. Only the basest manner of coward gleaned pleasure from torturing a bound enemy. Mousrom was terribly efficient at what he did, and his intricate network of spies and informants hidden throughout the Empire was a thing of beauty. Systematic torture of non-combatants was an ugly means to an end, and grim necessity. But there was no honor in it, or in the torturer himself.

"We have rounded up twenty thousand of them from Arbatsu already," Mousrom said with an unpleasant grin. "There was a sizable community nestled within the cities of the Arbatsu natives. To this number, I have also added the entirety of the Maiyoshi-jin courtesan whores who were under contract to the Throne and other noble houses on Vegita-sei itself. You may be sure, Ou-sama, that if one of them has one scrap of information as to the whereabouts of the Red Prince and his followers, I will wring the truth from them."

"I have no doubt," his father murmured. The King's face showed no hint of distaste for the man, but Vegita had the sudden impression that his father had a roiling contempt for the Inquisitor that rivaled his own.

"The Red Prince will find us soon enough," Vegita said, thinking of his woman's eyes as she had given his this insight, burning with intelligence like a blue flame. "He will seek us out. He told me what he plans, what he most desires, as we fought," the last words tapered down into a soft snarl of hatred. "Lord Corsaris fostered him from infancy. The planet Corsaris was where he made his base and quartered his mate and his son. When we took that world eighteen months past, we slew his woman, his foster father, his heir, and put the world he knew as home to the torch. He means to repay Vegita-sei for these losses. And you personally, Ottoussama, for the death of his son, by slaying me in combat."

His father's face had gone black with rage, perhaps thinking of how very, very close Jeiyce had come to doing just that. "He will find us. And when he does, I shall be ready or him! If I must break my own bones and train to the point of death each day from this day until we meet again, I will! And the next time, Ottoussama, I will rip him limb from limb!" A low rumble of agreement rolled through the chamber, and his father studied him with grim pride.

The next hour consisted of Turna bringing forth a list of possible retaliation targets, worlds thought to have had dealings with the Maiyosh-jin rebels in the past. Turna droned on, weighing and measuring the losses in revenue against the potential strategic threat each world might pose if it became a hive of rebellion. Vegita felt his mind begin to wonder after a while, and he began to wonder idly what his woman was doing this moment at Med Center. Today was her first day apprenticing under Scopa, and

she---Mousrom's wheedling voice snapped his attention back to the here and now.

"...but Med Center here in the Capital would be the most convenient location to set up a mass interrogation facility. We could make use of the personnel who labor there in keeping the subjects alive much longer if we---"

"Med Center," Vegita said flatly, before his father could answer, "is a haven where our unborn warriors grow to viability, and where we heal our wounded. It would be an insult to the blood our soldiers shed to use the same facility as a torturer's hovel!"

Mousrom's marred, fat face paled, his lips going thin with anger. He turned a questioning eye to the King's chair, but found no support there.

"The boy speaks the truth," Otoussama said shortly. "Do your business in the old slave pens in Kharda City to the north. They have a full, if outdated, med lab there."

Mousrom nodded obediently, but his eyes had shrunk to twin slits in submerged anger, though he dared not to so much as turn his gaze in Vegita's direction.

Another hour of decision making, while Vegita sat in silent, seething contemplation of all the things he would do to Jeiyce when he and the Red Prince came to grips once again. As the Councilors filed out of the great circular chamber, Vegita did not move from his chair. His father eyed him silently for a moment before speaking.

"Mousrom will not forget that, boy."

"Good," Vegita said irritably. "His behavior borders on insolence at its best. He is an insult to all true warriors, and I will kill him gladly if ever he speaks out of turn."

"He is my Minister of Intelligence, boy. He knows every secret in the Empire. Mine included." His father frowned. "Knowledge is great power in the right hands. He will find a way, sooner or later, to repay you for such a heavy-handed slight."

Vegita frowned himself, this time in genuine curiosity. "If he is so dangerous, why do you not kill him?"

His father grunted. "He is very, very useful. He has given me information on more than one occasion that has saved the Empire the trouble of putting down a full-scale rebellion. And thus, saved the lives of many Saiyans warriors. It is a game we play, he and I. He knows his life will end the day I suspect him of disloyalty, or the instant he ceases to be of great use to the Throne. And thus, he is carefully loyal, and very motivated to always be of use. And we will need him in this war we are about to fight."

Vegita's eyes narrowed angrily. "He gives you a full account of my private business, does he not, Ottousama?"

Ottoussama's lips curled minutely on the end. "You are thinking of that business with Raditz last year? Yes." The almost smile slid away to be replaced by a warning look. "Your business is mine, boy. I've invested nearly a quarter of a century in you, and occasionally, you show great promise. I would have been very annoyed to have to begin the tiresome business of raising another heir to manhood again. So, I keep close tabs on you through Mousrom." His father paused thoughtfully, before going on. "And as we are speaking of the business with Raditz...I have seen with my own eyes now just how handsomely you profited from the man's death. The prize you stole from Bardock's son is a dangerous one, boy. Tell me...has it occurred to you yet that you wish her to look upon you with complete devotion? To stay as yours of her own will, even should you set her free?"

Vegita stared at him in such open-mouthed shock that the King chuckled outright. "On the fifteenth anniversary of my birth," his father went on. "My father gifted me with the contract of a free red-haired Zapria-jin courtesan. She was a very beautiful and crafty woman, wise in the ways of politics and power.

In the year she spent in my bed, she instructed me as much in the psychology of ruling over men's minds and hearts as she did in the arts of bed play. And because I was an heir to a throne who might not wed where he chose, and must hold his affections in trust for a future queen, she also taught me which manner of woman to take as my mistress...and which sort of avoid. One lesson she emphasized in particular was how to spot an 'unbreakable'. That is what she called this sort of woman. You may bind her, chain her, over-power her, crush her body or kill her. In time, you may force her to do to your will...but only on the surface. But whatever you do to her, she will always remain essentially as she was on the first day she came into your possession. She will never bend or break to your will. Like the women of our own race, she cannot be tamed. But she can be won."

"Yes," Vegita murmured with a smile. "You see the thrill of such a challenge, then."

"I see the danger she represents to you, boy," his father said flatly. "Because by the time the idea of winning her true heart occurs to you, it has already become unclear who is the master and who is the slave. And should you succeed in this fool's errand, should you win her adoration, you will find that she has ensnared your heart as well. For all of your life, most likely. And whether you cast her off in the end, or put her down, she will haunt you til your dying breath."

Vegita snorted indignantly. What kind of weak-willed fool did his father take him for? "What would you do with such a woman, Ottoussama?"

"I would not have taken her to my bed in the first place. But, having done so already...I would kill her. With my own hands. You may still dream of her all your days, but at least she will gain no greater power over you." He studied the carefully blank expression on his son's face.

"She has no power over me!" Vegita said as sharply as he dared. But deep within him, an internal grain of doubt began to fester, as he thought of his sudden over-whelming desire to know her, the real woman, not the doll he had trained to mere obedience, and his inexplicable desire to win her heart. He could not even explain where the need had come from, when the whim of a new game, the challenge of one last scrap of her will to be conquered, had shifted to this bone-deep want to see her will unchecked...and have her want him still, adore him still. But...no! His father's concerns were errant foolishness. He was the master and she the slave, and so it would always be!

"I will be rid of her when I have had my fill of her, Ottoussama. But that day is not yet here. I do not prize her as greatly as you seem to think---"

"Is that why she entered into an apprenticeship at Med Center with your former house medic this morning?" His father asked, frowning. That fucking sneak-spy Mousrom again! Vegita issued a low, barely audible growl, and his father smiled grimly. "Adamant will would not matter so much, were she not such a great beauty. The kind of beauty that makes of man's blood boil in his veins. Nor would I deem her dangerous, if she were some brainless bit of fluff. But when I looked into those lovely blue eyes as you lay injured in your bed, I took the measure of her. She must have been reared in a ruling house of that back-water world Bardock found her on. She has a mind like a spring trap, boy. She will probably out-pace her mentors at Med Center within the month. In a year, she'll be running the place." He snorted. "Were you not so tangled up in her arms as you are, I would say leave her there. She is wasted as a whore. Still...the best course of action would be to have done with her. Iron will, a brilliant mind and a motive for revenge are a wicked combination, brat. And do not mistake her. Unless you have the surgeons selectively pair her memory, she will always want vengeance. She will not forget the death of Raditz or her cub." He sat a moment in silence, regarded his son's hard, implacable expression. "You will do as you will, as ever. But if you truly believe she has no power over you, tell me this. Had I killed her myself two days ago in your villa, as my instincts bade me, what would you have done? You are too young and green to rule in my place, boy. And I flatter myself to think that you have not yet tired of my company. But I think, had I slain her, you would now be sitting on my throne." His father stood, and Vegita stood with him, his mind rolling through the scenario his father had just presented him again and again. Gods...he would have killed the old man in his rage, though he would have regretted it later.

Ottoussama spoke the truth. He would have gone insane if he had awakened to find her dead by his father's hand. The King did not speak, only watched the younger man silently, letting this all sink in.

"Come, boy," he said after a moment. "Nothing need be decided this instant. I will come to you to see to Nappa. I never liked the man, but he served my House loyally all his days."

They burned Nappa's body upon the sheered peak of Cho-Tal with a great many warriors, common and Elite, in attendance. The funeral seemed to be a herald of the war to come, and all the Capital turned out to watch. Besides Vegita's own, not one hand raised wood to the big man's pyre. Nappa had been almost universally disliked and feared, even among Vegita's own squad. Had I died on Shikaji, who would have built your pyre, Sensei? He could not think of anyone, even his own father, who had called the man friend. His face bore no expression at all as he set the bier alight, as he stood beside his father, watching the blaze lick upward into the darkening sky.

"You are old to have lost a friend you valued for the first time, my son." Vegita nearly started visibly in surprise, though he didn't look away from the flames. His father had called him 'my son' perhaps half a dozen times in his life. Always in a moment of some great importance. "I should have seen that you were hardened to this sort of thing long ago. But we have had no strong enemies for most of your life, and Saiyans are hard to kill in the worst of times. You will see others fall before this war is won, boy. Mousrom says there are rumblings from every corner of the Empire. If this bastard Jeiyce can persuade even a fraction of the slave worlds to rise against us as one, we will have a hard fight not to be overborne by sheer numbers."

Vegita turned to stare at him. His father had not mentioned a word of this in Council. "You have always said that war is a good thing, Ottoussama. It sweeps the weaklings from our gene pool and makes the strong stronger."

"No victory is ever assured," his father said grimly. "Though I would not voice doubts before my ministers, or any of my subjects, under threat of torture. If we are strong, we will survive. If not, we don't deserve to live. But a war, a real war, will bring you that much closer to viability as a king. And that is a good thing. There are lessons a Saiyan no Ouji should know that can only be learned on the field, with his back up against a wall. And you will learn them all in the next year. They will help you to become a strong, cunning King in a very few years."

Vegita shifted uncomfortably. "You are not old, Ottousssama."

His father turned to study the utterly blank expression on his son's face. "I should have kept more distant from you, brat. It will be harder for you to take your rightful place when your day finally comes, because I have not. But..." His father turned back to regard the flames that spiraled up from the pyre. "It has been difficult not to be overly proud of such a strong son. I am 230 years next winter, my son. Just on the cusp of middle years. If you have any regard for me at all, you will spare me the dishonor of gray hair."

"I will not fail you, Ottoussama," Vegita whispered, barely above a breath.

His father only nodded. "It is good."

He touched down on the threshold of his villa, so wound up in troubled thoughts, none of which he wanted to untangle and examine too closely at the moment, that he did not at first notice the wreckage in the entryway and the hearth room...or the smear of bright red leading from the shattered glass of the crystal dining table to the open arch of the great east window that faced the back of the villa, looking out on the rolling green hills, rather than the Capital. He followed the blood trail, his heart in his throat. She was sitting in the window seat, propped up against the stone sill of the window, and---Oh gods, she had opened up her wrist and her life was pouring away through the gash like water through a fissure in a punctured damn. She turned her ghost white face to him, trying to speak, trying to move her lips. He didn't bother to try and decipher her words. He snatched her up in both arms and shot out the open window in a burning streak of speed.

The medics let out a collective shriek as he slammed through the ceiling feet first, and set her on a med cot. He swept the room, fixing on a familiar face. "The rest of you---out!" The other medics scattered like terrified vermin, leaving Scopa to face him alone. The doctor was already hovering over her, not waiting for a command.

"What have you done, you fool girl?" The Madrani was muttering softly.

"Fix her!" Vegita snarled. Every nerve and muscle in his body seemed to be trembling. "Your life depends on it, doctor!"

Scopa nodded absently, working in silence as he patched up the wound in her wrist with a med swab and injected a blood transfusion tube in one of the Chikyuu woman's arms. "I have to give her more blood before we put her in a tank." He patted one of her blanched cheeks where a tiny bloom of pink was beginning to materialize and heaved a sigh of relief that had nothing to do with fear for his own life. "You got her here in time, Ouji-sama. She'll be all right." The Madrani took one limp wrist and turned it gently, his worried frown unfurrowing slightly. He jumped as Vegita slammed his fist through the cot beside his woman's bed, shattering the thin metal to pieces.

"There is no remedy for this, doctor," Vegita said bleakly. "Neither medical nor forcible. If a living thing wills its own death, it will find a way. It is only a matter of time." But why now? When she had begun to wheedle some semblance of freedom from him, when all things in her life seemed to be moving toward betterment. Why now, and not---not last summer?

"Was there a mess in the villa when you arrived, Ouji-sama?" Scopa asked tentatively.

"She tore the place apart," Vegita said.

"She---she didn't do this to herself on purpose, my Prince."

Vegita stared hard and the Madrani and the man swallowed before continuing. He held up the woman's arm, and examined the rapidly healing wound once again. "I'd say she smashed her hand through the glass plate of the dining table and accidentally opened a vein when is shattered. Dammit...I knew something wasn't right when she left!"

"She was very pleased when I sent her to you this morning, doctor," Vegita said. He raised a baleful, deadly eye to the Madrani. "What displeased her?"

The man didn't raise his eyes from the stats readout of his bio-monitor. "The funeral, Ouji-sama. She's very isolated from any kind of news in your villa, though I can't think of why Batha and Caddi didn't mention it to her. She hadn't heard that Lord Nappa was slain until we all saw the smoke on top of Cho-Tal. We watched the funeral from the steps of Med Center. Everyone in the Capital did." The man's face had grown particularly blank as he continued speaking, taking on the careful non-expression of a slave schooled since infancy to hide his thoughts and feelings from his betters. "Bulma...she had a particular interest in Nappa-san, Ouji-sama."

"I know her interest," Vegita snapped.

"When she learned he was dead...She was like a warrior who has just seen his greatest, most hated enemy slain by another's hand, my Prince. I haven't seen her in such a rage since---" He stopped his words, his face once again carefully blank.

I don't want anyone in the galaxy to kill him other than me, his woman had said. The face of Jeiyce of Maiyosh swam before his eyes for a instant, mocking him, beating him down again. He had an inking of the kind of rage she had been feeling. He might tear the Capital itself to pieces in his rage if he learned someone other than himself had slain the Red Prince. Vegita's did not shift his deadly gaze from the Madrani's amber face, as these thoughts made their way through his head. He smiled coldly. "Since last summer?" He finished the doctor's sentence for him.

"As you say, Ouji-sama," the man stammered.

"It is your professional opinion that this was not a deliberate attempt to take her own life? Think well before you speak, doctor. If she dies by her own hand because I have set no watch on her, I will see that you are weeks in Mousrom's care before you finally depart this life."

The Madrani shook his head confidently. "My Prince...she would not have been so incompetent. If she had wished to die, she would be dead now. She will not die like that, though. She will go out kicking and screaming."

"Yes..." Vegita murmured finally, after turning the doctor's words over in his head a moment or two. "I think you are right." This was the strangest conversation he'd had in longer than he could recall, standing beside this lowly freedman, speaking to him as though he were almost an equal. But the heavy leaden weight that had closed around his chest had eased up by the time he stood watching the tendrils of the woman's soft, blue hair float in a halo around her face after Scopa placed her in a regen tank.

An hour later, he wrapped her in a thick blanket the Madrani provided and bore her half-waking body home to his villa in the dark. She slumbered restlessly beside him, tossing and murmuring in her own language, until he began to wish he had commanded the doctor to sedate her. Just as dawn began to burn the black into russet on the horizon, she sat bolt upright, shrieking a name he had heard her mutter in her sleep before, the name she must have given the son she had born Raditz. He caught her before she bolted from the bed, holding her down as she wailed against him, small fists pounding on his chest. He shook her lightly after a moment or two of this. The piercing noise she was making was lancing through his head, and this on top of a long sleepless night plagued by the shade of Nappa and the vicious laughter of the Red Prince set his temper on edge.

"Stop it!" He said harshly. Her eyes were suddenly wide with full wakefulness. "The dead are dead! And no amount of wailing will raise them again!" His voice cracked on the last words, as he saw again Nappa's body falling like a cloven tree. She went still in his arms, calming slowly, blue eyes searching his face. She finally shook her head despairingly, more tears marring the porcelain perfection of her cheeks. "When will the pain stop?" He realized to his horror that he had spoken the thought aloud, his voice a raw whisper.

"When someone you care about dies?" She asked softly. "Never. But they say in time, you get used to it. I'm starting to doubt that though. Karot-chan…" Her words failed her for a moment. "His death is like a wound that never heals. I always thought that if I could kill Nappa myself, it would start to heal. Now, I'll never know."

"Why…" He paused, wondering if the question in his mind, something that had always puzzled him, would set her to shrilling again. "Why the son and not the father? You were Raditz' woman.

He would have spurned his world and his people for your sake. You knew him. Adored him, I think. The boy could not even speak yet. You've no way of knowing if he would have grown into a man worthy of your affection." She was silent, staring at him incredulously for a long time.

"It's almost impossible to explain to someone who's been conditioned to have no inherent familial love," she said slowly.

"Raditz was very good to me…and I grew to love him after a while. But…" She closed her eyes, sighing sadly. "He never lost sight of the fact that I was his. That he owned me. He never understood what was wrong with that, or that his father had done anything wrong when he destroyed my homeworld. And more than that, he was a strong man who could defend himself. Karot-chan was helpless. And innocent. And all mine. I carried him under my heart for ten months and…he was a part of me. That's the real reason your women don't carry their children to term, Vegita. If they did, they'd rise up and gut all the men who wanted to take their babies away from them." He was silent. She shivered lightly against him. "Kami…I've never spoken about him aloud, not like this…I feel like I just forced up a belly-full of poison. For so long, all I could think of was one day killing my son's murderer. I think that was---was poisoning me as well."

His spoke very softly, so as not to frighten her into a pleasing lie, so he might hear the cold truth. "Do you hate me as greatly as you did Nappa? Do you dream of killing me still?" He watched her eyes go wary suddenly. "Tell me truly, woman. I slew Raditz in single combat. My hand did not take the boy's life, but I would have ordered it done just the same, though not before your eyes."

"I would have ordered Nappa's death if I could have," she said slowly. "But I didn't. And you would've ordered Karot-chan killed. But you didn't. Might have beens aren't the same as deeds done."

"No," he said bluntly. "But the blame is still at my feet, woman."

"Yes, it is," she said flatly. "But I wouldn't kill you, Ouji-sama. Ever."

He felt a tiny, indulgent grin begin to pull at one corner of his mouth. "That is a relief."

Her eyes glittered like blue agates, brilliant and cold. "You don't think I could kill you if I wanted to? I have a lot more resources at my disposal than I did on that island you kept me on those first months, Vegita. The pouza spice flowers that grow wild in these hills can be harvested for their roots, did you know that? Boiled down into a lethal poison that could kill you in half a minute if I pricked your skin with a diamond blade while you were sleeping. The synthetic fabric that covers the chairs in this bedroom will burn almost forty- percent cyanide if I set if on fire. Both terrible ways for a warrior to die, don't you think, Ouji-sama?"

His body had gone still as a stone as she spoke. The gentle hand that had been stroking the soft fall of her hair stopped at her delicate, defenseless neck. He took a long, slow breath before speaking, trying to calm himself. Nappa's ghost voice floated through his head, scolding him as a tiny boy for some childish tantrum. If you break your toys, you cannot play with them thereafter, my Prince.

"You've given this some thought," he finally managed to say coldly.

"Yes," she agreed. "Quite a lot. And I decided against it. At first, only for the same reason I've never stolen a ship and escaped.

Scopa finally explained to me when we moved back to the Capital that when one slave escapes, all the others in the household are put to death. If I did you in, your father would probably kill every slave on Vegita-sei."

"That he would," Vegita agreed.

"I also decided that if I were to take revenge on you, I wouldn’t' kill you."

"Ah," he smirked. "A fate worse than death for me? Like that fool Bardock. So, how do you plan to torture me, woman?" Something was beginning to stir inside him, shifting the anger to an almost unbearable excitement, a thing that he sensed was close kin to the biting insults and mutual predatory stance of a Saiyan courtship spar.

"The same way Bardock is being tortured," she smiled wickedly. "With love. I'm going to make you love me. Real love, Vegita no ouji. Mad and boundless and forever, like the twinned souls of moonbound warriors. I'll make you love me…and when you do, when I'm absolutely sure I have your whole heart, I'll use that love to destroy you."

He laughed aloud. "You have a very elevated opinion of your place in my life, woman."

"Think so?" She kissed him, one hand smoothing down his back to brush his tail. He rumbled low in his chest, tightening his arms around her. "You're half-way there already."

It was like ice water tossed on his bare back during deep sleep. A chill and a deep, atavistic ripple of unfamiliar fear went shooting through him. And on its heels, anger. "You…insolent bitch!" He snarled, arms clenching reactively, hearing her faint cry and a dull snap only dimly through his rage. He pulled back, drawing back his hand to deliver a blow that would have very probably broken her neck had it fallen. And froze, staring into eyes that were the color of the sea at sunrise, full of pain, but strangely calm. He had over-powered her countless times during the first months that she had been his, but he had never struck her. Not once. And now…now he could not. His hand and the arm attached to it would not obey. He let his hand fall limp to his side, his breath gripping once more in his chest as he shifted her gently, probing her ribcage with a light touch. He had held her so tightly, he had cracked a rib.

"Is the tank in Scopa's old surgery still there?" He asked softly.

She nodded. "I don’t need a tank for this. There's a bone sauter in my wardrobe beside the bed. I can mend it myself. It'll be knitted good as new by the time I go to Med Center." She eyed him worriedly. "I can still go to Med Center, can't I?"

He grunted. "I gave you my word, did I not?"

"Good," she smiled to herself, taking the bone sautering instrument he pulled out of the wardrobe and examining the tender area with experienced fingers. "It's not that bad. Just a hairline fracture."

"How would you know, woman," he asked irritably, watching her as she knelt on the bed, running the device over the bone, repairing the---the damage he had done to her. He nearly hissed aloud, furious at himself for the unnerving shudder that ripped through him each time she winced. She blinked at him in surprise.

"Vegita…You've broken my ribs more times than I can count. Just from holding me too tightly. A couple of times while you were asleep. This is the first time you've ever noticed." He swallowed hard against the icy coolness in her voice, growling again with barely checked rage as his stomach twisted in a slow rolling somersault. What the fuck was wrong with him?! She was a bed slave! A whore! To be used up at his pleasure and thrown away when he tired of her! To---to be---

But she winced again as she probed the skin over the newly healed bone, that would still be sensitive, still painful for several hours after knitting, and a vivid stab of sense memory swept through him. The sense of tearing agony as Jeiyce had shattered his own ribs to splinters, ramming the shards into his lungs like shrapnel with a second blow, all the while holding Vegita helpless, pinned by the Red Prince's greater strength. She raised her eyes again to meet his, and looked startled by what she saw there. How many times, he wondered, even after she had begun to submit to him, had he broken her bones without realizing it, and continued on through the night oblivious to her injuries?

"It's not as bad as your injuries were," she said, reading his mind apparently.

"Have I ever---?" He stopped the words before he uttered them, clamping his teeth down over them with a hiss of fury. At himself for having spoken, at her for being so damnably frail of body, for making him wrench internally at the thought of having damaged a creature as lowly and unimportant as herself.

"Never as bad as Jeiyce hurt you," she answered the question he had only half spoken, again seeing into his thoughts with no effort.

You're half-way there already, she had said.

No!

And no and no and no! His father's warnings were the ravings of a man whose blood had run cold for women since the death of Vegita's mother. He was the master here! He bared his teeth, and pulled her body roughly against his, making her yelp in pain. He set his jaw against the knot in his gut and growled murderously into her face. "Do you think I give a damn about you?! You live and continue to live for my pleasure. You are nothing outside of that! You are my whore until I see fit to have done with you, and nothing more! Nothing more!"

"Which one of us are you trying to convince, Vegita?" She asked, blue eyes burning mockingly into his as he threw he down and shoved her legs roughly apart.

"Woman," he rasped softly, his mouth against hers. "I do not give a damn about you."

Her lips curled in a smile so evil it would have made a prince of Hell sigh with adoration. "Yes, you do." She hooked her legs around his hips and pulled him deep inside her, and he choked on an answering cry of pain that echoed hers. His body, independent of his will, drove into her sweet warmth again and again, while his soul seemed to writhe on a bed of coals each time she gasped, every time her beautiful face cinched up in pain as he battered the newly healed bone in her ribcage with each thrust. He came in less than a minute, like an unschooled virgin boy, and she shrieked out as she finished with him, her cries a sickening mix of pleasure and agony.

"I will win this game of yours, woman," he managed to husk in her ear after a moment, still gasping like a drowning swimmer. "I will make you adore me, fawn upon me, give me every piece of yourself that you have held back, until I own you. All of you, body and soul! I will make you---" But the word clogged in his throat.

She brushed his lips with hers, delicate fingers caressing his sweating brow. "Love you?" Her soft laughter was sweet and cruel. "You don't know how, Vegita. You can't even make yourself say the word. You don't know how to fight a battle that doesn't involve brute strength and fighting power. I do. You're going to lose this little war, my beautiful Prince. And when you do, you'll be the one who is enslaved."

That wild, anticipatory thrill of a challenge, of a new and delicious sort of battle, began to fill him again, and he returned her kiss, slow and deep. "We shall see," he said. He withdrew from her gently, eased her up on her feet as though she were made of delicate cobweb strands. He began pulling on his clothes, slowly helping her do the same, noting the red marks on her flawless skin, already mottling to angry bruises. There would be no victory in his future if he continued to---to hurt her like this.

"My word to you, woman," he said softly. "You will not receive so much as a bruise from my hands hereafter."

He left before she could answer. It was past time for him to train.

He trained. Day and into the night, pummeling his flesh and breaking his bones in the high gravity domes the Madrani techs began to build and rebuild in a constant state of frantic construction, so that he would immediately have a new dome to demolish each time he shattered the last. They knew their lives depended on it. The only thing he lacked, burned for in a constant rage of frustration, was a sparring partner to equal his own strength. He went through the databases of fighting power counters for every warrior in the Empire, looking for someone, anyone that even came close. There was no one. He began searching Mousrom's records of captives held at Kharda city. There were some Maiyosh-jin with untapped potential to be very, very strong fighters, but the Red Prince's people were not warriors by nature. Jeiyce was an apparent anomaly among the sons of his race. He could have had these men trained to fight, whipped into shape to become amazingly powerful sparring partners...in the space of a year or two perhaps. But he did not have that much time. He began searching even the slave records each night before he slept. At long last, he found something. A possibility anyway. A mercenary type taken in a raid decades ago during his father's wars of conquest. It was easy to see why the big, lumbering fool had been spared the death that had greeted most higher powered captives in those days.

The man was just short of having been disqualified as sentient life in the brains department. He had spent the better part of the last two decades as a dock porter, but in his youth had been a mercenary in the service of Tsiru-sei. The big moron had not lifted a hand in violence for twenty years, he told Vegita sadly. But even a man as slow-witted as this one would soon remember the training of his soldiering days if properly motivated. Rikkuum, Vegita soon learned, was more than eager to become sparring partner to the Saiyan no Ouji, and lacked the native intelligence to fear having been selected for a duty that no Saiyan warrior had ever survived more than a few weeks. To his delight, Vegita soon found out why. The man was monstrously powerful, and faster than any being so large and lumbering should be.

In their first bout, the big bastard side-stepped Vegita's head-on attack and nearly cold cocked his master in one, hamfisted blow. Vegita staggered back, and roared with rage, firing a blast at the man that should have left him a smoldering pile of ash. Rikkuum blocked it easily and sprang forward again, catching the prince with an upper cut jab...and knocked the Saiyan no Ouji on his royal backside. He stood watching Vegita rise painful to his feet, and blinked amiably at the murderous expression on the Saiyan's face.

"This is what you require, Ouji-sama?"

Vegita stared at the giant man, this mountain of fighting strength that had lain fallow, untapped and unknown for 20 years. He had, by some benevolent miracle, stumbled onto exactly what he needed. Someone who would beat him to a pulp each day from morning to night, increasing his strength, speed and stamina with each new bout. He went to his bed that night, aching and shaky from a half hour in a regen tank and more content than he had been since the battle on Shikaji.

And each night, he returned home to besiege his woman in a new round of the merry war they had begun. He gave her utter autonomy to come and go as she would and to order all things in his household as though she were its mistress. He now realized that the gifts of clothing and luxuriant niceties had been tossed aside with nothing more than a cursory word of thanks from her. That freedom, or its closest simulation, was a thing she truly craved. She cleared out a spare room in the villa and moved a small mountain of medical texts, machines and engineering equipment into it in the space of an afternoon, and he soon became accustomed to seeking her in that "workshop" each time he returned home.

She in turn, showered him with affection and worked his exhausted, sore body to its limits each night, doing things to him that made it difficult to concentrate the next day if he thought on them overlong, that forced him to discipline himself sternly not to hurry through his training so that he might return to her again all the quicker.

But each evening at table, after his mocking courtesy and her sweet false submissiveness had waned, he saw a little more of the woman he sought to draw out. He slowly came to realize that she could debate him to the wall on any subject he cared to name, on things as diverse as hyper drive mechanics and Saiyan pre-interstellar history. The more he let her see that she might speak her mind uncensored---though he had to bite his tongue to keep from doing so a dozen times a night---the more she showed him her true self. And the more spellbound he became, by each mercurial flicker of wit, temper and intellect. He own tactic---to simply give her more and more freedom until her gratitude for all he had given her warmed her heart and melted it into his hands---seemed to be working, though slowly. He had assumed initially that her strategy was to bed him as well and creatively as his schedule allowed, but…He began to wonder if the simple act of showing him who she truly was might not be some sort of subtle on his heart assault as well.

"How many others like Rikkuum do you think there are, Ottoussama?" Vegita asked his father after the King had summoned him one morning. The word on his constant use of the tanks, nearly every day now, as Rikkuum continued to happily pound him into tenderized meat each time they fought, had reached his father's ears. "Men that strong, who slipped past our purges of all the strongest races. Men with both intelligence and fighting power."

"It is a big galaxy, boy," his father answered pensively. "More than we imagine. You are thinking that if you could find this Rikkuum so easily, what manner of fighting power has the Red Prince managed to amass in his followers?"

"If he had 100 such men, he would be unstoppable," Vegita said soberly. "He could mount a successful siege of Vegita-sei itself."

"You are beginning to think like a king," his father chuckled. "Now you know why I rarely sleep more than an hour a night. I must contemplate this and every other potential situation that might threaten this world and our people, and try to form a plan to avert it should that situation arise." His father smiled grimly. "You have been so caught up in your training that you did not notice the orbital moon baubles that Bardock and his weapons squad have been launching over the last few days. There are even more on the ground to be sent up in the event of attack. Let the Red Demons try their hand against an entire planet full of enraged Oozaru if they will." Ottoussama bid him a good-humored farewell and left for Taldai, Vegita-sei nearest neighboring solar system, to spend the day forcibly galvanizing the ship foundry there into completing Vegita-sei's new fleet ahead of schedule.

By noon, he stood over the bleeding, unconscious body of Rikkuum, winded, bloody himself, but very pleased. This was the first time he had put the big man down before midday. He went out into the sun, commanding the medics who hovered on the edge of his training dome to see to the man, and the palace cooks to bring his lunch outside. He stepped out into the bright light of day, squinting upward at the giant troop carrier that seemed to be listing horribly to port as it set down on the upper launch pad of Med Center with a resounding metallic thud. An instant later, an alarm claxon began to shrill throughout the Capital, but Vegita was already moving. He set down at Med Center in the midst of an insect hive of running men and women. He caught sight of a familiar face, standing beneath the under belly of the carrier. Bardock. The man was easing his shoulder out from under the hull, shouting at the warriors around him to get inside.

"What the hell is this?!" Vegita barked out.

"We were working on a moon bauble array for your father, Ouji-sama," Bardock said, breathing heavily. "The carrier came down out of space like a rock. We couldn't raise the bridge on our scouters, so we just grabbed it and set it down here. It looks like its taken heavy fire. There are score marks all over---"

"Ouji-sama!" A tall, lanky man, one of Bardock's warriors, came tearing out of the carrier. "The carrier is from Ansou-sei! The pilots say the garrisons there were hit by the Maiyosh-jin this morning. They fired some sort of magnetic disruption blast that fragged all their communications equipment. The men inside said that this is the first of ten carriers, all bearing Saiyan wounded!" As the man spoke, a rush of stretcher bearers began loading the first of the wounded warriors from the ship. Or what was left of them.

"Get the armor off these men now!" The Madrani Scopa was shouting like a squad commander in the field, barking out orders to his own staff and the Saiyans that were now rushing in from all parts of the Capital, responding to the alarm. The bio-monitor in the doctor's hand was screaming like a dying bird. "The armor's hot! Bulma!" His woman was there at the Madrani's side, carrying a med satchel that was nearly as big as she was. "Set up a rad inoculation triage right here, both for the wounded and the men going inside the ship---" His eyes lit on Vegita, and he raced over, eyes frantic. "Ouji-sama! I must humbly ask you---"

"These are my warriors, doctor," Vegita snapped. "What do they need?"

"Their armor is irradiated, Ouji-sama! It must be disposed of quickly---off planet. The ship is hot as well. From the looks of the wounded, the Maiyosh-jin must have used plasma atomics!"

Vegita cursed viscously. The honorless cowards! The doctor was right. The plasma missiles would have cut through a Saiyan's Ki shield like a knife through new bread. And melted the men's flesh inside their own armor. "All the other troop transports that will be arriving in the next few hours will be hot as well. I can cure rad poisoning with an injection, my prince, but if we let the crippled carriers land, or worse, if they break up as they try to land, they could irradiate the entire Capital! Ouji-sama, I cannot give orders to Saiyan warriors, but you can!"

"We will empty this carrier, then launch it into the sun," Vegita said quickly. "I will set warriors to physically hold the other carriers in position just inside the atmosphere, while others ferry the wounded down to you. Then we will hurl those carriers into the sun as well. Captain!"

"My Prince?" Bardock barked out smartly. Vegita did not miss the man smooth out the hearty dislike from his face. Raditz' father was an insolent bastard, he thought grimly. But he was also a very bright, capable bastard. "Take command of the men emptying this transport, and all the others that arrive. I will marshal the stronger Elites to catch the ships as they arrive and hold them in place while you pull the wounded out."

"Bardock!" Bulma caught the warrior's arm. "Wasn't Romayna stationed on Ansou-sei?" Bardock nodded shortly, his eyes softening as they fell on the girl's pale, worried face.

"Don't fret for her, brat," he said with a grim, tense grin. "She is strong and clever. She will have survived." He wheeled away and began shouting orders at his own squad and dozens of others.

Vegita didn't pause to reflect on that strange exchange, or the squad captain's oddly affectionate manner toward the young woman who hated him so deeply. There was no time. He began to shout out orders to the Elites that were beginning to cluster around him, anxious for orders.

The whole of that long, mad day was a blur in his mind ever after. He rallied and organized both the soldiers and slaves that poured into the medical quarter as the day wore on and streamed in from the surrounding countryside to aid in porting the wounded to the surface. Once each transport was empty, the teams of stronger warriors hovering below the ship, faces straining with effort from holding the great weight steady, sometimes for several hours, would gather the last of their combined strength to shove the carriers out of the atmosphere and into the sun's gravitational pull . And by the time each ship was ditched, another transport would arrive. The faces of the Saiyan soldiers, some twisted in agony or burnt beyond recognition, all spitting gouts of blood from blistered lips as the poison of the rad plasma ate them alive from inside---all these images began to burn inside Vegita's mind. He knew they would stay firmly etched there all his days. He thought he had felt anger when Jeiyce of Maiyosh had beaten him down, but now he realized he had never known true fury until this day. He might have killed any one of these men in tournament without a second thought. He did not value a single one of them personally. But they were his. His soldiers, his people, all sons of Vegita-sei. A half million troops cut down in a single bombing strike. The enemy had used the cruelest, most cowardly far range weapon known to sentient life. Plasma atomics. Cruel because it killed the bulk of its victims slowly. Cowardly because the soldiers on the surface had been given no chance to fight back. The missiles had struck the garrison bases without warning in the dead of night.

As each carrier was hurled into the sun, the men beside him would fall away, dropping down in exhaustion from effort and rad exposure. The flushed, unhealthy visages of the Elites around him told Vegita that having over-taxed their fighting powers was not causing collapse so much as the fact that they were being poisoned themselves. He passed the command down through Bardock and his squad members that each man bracing the carriers should drop down to Med Center himself for a rad inoculation the instant he began to feel weak. Vegita himself felt nothing. He held onto his rage throughout that long day, unable to release it, unable to allow himself to stop and rest until all his warriors, his warriors, were on the surface. He did not know if it was adrenaline or his own Ki shield, drawn from a fighting power so many times greater than any of the men around him, that kept the sickness at bay for him. But as the last carrier spun upward in a whirling silhouette into the sun, a wave of weak, sickened nausea rose up and pulled him down into darkness.

"Young fool," a familiar voice said gruffly. He opened his eyes to see his father standing by his bed, arms folded. "You are a man, you young idiot! Not a god. Nor are you the Legendary reborn to us again…yet. Did you think your royal blood a sufficient shield against plasma radiation?" The king shook his head angrily. "Come to me when you are fit to fly, boy. We must talk of what to do next."

Vegita nodded silently, and his father seemed to fade into a bank of mist. The sound of his woman's voice, weeping softly, brought him back to full consciousness. She was a few meters away in the crowded recovery ward, bent over the body, horribly burned and still horribly alive, of a Saiyan woman, her slim shoulders shaking with grief.

"Do not dishonor her death with tears, daughter," Bardock told her softly. His voice sounded broken, as though the man were choking on shards of glass.

"Let her weep," the dying woman whispered. "She is neither Saiyan nor a warrior…though only for want of fighting power. I…knew you would survive when Raditz and the babe were slain."

A coughing rasp of a chuckle. "Tell me, Bulma…have you bent the Saiyan no Ouji to your will as completely as you did my firstborn?"

"Romayna-san…" The younger woman's voice was a soft sob.

"I think…he will learn that it was folly to make an enemy of you before the last dance is done. All my goods and chattels I bequeath to you, girl. And what lies safe in the incu-ward below us as well…to ease your grief."

"Romayna," Bardock said. "The girl is not her own mistress. All you will to her, you give to the man who slew Raditz."

"Bar-kun…" A long labored breath in the woman's half-melted lungs. "Nothing is forgiven, beloved. Not yet. You have not yet earned it. You will know when you have…But I will not look on you as I die. Go." Bardock uttered a low, choking growl that was more than half a sob, though his face remained impassive. He turned without another word and left the two women to themselves. Bardock's mate began to speak softly to the Chikyuu woman, too softly for Vegita to hear the words. He slept again.

His eyes snapped open and he sat up in the silent recovery ward, easing himself slowly to his feet. It was morning, though of what day he wasn't sure. He could feel his body growing stronger by the minute, telling him more accurately than any physician that he had rested long enough. He caught sight of the Madrani doctor Scopa as he made his way out of the complex, and smirked. The man was lying on his face on an unoccupied gurney, snoring softly. Let the fellow sleep, Vegita thought. The weakling had earned it. He found his father cloistered with the entirety of the Privy Council, huddled around a halo star chart.

"Are you fit for battle?" His father said without preamble as Vegita entered the chamber.

"I am more than fit, Ottoussama," Vegita snarled softly.

The king nodded curtly. "The whole planet is buzzing with word of your doings yesterday. Medical managed to save more than a third of the wounded. It would have been more, but you gave the surgeons leave to let those who would have lived as cripples die with honor. A merciful command, boy." The note of pride in those abrupt words sent a faint tremor of warmth through Vegita's still shaky body. "Intelligence has given us a list of targets known now to harbor Maiyosh-jin rebels and civilians, or to have had dealings with them in the past. At this juncture, it's all one. We will kill their race, all their kind, wherever we find them. To this list, I have added several dozen more worlds, all high profile hubs and space ports of interstellar travel. You will take ten thousand warriors in ten troop carriers and wage a campaign of annihilation against these worlds. Where it is feasible, take any Maiyosh-jin you find alive, to be returned to Vegita-sei and put to questioning."

"This is a campaign of terror," Vegita said, surveying the targets red-marked for destruction on the star chart. They were all dispersed evenly throughout each quadrant of Imperial Saiyan space, so that every part of the Empire might feel the sting of reprimand. "By your leave, Ottoussama, I will wait three days between each purge. Beginning with the third or forth world on this list, I will send a wave comm message to the surface informing the leaders and general populace that if they give up information concerning the Red Prince or the location of any hidden colonies of Maiyosh-jin, they will be spared."

Articha nodded to his father. "It is sound strategy, Sire. And if he strikes at the same hour, every three days, it will put the entire Empire in a panic, each world wondering if they will be next."

"A good plan," his father said. "You will take Articha along as your field marshal, boy. You leave tomorrow."

"But before you depart, Ouji-sama," Mousrom's piggy eyes bore no hint of insolence, but Vegita could feel angry spite rolling off the fat man in waves. "You should see the crux of the enemy's new 'weapon'. It allowed the Red Demons to launch plasma nukes through our sensors nets undetected. This is a fairly innocuous example of the technology." The Inquisitor lay a thumb sized pellet on the council table, pressing a tiny catch on its side. The pellet 'popped' in a burst of metallic scented smoke. And a full mini-surgery satchel appeared from nowhere, spread across half the table. "It is a kind of miniaturization science we have never seen, Ouji-sama. My weapons teams have not been able to replicate it, but they say there is no limit to the size or variety of its scope. The Maiyosh-jin used this technology to miniaturize their plasma torpedoes that must have been timed to 'expand' just before they struck the surface of Ansou-sei. I also believe it is how the Maiyosh-jin populated worlds were able to evacuate in the space of a day. The possibilities are endless. Ships, food, medical supplies, housing…weapons. And…" The man's eyes glittered in ugly anticipation. "I have learned something in the last hour that may alter your majesty's benevolent policies toward the slave population of Vegita-sei. This morning, one of our Maiyosh-jin captives led me to a technical slave who toiled in the palace itself.

In the slave's rooms, we found this." Mousrom laid another pellet, identical to the first, on the table, and paused for dramatic effect.

"We must face the very real possibility of a slave network in league with the Red Prince here on Vegita-sei. The potential for terrorism on our own soil is one we cannot ignore, Ou-sama."

"What remedy would you suggest?" Ottoussama said quietly in the sudden cold silence.

"A clean sweep, Sire," Mousrom said eagerly. "Either execute or rotate off world all the general labor slaves. And I would ask leave to put to question selected segments of the more intelligent, highly skilled slaves and free alien residents here in the Capital. Especially those whose duties require them to travel off world, or give them access to those who do."

"Yesterday, I would have agreed with you," Vegita said, eyeing the man with open disgust. "And seen no harm in letting you gut the every slave and freedman on the planet until you sated even your apparently unquenchable taste for torture." An almost inaudible chuckle escaped Turna. "How skilled are you at medicine, Mousrom-san?" Vegita drawled. "Without the slaves and freedmen in Medical, our losses would have been 90% yesterday, not a 'mere' two thirds. When our soldiers die by the tens of thousands after you have depleted our slave population of its medical staff, I will send their mates and heirs to your doorstep to ask for a blood price."

His father cut off whatever reply the seething, red-faced Inquisitor might have made. "Seek out this 'red network' in your conventional manner, Mousrom. There will be no wholesale purge and torture of Vegita-sei's homeworld slaves until you show me they are all in league with the enemy. The boy is right. We will weaken ourselves greatly if we put our labor force to the sword."

"Or the wrack," Articha murmured. "The slaves at Med Center and the Capital at large showed great loyalty to their masters yesterday. Your tactics would drive them into the arms of the Red Prince."

"I---I beg your pardon, Ou-sama," Mousrom said solicitously. He cut his eyes back to Vegita, full of veiled malice. "And yours, Ouji-sama. I am guilty of presumption in my zealous wish to serve you. I will continue as you have previously bade me proceed. I will only arrest and question those slaves whom I have just reason to suspect. Both those slaves in the general populace…and those in Med Center, for whom you have such a great affection, Oujisama." There were several levels of barbed threat and insinuation in those words. Vegita regarded the Inquisitor coldly, dropping all pretense of civility.

"Take care, fat man," he said softly. "If you over-step your station, you may trip and fall."

"Enough," his father said irritably. "Try not to goad the boy into killing you, Mousrom. I can little afford to lose your services on the eve of all out war." Vegita took the point as well, and hung back after the others had departed, arms folded over his chest, glowering down at his feet in suppressed rage. The Inquisitor well knew his woman was now apprenticed to Scopa at Med Center. Mousrom had given his father the information in fact. Would the Intelligence Minister truly have the suicidal gaul to strike at Vegita through his woman, Mousrom's petty revenge for past and present insults? Trump up some suspicion surrounding her, then….then take her to his torturer's nest in the north while Vegita was away at war? And when he returned, the deed would have been done, his woman's fragile, defenseless body torn to pieces upon Mousrom's twisted machines. However long Vegita took killing the misshapen Inquisitor would not matter then. No amount of revenge would bring her back after she was dead.

"Heed Articha's experience on the field, boy." His father's voice cut through the worried, angry run of his thoughts. Vegita regarded the other man's face, so much like his own, though harder and no longer young. "Your strength is great, but even a large predator may be over-whelmed by an army of stinging insects...and these insects will soon rise against us by the trillions. It is the nature of every living thing, however weak and lowly, to wish to be free."

"Those trillions you speak of need a focal point to look to and to lead them," Vegita said softly. "Without it they are nothing more than stampeding live stock, a directionless mob at best. Jeiyce is that symbol for our enemies. When I crush him, they will be lost."

"They will be lost," his father agreed, but his perpetual frown sank even deeper. "But a mob set in motion is a force of nature. They will not cease their struggles when you have slain Jeiyce of Maiyosh. This rebellion will be long and bitter in putting down. But...it is good that our warriors have a symbol of their own. After yesterday, our troops would cheerfully follow you to lay siege to Hell if you commanded them. It is good that you have learned a lesson I despaired of you ever truly understanding." His father's face remained hard as granite, but the cold black eyes warmed again with pride. "That our warriors, our people, are yours. To command, to rule...and to protect. And as their lord, you are theirs as well."

He spent the day making ready, assembling and organizing his ships, his men, his supplies, caught up in an almost unbearable feeling of childlike excitement. At every step of the way, Articha hovered silent and steady at his shoulder, voicing neither approval nor disapproval at any decision he made until all was in readiness.

"You have a gift for leading men, and a knack for organization, Ouji-sama," she said curtly.

High praise indeed from Articha. He began to realize the reason why he liked the normally taciturn woman, why he would have chosen her himself had his father not commanded her to advise him in this campaign. She was blunt and utterly honest, a rare thing even among the Royal Councilors, and would not keep silent where she felt he had fallen short, or praise him for anything less than excellence.

Late in the evening, he flew back to his hillside villa, scanning for the tiny, but distinct Ki that should have lain sleeping within. He wheeled about with an annoyed curse, burning back in the direction of Med Center. What the hell was the woman still doing there this late? Gossiping with her girlfriend Scopa? He barged rudely into the main infirmary, still overflowing with wounded, and was greeted by a pale-faced Scopa. The amber-skinned man, so calm and professional as he had orchestrated the treatment of more than 100, 000 wounded, seemed on the point of tears.

"Where is my woman?!" He snapped angrily. But something in the man's face stilled the annoyance he was feeling, and froze into something that bordered on fear. Mousrom...

"Did they take her? The Inquisitors?!"

The Madrani shook his head in mild confusion at the question. "No. I took a short nap in the wee hours this morning when things began to calm down…I left her sleeping near your bedside. But…Oh gods, Ouji-sama! I beg you…I beg you, think a bit before you act in this matter!"

"What the hell are you talking about, you fool?!"

"She is below, Ouji-sama," the doctor said softly. "In the incu-ward."

The incu-ward. The endless subterranean warehouse of incubators housed beneath Med Center, where Saiyan embryos were placed to grow to viability…Vegita felt the lump of ice in his chest grow colder still.

"Show me," he said curtly.

He followed the Madrani to the lift that led down to what was the largest storage facility of infants in the Empire, through half lit corridors of sleeping brats in all stages of development, to a wing that seemed to house the children ready for emergence. Ready to be sent to the infant barracks for aggression conditioning if their Ki was acceptably high, or tossed to an uncertain fate in the pod seeding unit of they were weak. She was sitting on the floor beside an open incubator, rocking a naked babe in her arms, smiling and weeping at the same time. A few feet from her, Bardock knelt, still in the blood smeared armor he had worn the day before, speaking to her in soft, soothing tones. She did not seem to hear him or even notice the man's presence. Bardock turned as Vegita and Scopa approached, edging back from the woman slowly, his movements leaden as though his limbs were weighted.

"One of you will explain this to me now!" Vegita hissed softly, his eyes locked on the woman's face, her fragile smile as she looked down at the boy in her arms.

"The boy is my son, Ouji-sama," Bardock said in a hushed voice. "My---my mate discovered herself with child six years ago, and put the embryo in cry-storage. When we found ourselves suddenly without an heir a year ago, she had him unfrozen and placed in an incu-pod." Vegita narrowed his eyes balefully at the couched reference to Raditz' death, but kept silent as the man continued. "Romayna and I were estranged, and she---she had a particular fondness for the Chikyuu girl. She willed the boy to Bulma on her deathbed, Ouji-sama."

"My Prince..." The doctor said tremulously. "I would implore you as her physician to tread lightly here..."

"He's trying to tell you," Bardock whispered harshly, "that if you snatch the brat from her arms, her mind will most likely snap. Permanently." The man's brows drew together in a frown of open disgust. "And you'll lose your favorite fuck toy for good."

Vegita's hand was around Bardock's throat before he even finished the sentence. He would have snapped the bastard's neck in another second, but a low cry from the woman made him turn. She was on her feet now, staring at him in absolute horror, clutching the baby to her chest. Then she wheeled and ran, tearing down the pitch black corridor, sobbing with terror. He shot forward and caught her lightly in his arms an instant before she would have gone tumbling headfirst dark a dark stairway. She began shrieking incoherently, trying to keep the boy away from him, as he shook her gently, trying to make her hear him.

"I will not harm him, Bulma!" He finally roared, his voice rising over her screams. She went immobile almost instantly, staring at him wide-eyed. Then...she began to collapse in his arms, sinking slowly her knees before him while he stared down at her in shock.

"Please...Please, Vegita...Oh gods, please let me keep him! I'll do anything...Anything! Please don't take him away from me again!"

The two fools rushing behind him in the darkness had been right, he thought numbly. What he did and said in the next few moments might very well mean the loss of her. "Woman..." He said slowly, carefully. "This is not the same boy."

"I don't care!" She wailed. "Please....oh, Kami, please...." Her voice tapered off into a low moan. She sounded like a damned soul begging for mercy on the threshold of Hell...and expecting none. He swallowed his anger at the dead woman who had put them both in this situation, trying to think, trying to reason out a solution that would not leave her mad. But he would be damned to a coward's hell himself before he fostered any whelp of Bardock in his own household! He would not---

There was a solution. "Keep the brat here," he said finally, watching the hope that dawned in her eyes with a small internal smile. This would go a long way to winning the little war he and she had been waging during the last weeks. "I will not have the son of Bardock sleeping under my roof. But you may keep him at Med Center. Scopa will attend him at night. Will you not, doctor?"

"With all my heart, Ouji-sama," the Madrani whispered.

"You understand that he must go to the children's barracks at four year of age?" Vegita asked sternly. She nodded reluctantly. "It is done then. I am leaving Vegita-sei in the morning to hunt the Red Prince, and to give our enemies an answer to their attack yesterday. It may be months before I return. You will dwell here at Med Center while I am gone. Keep the boy by your side night and day if you wish."

"Vegita..." She sighed softly, unable to speak more.

He turned to glare at Bardock. "You are familiar with Mousrom of Intelligence?" The warrior nodded shortly, and the Madrani gasped softly at the mention of that name. "He is not my friend, and may try to avenge himself upon me in some spiteful way while I am off planet." Bardock's eyes cut to the woman in grim understanding. Vegita did not like this man, would have killed him out of hand for the words he had spoken moments ago were he not such a strong clever soldier. And Vegita-sei needed all her strong soldiers now. Every single one of them.

Daughter, Bardock had called the girl as she wept over the body of his dying mate. As a man would address his son's bride. For whatever reason, he looked upon her as a man looked upon a woman of his own blood. He would not desire her for his own. In fact, if the man held true to the bent of most Saiyan widowers, Vegita's own father included, he would probably never desire another woman again after the death of his mate. Bardock was not a man Vegita would ever willingly trust with his own life. But somehow, Vegita knew the man would give his life to protect Bulma. And for all the want of a single drop of noble blood, he was stronger than most Elites.

"I appoint you my chatelain in my absence, Bardock. Watch over all that is mine, guard it with your life if you must, until I return. Do not leave her side. And if the Inquisitors come for her with some convenient bit of manufactured suspicion, I command you to kill them in my name, and hide her away in the back country until I return."

"I will do all these things to the last of my strength, Ouji-sama," Bardock growled softly.

An hour later, Bulma had nested the boy in a set of rooms Scopa had given her in Med Center's residential wing. She turned to Vegita, and drew him to the little apartment's narrow bed, her eyes shining with standing tears. It had not struck him until this moment that he would not see her again for months. The thought seemed to wrench at him in some empty, lost fashion. Months until he touched her again, held her, heard the sound of her voice.

She leaned down and kissed him lightly, and one bright tear escaped, rolling slowly down one perfect cheek. He cupped her face in his hand and wiped it away.

"I have seen you weep in sorrow, anger and joy," he said softly. "Which is it now?"

"All three," she whispered. "And one thing more." She kissed him deeper this time, her damp eyes beginning to burn with desire.

"Thankfulness."

For three months, he burned and butchered, and was occasionally blessed with a stand up fight. In addition to the fixed relation targets, they managed to rout out four separate Maiyosh-jin nests on uncharted worlds. The locations had been given up with great eagerness by worlds anxious to save their own hides. It was amazing and unnerving, however, just how many of the enemy strongholds held firm and refused to talk. Only three worlds of the first twenty his fleet laid siege to in those first weeks had given over their loyalty to the Red Prince in the blind terror of staring the end of their world in the face. None of these worlds yielded a scrap of information as to the whereabouts of Jeiyce himself.

On each world that collaborated and led him to a nest of Maiyosh-jin rebels, he left behind a garrison of a thousand soldiers to hold the planet under martial law. This he did to better motivate the next world his forces called upon. If they knew that the Saiyan no Ouji would remain true to his word and spare their worlds should they talk, each new system would be far more likely to spill all they knew to save themselves.

On the sixth week of his campaign, they struck such a Maiyosh-jin colony. And found something new. The base was more of a hidden bunker, comprised of more than 90% non-combatants. Children and weaklings, in other words. He hung behind in his flagship while he sent ten squads to blast everything that stirred on the planet below, fulfilling his father's command to utterly exterminate the Maiyosh-jin as a race. He had grown to detest these kinds of raids. There was no challenge and no honor to be found in mass butchery of enemies who could not defend themselves. It was demeaning to a true warrior, and abysmally boring. Like hunting squealing, toothless game. The clarion call came in less than twenty minutes after the battalion made planetfall, a choked, guttural cry over a comm link that made no sense.

"Can't fly...can't see....Everywhere!"

Vegita slammed his fist through the comm console and whirled, heading for the lift that led to the drop hatch in the belly of the ship, with Articha bitching at him every step of the way.

"Ouji-sama, this is an unknown situation!" She said harshly. "You cannot rush headlong into the face of what may be another volley of plasma nukes or some even more deadly technology!"

"Our scanners detected no radiation signatures on the surface," he snapped. "I will not sit idly by while my men are gutted!"

Seven minutes. It could not have taken him an instant longer to arrive at the scene of the battle that was already over. And he found that the enemy, an undefended colony of babes, geriatrics and weaklings, had slaughtered all but a handful of the seventy warriors sent to dispatch them. And then simply vanished. Or so he thought, until the call came from the bridge of his point troop carrier, crackling inside his scouter through a wedge of static. The scanners had picked up a hyper light signature. Then another...then another. Ships jumping to hyper light speed all around his fleet, whipping past them unseen by the eye or his ships' scouting equipment.

He roared with rage like a maddened Oozaru, blasting the world beneath him to smoldering grist as the Elites from his own royal squad dodged back from his anger, bearing the few, bloody survivors from the ground before Vegita set the planet's atmosphere alight with a heat blast, flash frying the world and everything on it, still spitting with fury.

He was no calmer as he watched the medics labor ever the half dozen men who had survived the ambush, not one of whom looked as though he would survive the night.

"What manner of weapon did they use, soldier?" He asked the bloody squad commander on the surgery bed. The man looked to be in better shape than any of his fellows.

"Never saw, my prince...Invisible..." The warrior whispered. "Hit us...looked like a simple beam cannon blast. Nobody even thought to dodge. It was like...having your Ki ripped out of your head. We fell out of the sky...couldn't fly. And then the old men and brats took us out with blaster rifles." He laughed weakly. "Clever little bastards...." His eyes lost focus and his breath stopped.

Vegita cursed softly. His rage had burned down into something calm, cold and deadly. He had been played for a fool. He had been defeated...again.

"The pellets again," Articha muttered, almost under her breath. He glanced at her sharply. "That is why we detected no ships on approach," she went on urgently. "They must have had an escape contingent of ships hidden with that miniaturization technology. And now it seems those pellets were not the end of their new technology."

"Invisibility shields," Vegita snarled. "And...Ki rupturing weapons."

"It is not good," she said grimly. "I have never seen such a thing. Though when I was a girl, men said that the Tsiru-jin had something similar. A thing that could shield a warrior from his own Ki, and render him helpless. We must inform your father of this new weapon, Ouji-sama."

"Send out a hyper wave message to all our garrisons and colony worlds," Vegita added, as a cold thought struck him. "It is good that the bulk of our off world Saiyan colonies are moon locked worlds. Oozaru strength does not need Ki."

Articha paled slightly. "But the change dulls the wits. And a soldier cannot easily fight what he cannot see."

"Mousrom says there are whispers of some secret 'mastertech'," his father told him an hour later as he sat before the hyper wave screen, frowning at the fuzzy image of the king's glowering face. "Whoever he is, he is well-hidden. Not a breath of a whisper as to the location or identity of this mysterious weapons wright had reached the ears of Intelligence. I suspect we will find him when we find the Red Prince. Were I Maiyosh, I would keep such a treasure close." A pause, then his father growled angrily. "I am sending 100,000 more troops to aid you in your search, boy. And another 500,000 to strengthen the off world garrisons and colonies defenses." Defenses. The very word seemed to stick in his father's throat, and brought back the mad, animal rage Vegita had felt earlier that day. Machines that put a Saiyan warrior on the defensive, that laid his fighting power to waste so completely he could be killed by a brat with a blaster rifle. Whom he could not even strike at, because he could not see them. "This is all out war now, boy," his father went on. "The thing all your generation has spent its entire life pining for is here."

"We will win," Vegita said, unaccountably unnerved by the almost imperceptible shadow of worry in his father's eyes.

"In strength alone, we are unmatchable," Ottoussama muttered, "but this is quickly becoming a war of wits and clever machines. Watch your back, boy. Your reinforcements will join you in two days time."

They sacked thirty more targets in as many days, without pausing to rest, without asking for a shred of information from those they slew. Vegita split his new armada of ships and men into six fleets, sending them to separate sections of the Empire, so that the hard hand of their Saiyan masters might be felt everywhere at once by any who would think of joining with the rebels. And as they moved from system to system like gods of death, burning everything that lay in their path, word of attacks on Saiyan outposts and Saiyan inhabited worlds came, sporadically at first, then daily. And Vegita found that he had only banked the black rage that had taken him on that nameless Maiyosh-jin base world. Each new world his forces greeted saw it flare to near madness again as he recalled how he had been played for a fool, as he pictured the hundreds of thousands, grown to millions now, of his people slain by the enemy's cowardly ambush attacks. He began to order his ships to hang high above each world, just on the cusp of space, while he personally summoned up the kind of energy blast only one in ten million Saiyan warriors could muster. Core bomb, the purging squads called it, a blast that sank to the center of a planet and broke it apart from the center out.

After a week of this, having calmly watched him vent his fury, Articha tactfully suggested that perhaps they should again begin to demand information from those who awaited their fates upon the planet's surface. Behind them, rose the low, viscous rumbles of his flag ship's command crew. His warriors wanted blood for blood. Three colony worlds had fallen to the enemy in the last seven days. Ten million Saiyan lives, felled by cowards hiding behind invisibility shields, their Ki laid waste, their bodies blown to bits by simple pulse cannons an instant later. But Vegita knew she spoke sense. He soon found that his month long killing spree had not been such without its tactical advantages. The very next world his fleet approached nearly fell over themselves to give him the location of three separate Maiyosh-jin bases.

They took each base with a carefully staged attack that gave the enemy no chance to bolt or prepare. No one had yet captured a live enemy, but in the heat of a pitched battle against the first of these Maiyosh-jin hideaways, Articha devised a baiting tactic, an edge to use against the unseen. The enemy could not move quickly or use Ki themselves without being detected by scouters. Firing a volley of power in the general direction that a Ki-killing blast usually yielded up a number of corpses, and blew their invisibility machines to bits along with their bodies. The scraps of the weapons, he sent to Vegita-sei to be dissected by his father's techs, but the bodies…they were not Maiyosh-jin. Not all of them. There were Serulian, Corsarians, Canid-jin, and two score other races, strewn across the charred battle fields. All bearing the devilish little invisibility belts, all wielding the 'Ki Killers', as his men had begun to call them almost fearfully.

Nine of ten worlds his fleets had fallen upon in the last weeks were taken completely at unawares. But one in ten…One in ten, they found vacated. Their entire sentient population simply fled without a trace.

"There is no way to tell where they have gone," Articha told him, her scarred face twisted in frustration she would never have displayed before his men. They had come to Avaris-sei with high hopes of finding some truly relevant information. The Avaris-jin had been mercantile allies with Maiyosh House since time out of mind. Now the two of them stood upon a mountainous peak and surveyed the ghost world and the empty city that lay spread out before them. He had wished to see this with his own eyes, had refused to believe that such a thing was possible in the space of twenty-nine hours. One day ago, this world had held a population of roughly three billion people. "There are hundreds of thousands of inhabitable worlds out there, my prince," Articha went on. "It will be like hunting a single grain of dirt in the grasslands of the Southern steppe!" She cursed softly, her long raven hair whipping in the high winds. To the east, a great storm was building. "I sometimes wonder---" She stopped herself, the strong, handsome lines of her high cheekbones drawn down in a deep frown.

"Tell me true, General," he said quietly. "What is it you wonder?"

She grinned faintly, something the older woman rarely did. "Something that is perhaps both seditious and blasphemy. I wonder if we are unwise to have held the Madrani and other craftwise races in such contempt. It is an old, old tenant of strategy to manipulate one's opponent into underestimation, and thus, over-stepping himself. " She shook her head with grim admiration. "Every battle, every war, is unique, my Prince. But I am constantly amazed how one hand, one individual, can turn the tide of any struggle. In this case, not with raw strength, but with cleverness. The master engineer the enemy harbors, this one person---who is very probably someone we would overlook as a weakling and view as no threat at all---is the true author of every loss the Empire has suffered in the last months. Whoever he or she is, this one person is a far greater threat to Vegita-sei than Jeiyce of Maiyosh will ever---" She broke off, her entire body frozen in a posture of shock, her normally impassive face paling. "Ouji-sama! We have been fools! If this master tech could devise

miniaturization pellets to fit an entire space ship in the palm of my hand, he could just as easily craft an invisibility shield to cloak an entire planet! Perhaps even the combined Ki's of the inhabitants and---!"

A thick beam of luminous energy flared to life from a hidden cradle in the valley below them, streaking upward to its target high overhead, bursting into an incandescent shower of light and noise. Then another, followed by a screaming burst of deafening static roaring through their scouters. They never had time to react. A blade of icy, numbing weakness struck them both and Vegita felt the world torn away from him.

He woke to the sound of desperate struggle and harsh male laughter. He tried to raise his head to see where he was, to see what was happening around him, but he could barely move. He was in a dark room, lying upon a cold, metallic floor in a pool of his own blood and sweat. Something icy and sickening seemed to be wrenching at the deepest part of him, tearing away his fighting power and physical strength. Somewhere nearby, he could hear Articha's voice choking and cursing, and the sound of labored breathing.

"This room is shielded by Tsiru-jin Ki-dampers, little Prince," a man's voice said lightly. "It's an old Tsiru-jin technology Maiyosh House bought off Cold-sama before the whole slithery race up and died a while back." Vegita made some sort of gasping animal noise as the face of Jeiyce of Maiyosh moved into his line of vision. "Feeling a little weak, are we?" That mocking laughter that had haunted his dreams since Shikaji rippled through the echoing walls of the dark prison.

"I will kill you!" Vegita tried to shout, but his breath failed him, along with his strength, and he collapsed back onto the floor.

"You won't do shit, boyo," Jeiyce said coldly. "You monkeys have been busy, haven't you? Must make you feel like quiet a little man to have killed nearly 50 billion people in less than four months." The man smiled amiably at him. "I won't try to make you understand. Never try to reason with drunkards or rabid animals, my foster father always said. But cheer up, laddie! You're not going to die. Neither you nor that fine looking lady general in the next cell. I'm going to use the pair of you to give your dear old dad a taste of what he's been dishing out, lo these many years. To my people. To all the peoples unfortunate to come in contact with your abomination of a race. Let him learn how it feels to have your children butchered, your women raped to death or beaten down into cringing whores, your sons tortured and broken until they grovel on their bellies like canines. I've given your companion a new occupation---battalion whore for my men. Most of them have lost their wives, mothers or daughters to Saiyan hands, one way or another. They're very anxious to return the favor." Vegita spat out a round of curses, trying to rise, trying to fling himself at the man before him. "And you, Prince Vegita…I will see you weep like a child for me to kill you. Before I'm done with you, I'll see you belly crawl and call me master like a good little slave. And when I send the two of you back to Vegita-ou, mad and broken, maybe he'll understand some small part of what he and his Master Inquisitor have done to my people!"

"Fuck…you," Vegita hissed, trying to close his ears against the noises drifting over from the next cell, the knowledge of what must be happening to Articha. That these red bastards should dishonor a warrior of Vegita-sei so---!

"Sorry," Jeiyce said. "You're not my type." His face went blank for a moment, devoid of all the false good humor. "I used to be a good man, you know. The kind of man who would have killed someone for doing what I'm about to do to you. For what my men are doing to your companion right now." Then he shrugged as though it were nothing. "Well…I guess a sentence in Hell is a small price to pay if I can wipe your race out of existence. Let's get started, shall we?"

They left no external marks on his body. No one even drew his blood…no one except Vegita himself. He did not sleep in all the time they held him in that dark metal pit, though he lost consciousness again and again. At first, anyway. After it became apparent that he was gaining some small measure of strength and mental rest each time he passed out, they began to inject him with shock stims. And even that brief oblivion was taken from him. They took his torture in shifts, around the clock. Jeiyce, a fat pinkish-orange Aquir-jin named Dodoria, and a nameless Corsarian whom Jeiyce informed him had been a doctor before a Saiyan warrior had ripped out his tongue. No sleep, no rest, no dreams…Unless he counted the hallucinations that began on his third or forth week without so much as a wink of rest.

He saw his woman most often, beautiful and warm, standing in a green field over-flowing with flowers, smiling at him distantly. Her face was like a beacon of comfort and rest that he could never seem to reach no matter how hard he tried. Sometimes his father seemed to be wandering in a fog, searching for him, calling his name…and in the end, giving him up for dead. Nappa, cold and bloodless, a gaping hole in his chest, telling him to be strong.

As the weeks began to draw out, sleepless pain and the mocking, tireless hatred of his tormentors his only companions, he began to lose touch with time and reality more and more often. Sometimes he would think he was very young, almost too young to stand unaided, and he would begin to shriek for Nappa-sensei to make the hurt stop. Just for a moment, just for half a second. But Nappa was dead, and he knew, when his senses returned, that the pain would never end.

They were terribly inventive in the things they did to him. Neural disruption shots and cerebral manipulators strapped around his chest and skull gave him the false sensation of any sort of agony within the reach of their imagination, without harming him physically in any way. With the correct sequence of brain stimulus and neuro injections, he would imagine and feel any sort of torment they could conceive of as though it were real. But as bad as it was, all this he might have born, might have fought and held firm against it. If they had only let him sleep…

Week after week, that bled into months, wore him down, frayed the edges of his sanity, and stripped away his resistance with his pride, one agonizing ounce at a time. Sometimes, in his more lucid moments, he could hear Articha's voice, growling and sobbing, mere meters away. On one occasion, he managed to raise his head enough to see her through the bars of the next cell, and he saw---he saw her, naked, pinned beneath the grinning man on top of her, her mouth a gaping, silent scream. And as he looked on, the image blurred and shifted, and…oh gods…And he saw himself moving upon his woman as she struggled helplessly, battering into her over and over as she tried to scream without the benefit of a voice. He rolled on his side, wretching, sobbing like a child, screaming soundlessly. His own voice had deserted him early on, as he shrieked his vocal chords to bloody shreds. Was this what it felt like to be Silenced, he wondered, shaking and curling into a ball, trying to make himself small. If he became small enough, maybe they would leave him alone.

They did not leave him alone. If anything, their efforts after that first spate of tears became more vigorous as they sensed he was approaching some sort of breaking point. They began to use other devices, new machines, that hurt in different ways. That hurt worse. That hammered through the last of his control, that left him sobbing for Nappa-sensei, for Ottoussama to come save him, to make them stopstopstop…

Jeiyce began to speak to him then, kindly, like an older warrior would speak to a young soldier he had known since boyhood. "It's not a big thing, laddie. Just a word or two, and then you can take a little rest. Wouldn't it be nice to stop all the nasty hurting and take a nice long nap?" Vegita nodded weakly. It would be nice. He couldn't think of anything nicer, in fact. "Just say it like a good lad, do as I tell you…and you can sleep." He moved his lips, trying to frame words, but no sound would come out.

"Hmm…" The Red Prince murmured. "I guess you wouldn't have much of a voice left. I've got another idea." Jeiyce told him his idea."

"Saiyan no Ouji!" Articha's voice, raw and broken, sliced through the haze around his mind. "Remember who you are!"

"Shut that bitch up!" Dodoria boomed harshly at someone he couldn't see.

Vegita drew in a deep, shaky breath…And spat in the Red Prince's face. A black boot connected with his head and he sank into blessed, blessed night.

The roused him moments later, cursing angrily. And they began again.

He held onto himself for a long time after that. Held onto his will and his pride and his hatred for them. He did not know how much longer it was. But at some point, time washed away from him. His name slipped from his grasp next, and with it his will and his memory of who he had been. In the end, there was only the pain.

And then Jeiyce told him once more what he must do to make the pain stop. To sleep. Was the smiling red man his friend, he began to wonder? He must be. He was telling him how to make the hurting go away.

"That's it, laddie," the friendly, red-skinned man told him encouragingly as he crawled inch by torturous inch to where the other man stood. "Just a little farther. You can do it." He reached his destination with a grateful sob, and did the simple task that the red-skinned man said would make everything better. He placed his lips on the shiny black boots of the Red Prince and kissed them.

He slept each night in peace. Sometimes he dreamed strange things. His master told him these were fantasies from the brain fever he had barely survived. The memory of that pain was something his very soul wanted to cringe away from. Whenever he tried to sift through those fragmented dreams, to make sense of them, the pain would come, quailing any lingering bits of curiosity. They gave him medicine daily to keep the fever from returning. It made him feel sluggish and confused, the same way the belt he wore around his waist day and night made him feel terribly weak. But it was better than the illness. Sometimes the orange man came to his cell and beat him for no reason. Sometimes others came with him. They told him he had been an evil man, a son of an evil race, and that the beatings were his just deserts, a thing he must endure. His master explained that they were teaching him to be less evil. That didn't seem to make sense, but he couldn't think clearly enough to puzzle out why. It didn't really matter though. Each night they would leave him in peace, and he would sleep until he woke feeling rested and at peace.

On the second week after the fever in his brain broke, he woke with a terrified cry as a deafening boom sounded in the sky, lighting up the night. He shrank back in his cell, listening to the noises grow louder and louder, hearing the sound of harsh shouts and running feet overhead. As he sat shivering and sobbing in the darkness, a woman's voice began to speak to him gently. To call him by a name. He shrank away from her, further into the back of his cell, away from that name and the memory of the pain that lay entwined with it. Heavy footsteps were coming down the corridor, slowing apprehensively. A moment or two of dead silence, then the sound of a man's harsh sob.

"Beloved…oh gods…"

"Turna…"The woman whispered, her voice paper thin. "Do not let them see me. I will not be pitied."

"Out!" Another man's deep voice roared. "Get the hell out of here, all of you! If one of you repeats to a living soul how we found her, I'll give the whole lot of you to Mousrom!" He shivered and whimpered faintly at the familiar sound of that voice.

"Sire…" They were right outside his cell. He scrambled back to the wall as the footsteps drew near.

"Look at me, boy," the harsh voice said. He raised his head and looked into the eyes of the bearded man who knelt before him. A spear of memory drove into his mind and with it came the pain. He shrank back and began to shriek, sobbing with terror. Strong arms caught him, held him as he tried to escape. "My son…" The man whispered, his voice unsteady. "My son…" Something struck him hard and he slept again.

"No one will see him other than the three of you," the bearded man's voice as saying somewhere through a thick fog. "I have let it be known only that he and Articha were near death when we found them. The three of you, Turna and myself alone know the full truth." A tired rumble of a sigh." He will either return to his senses or he will not. Do not leave his side, girl. I have some idea of how overly attached he was to you. Your presence may help to bring him out of this---this---"

"I won't leave him. Ou-sama," a girl's voice said softly. It was beautiful, like something he had once dreamed about.

"I will give him a month to come back to us. If he does not..." A long pause. "If he does not, I will put him down myself." A heavy, callused hand on his face, drawn through his hair, like a warm memory forgotten since earliest childhood.

Her name was Bulma and she was as beautiful as her voice. She had a baby son that she carried with her everywhere she went. Sometimes she and Bardock would argue about that. The big, frowning scar-faced warrior seemed to think she was spoiling the boy, making him dependent on her by always keeping him in her arms. Bulma gave him an odd, wary look the first time he asked if he could hold the boy himself, but slowly sat the child in his arms. He regarded the yearling baby with curiosity and a little fascination. He was sure he had never been this close to a child this young, though he could not say how he knew this. The boy stared back up at him and smiled toothlessly, and Vegita grinned back, laughing delightedly.

His name was Vegita, they told him---Bulma, Bardock, and the soft-spoken golden-skinned Doctor Scopa. He didn't remember that. He didn't remember anything at all except that it was agony whenever he tried to remember. Doctor Scopa said his mind and spirit just needed time to rest. When he was strong enough, rested enough, he would remember everything.

They were in a big house on the edge of an endless, rolling expanse of hills and grasslands that stretched out as far as the eye could see. Bardock said this was his home. Vegita thought it was beautiful and told him so. The solemn-faced soldier thanked him quietly. He seemed to avoid Vegita's company whenever it was possible, as though Vegita made him very uncomfortable, but he liked the sad-eyed man anyway.

On his tenth day in the house of Bardock, he dreamed of his forgotten past for the first time. He saw himself at the center of a hellish firestorm of violence and death, a storm of his own making. He saw himself bathed in the blood of his enemies. And with these terrifying images came the horror of a pain that was never-ending, a waking nightmare where he would never sleep again. He woke choking, his voice seizing in his throat, unable to scream or make a sound. He lay weeping softly, curled into a fetal ball in his bed, as the memory slowly receded. A soft click of the door opening, and Bulma sat down beside him, stroking his head gently until the tears stopped. He stared up at her, at her half-lit, porcelain face, and...An entirely different set of memories flooded in. If her in his arms, soft and warm and too sweet for words, as he moved within her, as he made her sigh with pleasure...

"I remember..."

"What?" She whispered quietly.

"You." He gathered his courage to ask his next question. "Were we...Are you my mate?" How painful must it be for her, if they had been wed and he didn't even remember her?

But she slowly shook her head. "No...we were...we.."

"Lovers then?" His breath seemed caught in his chest when she smiled, looking relieved. She nodded.

"Will you stay with me?" He whispered. She didn't reply, only gently disengaged herself and pulled her night shift over her head, crawling into the bed beside him. She was warm and naked, her arms wrapped around him, and she kissed him softly. She seemed to be waiting for him to do something more. His heart skipped a beat as he suddenly realized everything that 'more' might entail.

Her body felt willing and eager against his, she was almost trembling with desire for him. But…an image, another harsh flash of memory, of a Saiyan woman's face, twisted in agony and sickened shame, curdled the want building inside him. So, he only kissed her back, almost shyly. "Thank you," he said shakily. They slept.

His mind grew stronger, sharper, less childlike as the days passed. He discovered Scopa's collection of medical books and galactic histories and began to make his way slowly through the entire library. The historical accords of Vegita-sei were not a pleasant read, but he pored through the tomes end to end. This was his world, the Saiyan were his people, and he knew nothing about them accept minuscule odd bits of memory that filtered through the veil around his past. Bardock had told him what had happened to him.

He was a crown prince of his people, the heir to a great empire, and he had been leading a war against Vegita-sei's enemies. For a long while, the Empire had thought that their Maiyosh-jin enemies were moving whole worlds full of people over night. It was now known that they had used unimaginably complex halo-projection arrays couples with a new invisibility technology. They had simply lain low on most of the worlds the Saiyan's had thought vacated, and hidden, trusting the greed of Vegita-sei for rich worlds to keep the Saiyans from blowing the seemingly empty planet to bits. As they slowly acquired the resources to mass produce these defensive weapons, the Maiyosh-jin began to distribute them to their allies first, then to any world that asked. Given the window of time that the camouflage machines afforded them, most worlds managed to evacuate in reality over the space of a month or so.

Avaris-sei had been a carefully laid trap. The Red Prince---Vegita fought to keep from trembling at the sound of that name---had known through his own intelligence sources that Avaris-sei was one of Vegita's prime targets. Jeiyce had simply camped out on that camouflaged world and waited for Vegita to arrive. They had blown his war ships and troop carriers out of the sky with plasma torpedoes, and taken Vegita and his general Articha alive with their Ki-Killers, all unseen. He and Articha had only been found because of the general's moonbond with her mate Turna. The Royal Statistician had tracked her slowly but surely across the breadth of light years through the bond they shared, leading Saiyan forces after months of searching, to the hidden base world where Vegita had been found. Each evening, he sat on the sill of the hearth beside Bardock and the two of them listened intently to the toll of losses the Empire was taking on a daily basis now. During the six months of Vegita's captivity, a simple war of resubjegation had become a war for survival, in which Vegita-sei was fighting for her life alone against every sentient race in the Empire. The garrisoned slave worlds had risen up, ushering the Red Demons into their systems, back-stabbing their overlords. The attacks on colony worlds were growing closer and closer to Vegita-sei itself each passing day.

The one good bit of news was that no new super weapons had surfaced in more that ten months. Some rumors held that Jeiyce's secret weapons smith had perished in some random skirmish. The king, however, was not of that opinion.

"Maybe he's just tired of all the killing," Bulma suggested thoughtfully one evening. Vegita's father eyed the girl on the other side of the chess board shrewdly. The King would come to visit the isolated back country house unannounced once every few days to see how Vegita's 'mending' was progressing. The grief shadowed behind the grim, bearded man's cold eyes whenever he looked on his son and saw no recognition there made Vegita want to turn away in shame. He knew what had happened. He had a pretty good idea anyway, and occasional horrific flashes of memory. The Prince of Maiyosh had...broken him. Taken his pride, his memory, even his name, and left him this...this man with no past who started at even the mention of his torturer's name. He knew that he had been left alive to be rescued out of deliberate malice. And worse, that if the Red Prince had killed him outright, it would have grieved his father less than seeing Vegita as he was now.

Vegita folded the book he had been reading, one of Bardock's medical science treatises from the Imperial scientific congress on his findings during a research mission to Tsiru-sei years ago. Everyone in this house seemed to know more about medicine than himself, with the exception of the baby Rom-kun and Bulma's dogs. One of the hounds loped happily along beside him as he moved to sit closer to the two opponents. On his first or second visit, Bulma had explained the game to Ottoussama one time. His father had nodded curtly and beaten her at her own game in half an hour. The King had been highly amused at the girl's sputtering reaction. Apparently she'd never lost a game in her life. Now she was on a vendetta. This game had lasted over an hour already.

"Tired of killing, girl?" His father snorted. "Is there such a thing?"

"It's an alien perspective, Ou-sama," she murmured. "I am an alien, after all."

Ottoussama took one of her rooks with a predatory smirk. "Give me some perspective in this man, then. I would know my enemy, the better to hunt him."

"Well..." Her brow furrowed, as she chose her words with care. She slew his bishop with her remaining knight as she spoke. "If he is not Maiyosh-jin himself, he very likely sought out this Jeiyce out of a wish for revenge. For his people, for his family. Possibly for himself. Whether he is working in hiding on one of the Maiyosh-jin rebel bases, or traveling with the Red Prince himself, he can't be oblivious to the carnage his inventions have caused. Many races find violence and bloodshed terrifying and painful, Ou-sama. Both to give as well of to receive. They may match Saiyan ferocity and bloodlust for a while if properly motivated, but after a while their revenge begins to wound them as deeply as their enemies. So, he may have lost his taste for it. Another possibility is that this man was...taken in by the Maiyosh-jin."

"Taken in?" His father seemed nonplused by such a suggestion. "This bastard has single handedly turned an paltry uprising into an all out war!"

"Think about the 'weapons' he constructed, Sire" she said, retreating her queen into a defensive posture as his own queen advanced. "He might have built each one of these devices thinking he was saving lives. They are all defensive in nature. Even the Ki-Killer guns are nothing more than an equalizer for races with no fighting power to speak of. Invisibility shields and halo projectors to hide civilians, or entire worlds, from the Empire's soldiers. Miniaturization technology to transport food and medicine, to hide get away ships. And plasma nukes are not his invention. They are an old Maiyosh-jin sin, a dirty weapon they've used many times in the past if you read their histories. Jeiyce's own techs simply took this mystery engineer's machines and combined them with other weapons to warp them into something truly deadly." She raised her clear blue eyes and met the hard black stare of her opponent across the table. "But that is only my humble, uninformed theory, Ou-sama. For all I know, this man may live each day of his life with no other hope than to destroy you and your entire race." She took his king with the pawn she had quietly maneuvered into enemy territory.

"Checkmate, Sire," she said meekly, eyes lowered.

His father stared at the board, then at the young woman before him in shocked silence. Then he burst out laughing, deep and hearty. "Another game, girl!"

"He'll be here every evening, now, Bulma," Vegita said with a poorly hidden grin. "In all the Empire, he can count on the fingers of one hand those who can best him in a game of strategy. Even Articha cannot---" He broke off, paling, his breath coming short.

"Boy?" His father was suddenly gazing into his face, eyes intent. And it was suddenly there, or pieces of it. A myriad of segmented images, jumpy and incomplete, memories of the mad before him. His father.

"Ottoussama," Vegita whispered. "You...you were standing at a stone bier on a mountain top, showing me the land that stretched out to the curve of the world. You told me my mother's ashes were strewn out over the whole of our planet's surface. That she was part of Vegita-sei now."

"It is true memory, boy," his father said. "You were not quite two years old, I think." One of Bulma's dogs ducked its head under the King's hand, fawning for affection. His father glanced down at it, growling irritably, and the animal retreated under Vegita's chair with a yip. It knew a pack leader when it saw one.

"I remember you," Vegita said again. His father gazed into his eyes a moment longer. But whatever he saw there brought that look again, the look of a man mourning a son who had suffered a fate worse than death.

"It is coming, Ou-sama!" Scopa told his father tensely, before the King took his leave of them that night. "A little at a time. He will come back to himself completely if he has enough time. But he will need longer than a month."

Vegita listened intently as the King made no reply at first. Rom-kun grabbed both his fingers for support and began toddling around him in a circle. Scopa and Bulma were outside the house with Ottoussama, just on the other side of the hearthroom walls, and he could hear their words clearly, though he doubted they knew that. One of Bulma's dogs raised its head and whined as Vegita-ou made a low growling noise deep in his throat. His father seemed to be choking on something, his energy was surging with a sickened, murderous fury at someone who was not present. At the man who had done this to his son.

"I sent a strong, fierce son to war. The strongest our race has seen in a thousand years. That gentle boy in there cannot follow me to the throne. And I will not see him live to be shamed and mocked by his own people!"

"He is making progress, Ou-sama," Bulma said.

"It is as I said from the first, Sire," Scopa added. "When it comes, it will most likely come all at once."

His father was silent for another long, tense moment. Then he made some sort of noise, a snarling agreement, and he was gone.

Much later, Bulma came to put Rom-kun down for the night. The boy had crawled into his lap as he sat reading by firelight and nodded off.

"He is ashamed of me," Vegita said softly as she took the baby from his arms. "That I was so weak. That I let them break me."

She shook her head. "He's just afraid you'll never remember who you were." Gods, she was so beautiful.

"I think I dreamed of you while they were torturing me," he whispered. "Waking dreams. Your face was like a light in a hell of darkness." He lowered his head, thinking of the words his father had used to describe him, the man he had been before. Strong and fierce. He was neither of those things now. He must seem like a walking shade of the son Ottoussma had been so desperately proud of. Of the man the woman before him must have loved.

"I---I want to tell Ottoussama that I could have stayed strong. I could have...no matter what they did to me. If they'd only let me s-sleep..." She put her arms around his shaking shoulders, holding him, kissing his face.

"There's no shame in it. Everyone has a breaking point, where their strength and will just gives out. We're all just flesh and blood...not gods."

He drew back, peering into her face. "Am I such a fool now? Is that why you don't want me? Because I am...not as I was. Not whole?"

"I do want you, Vegita," she said softly, putting her lips to his. But he pushed her back again, gently.

"No...You---your body wants me. But...you don't. Or you wish you didn't. I do not understand it."

She bit her lip, tears forming in her eyes. Finally she spoke again. "You're not a fool. And you are whole. You're just...you. As you would have been left to follow your own nature. You're the good man you might have been, if you hadn't been raised to be a---Oh Kami! I wish I had met you first!" She began to cry softly, kissing him again. "I think I could have loved you more than my own life if you had been like you are now."

"I was unkind to you?" He couldn't imagine it, but...he had no way of knowing if he had treated her well or ill.

"You..." Her face went still and thoughtful. "You were as good as you knew how to be."

His chest tightened. A more diplomatic and cryptic answer he could not have hoped to receive. He was a prince. He must have been arrogant and spoiled as many sons of the ruling houses in Scopa's histories seemed to be. He had most likely been a spoiled, arrogant lover as well. A thought, a question suddenly leapt into his mind, and with it a crushing wave of pain and nausea. The picture of a woman's face, half-obscured by her tangled raven hair, screaming as---He doubled over, nauseous and gasping.

Oh gods...Articha....

"Where is Articha?" He asked tremulously, when he could speak again. He shut his eyes, trying to wipe the images from his mind. Bulma paled to bloodless white, and did not answer.

"She is dead," he said bleakly. "It would have been almost impossible to survive---to survive what they did to her."

"It is possible." Her voice was suddenly so unaccountably cold, he flinched away from her. She stared at him blankly for a long time, then her face softened, her hand caressed his face. "Turna took her to one of their country estates to recover. She won't die. She says she won't give them the satisfaction of having destroyed her. She's a very strong woman."

He nodded solemnly. "I dream sometimes of fighting and killing. Of enjoying it. Even now, when I think of those memories, the thrill of battle seems to sing inside me. I think violence and love of battle must be bred into my blood and bones. I understand them. But I do not understand how a man could use a woman so."

She began to cry again, perhaps out of sympathy for Articha and her pain. He carried her to his bed, laying the sleeping baby between them, holding her until she slept herself. He realized, just before he nodded off, that he did not want to ever sleep again without her beside him.

Another round of days, then weeks passed. The cool winds from the mountain heights breezed away the oppressive heat of high summer. Rom-kun was walking now, running, following him everywhere and trailing behind Bulma's dogs like a tiny predator, trying to catch them and ride them. Vegita read when he pleased, sparred with Bardock each day at morning and dusk, and listened to Bulma and Bardock argue each night at supper. Mostly over the way Bulma was raising Bardock's son.

"You are warping him against the bent of his own nature, girl! How will I make a warrior of him after you've had four solid years to coddle him the way you're doing? He can barely speak, and he is already what the drill instructors in the children's barracks will deem abnormal!"

"That's because I pulled him out of his incubator before they shifted him to the infant conditioning unit, and then to the infant barracks!" She shot back, violently slicing the roast cardu-boar she was serving the men at the table. "This is what a Saiyan child is like naturally, when he hasn't had his head pumped full of subliminal aggression tapes for the first fucking year of his life!"

"Bulma..." Bardock said finally. "If, at four years of age, his drill instructors decide that he is defective mentally, or that he lacks the normal will to fight, they will put him down."

She froze, the knife in her hand aloft. She seemed on the point of flying at the scarred man across the table. Then she spoke coldly. "Then train him yourself, when he's old enough. It's your right as his father. Any Saiyan parent can assume his offspring's training personally if he wants, right? It's just that most warriors don't want to be bothered."

"Girl, I have---"

"You have a chance to make up for your sins, Bardock," she said in a soft voice. "Romayna-san said you would get a chance, that you'd know when you had earned her forgiveness. She was so close to death, she must have seen that Son-Kun's soul had come back to her in Rom-kun."

"Bulma..." Bardock said tiredly. "You are speaking madness."

"You didn't know Son-Kun, Bardock," she said emphatically. "I did! Everything about Rom-kun is the same, not just the fact that he's virtually identical physically. It's everything, from the way he smiles to the way he carried himself since he started to walk."

Bardock shook his head. "It is the same because both boys had the same parents."

Vegita and Scopa kept wisely silent on the matter, letting the two of them edge their way to a detante. Bardock would not agree for any amount of wealth that the boy was his second born son reborn. Bulma would not agree under any circumstances to curb her gentle, nurturing ways toward the child. Eventually they reached some sort of compromise, and Bardock began to train the boy in basic stances of fighting techniques.

He spent his evenings playing chess with Bulma, talking to her, listening to everything she would tell him about herself. Wishing with a kind of torn yearning that he could remember how it had been to be her lover. He knew now that the shadowed pain behind her eyes was from having lost her world, her people, to a Saiyan purge years ago. There was more to this story, something that neither she nor Bardock would tell him, and he suspected it had something to do with the scar-faced soldier's son, the one Bulma insisted had been reborn as Rom-kun. Bardock's second chance, she said cryptically. He wanted to know her, as he must have known her before, to relearn every turn and twist of her brilliant mind and rememorize every smile, frown and gesture. He asked her finally, late one night when the others had already gone to their beds, why she did not hate his people, all his people, if they had killed her race, purged her planet. The whole idea of purging sat ill with him, seeing it through the eyes of the victim, not the conquering warrior race.

She didn't answer at first. "I would have hated you all if I hadn't seen something almost immediately, a truth that most of your enemies don't want to think about. That you're not monsters. You're just men. Very, very strong, and so entrenched in your violent warrior culture that you can't see beyond the end of your own noses most of the time, but…The men who came and destroyed my world…they were friends. They loved each other like brothers, even though they'd never admit it in a million years. They loved their mates, and their children once they got to know them. They were…just people. Raised in a violent, murderous society, trained from the cradle to kill anything not Saiyan without turning a hair. But beneath all that, they were all like Rom-kun. Or like you."

"I am not a child," he said softly.

"No," she said softly, her eyes reflecting the flames of the glowing embers from the heart pit, reflecting the heat that was gathering inside him. "You're not a child."

"I want you," he said simply. "For all that I have forgotten, I have not forgotten that. But…I will wait. For a day when you want me, and that wanting does not bring you grief. " He kissed her, and went to seek his own bed.

Several mornings later, he found her in a state of near hysteria, tossing wires and metal and mechanical diagrams in all directions in the little work room she had set up for herself next to her bedroom. Bardock had left for the day, taking his son with him to accustom the boy to the sensation of flight.

"I guess it would be pretty sad," she said weepily. "A Saiyan child with a fear of heights, and I know I can't teach him those things, but…He's not been away from me for more than a few moments since---since Romayna gave him to me!"

"You should not stay in here," he said thoughtfully.

"Yeah?" She sniffled. "Why not?"

"You will destroy your…thing," he gestured vaguely at the bell-shaped medical machine she had already half dismantled in a less than gentle fashion. "Come with me. Outside for the day."

The fields were littered with tiny crimson flowers, moonflowers, Bardock called them. They walked all morning, making good time, even on foot, with her nervous anxiety to spur them on. Slowly, as she began to tire, she began to think more clearly, rather than simply feel, and she grew calmer. She began to take in the perfect day around her, and enjoy it.

By afternoon, they were lying side by side upon a low hillside, a few miles from Bardock's house. Her eyes seemed to reflect the perfect blue of the sky overhead. Her long hair was tangled in the grass beneath them.

"How did you..." He let the question trail off, thinking better of it. It might bring up painful memories for her.

"Don't start a question and not finish it, Vegita," she said tartly. He grinned, turning on his side to face her, propped up on one elbow.

"How did you breed the dogs if your world is gone?" He watched her face tense, saw the contentment wash away and cursed himself for a fool.

"My jacket," she said, turning to face him. "My parents kept dozens of animals at our estate. When Bardock brought me to Vegita-sei, I bagged the clothes I was wearing the day my world died, to sort of save them. A couple of years later, I realized that Vegita-sei had cloning technology far more advanced than Chikyuu's. I asked Bardock's wife, Romayna, to put the hairs from my clothes, animal hairs, into cryo-storage for me at Med Center. When I started working at Med Center, after you went away, I suddenly remembered that, and I grew two clones of Baka and Yaro, my dogs back on Chikyuu. I could have grown Scratch too, but...he was my father's cat. Poppa always kept a cat with him when he worked, a workshop cat to help him think better, he said. I think it would have made me cry every time I looked at him."

"You loved him greatly?"

"Yes..." She smiled sadly. "I loved him very much..."

"Bardock told me," he said pensively, "that I should never say such a thing to my father."

Her mouth twitched, perhaps visualizing such a scene, or trying to. "That you love him?" He nodded. She sobered, and regarded him seriously. "Don't. It's against Saiyan custom to say it aloud, or even openly admit to it. And it would only upset him if said said it."

"You are not Saiyan," he said, the words tumbling over his lips before he lost his courage. "Would it upset you if I said it to you?"

She stared at him, her face a mask of shock and indecision and---and emotions so complex and conflicting he could not put a name to any of them.

"I---I could love the man you are right now. Kami...I think I already do. But---but you won't stay this way! You'll go back to---to the way you were before!"

"I do not think that is possible," he said, tracing the furrowed line of her beautiful face with his hand. "I believe there is no way back to my memory of before Avaris except through Avaris---through J-Jeiyce," he stumbled over the name, but kept his eyes on hers. "When I do remember, as Scopa says I shall, when I have passed through that hell....Bulma, a man could not emerge from such a thing unchanged." His arms seemed to have wrapped themselves around her of their own will as he spoke, pulling her body slowly, gently against his. "I think I must have been a prideful, selfish lover to you. That I must have hurt you greatly. I am sorry for that. I must have been the basest sort of fool to take your lover for granted" His lips touched hers...

And it all seemed to happen at once. He was drowning in those sky-colored eyes, inside the heat that was blooming in his mind and body, so sweet it was almost agony. Their limbs were becoming entangled in a slow, lingering kiss that seemed to last an eternity. It was all hauntingly familiar, each soft sigh she uttered, every curve of her body, and all new at once. He did not press for more, only lay beside her, caressing her body through her clothes, holding her, as he kissed her again, and again, and again, until she made some sort of low demanding moan. She sat up, pulling his tunic over his head, her mouth trailing down his throat, as he began to pull at the light, flowing dress she wore. In another moment there was nothing between them, not a stitch of clothing separating his skin from hers. It all became a burning blur of soft warm skin and quickening need as she moved over him, touching him, her mouth and fragile, bird boned hands everywhere.

"Do you want this?" He asked softly, trying to look through her eyes, into her heart, almost weeping with joy as he saw the sweet, full smile that bloomed on her face.

"Yes…" She said. "Yes." Her arms were around him, legs encircling him, and then---He gasped and half-sobbed as he slid inside her. She moved above him, her eyes too bright, sparkling with unshed tears.

"Don't…" He tried to say, his voice a shuddering whisper, "I want you to be happy…" He inhaled sharply as she squeezed him gently, her warm tightness contracting around him. "…want to make you happy…I…" He sat up, wrapping her inside his arms, moving with her, building toward some sweet breaking point together.

"I am," she breathed against his lips. "Vegita…I…" She sobbed his name as the end crashed over her, through her, sweeping him over the edge with her like a tidal wave. They clung together like exhausted children, shaking and gasping. The sense of…rightness, that this, this, was how it should always be, struck him like a lightning bolt from the clear sky above them. That, somehow, it had had never been right, though he knew he had held her a hundred times before. And that having had this once, just one taste of how it could be, he would never again be able to settle for less.

"Bulma…" He raised his eyes to meet hers, his entire body and soul poured into the pale, insufficient words that only touched on the tiniest fraction of the meaning they were meant to convey. "I love you," he whispered, taking her face between his hands, his mouth against hers. "I love you…"

And it all came back in one shattering instant. His body went rigid, stone still with shock for a second or two. He cold not move, he could not breathe. His heart seemed to have lurched to a halt in his chest. Then he screamed. And screamed. As he had in that black steel pit where they had held him until his voice had frayed and bled and died. The full weight of memory crashed down on him like a thousand jagged shards of glass, slicing into the half-mended fabric of his wounded soul, each reflecting an image of the things they had done to him in that sleepless, unimaginably horror for half a year. Until he had shrieked like the maddened thing he had become at the mere sight of the Red Prince's face. Until he wept like a craven mongrel, pleading for them to stop, begging them to kill him. Until he crawled on his stomach to kiss the Maiyosh-jin's boots...He had broken in half, and all that remained of his self had poured out into his enemy's hands.

She was still holding him, speaking to him softly, while he wept as he had not since he could walk unaided. Another wave of recollection rushed in, and he convulsed under the new blow. He could feel it shifting and reshaping him as it came. Though nothing was the same. He had been right. He would never be as he had been before. He would never---

He saw her face, every memory of her, every instant since the first moment he had lain eyes on her in Raditz' house to this instant, and every second in between...and he wrenched away from her with a broken wail. He lay on his face in the tall red-petal strewn grass, sobbing softly. For her. For himself. For more things than he could give voice to if he lived a thousand years.

A soft hand touched him again, stroking his hair, caressing the back of his neck, still speaking to him gently. Slowly the words began to register with him. She turned him gently over on his back, brushing the tears from his face.

"What did you remember?" She asked softly.

"Everything..." He saw her face change, saw it grow blank, and felt her began to crumble inside with the loss of the man he had been moments ago.

"Do you..." Her face had begun to convulse with pain, as though he had somehow died. Perhaps in a way, he had. "Do you know who you are?"

"No," he said, watching her eyes begin to brim with a pitiful kind of hope. "I am Vegita who went to war to annihilate the Empire's enemies. I am Vegita who lay six months in a Maiyosh-jin dungeon tortured day and night until...until I was no one at all. I am Vegita who dwelt with you in the house of Bardock these three months. I am...I am all three men...and one. But I do not know who that man is." The words gave her no more comfort than they gave him. She turned slowly away from him, weeping as she must have wept for Raditz and her firstborn. Wept in Silenced agony each day as she built her little weapons on that green, sheer sloped island. That island that must lay housed in a place of horror in her mind, in the same way that black, steel Maiyosh-ijn cell would forever dwell inside him.

He knew he should let her cry herself out, that any comfort he might try to give would only mock her pain...because it came from him. But he could not stop himself. He could not hear her voice, breaking up in tearing sobs, and do nothing. He pulled her into his arms, and to his wonder, she clung to him as he rocked her naked body against his, until she was simply too tired to weep any more.

A long silence stretched out between them, broken only by the sound of their breath and the light winds sweeping in from the open plains.

"You win, Bulma," he said at last.

She turned in his embrace, gazing up at him. "Win?"

"The fool's 'game' we began before I went to war," he said hollowly. "When we each vowed to enslave the other's heart. You are the victor, woman. You will not hear me give it voice again, but...I meant the---the words I spoke. I still do. And I know that should we both live until the sun above us burns cold and dies, you will never feel the same. I did not understand that before, or even why. I do now."

"And I swore I'd use your love to destroy you," she said thoughtfully. "But I wonder...if the man I made that promise to isn't destroyed already. You're right. You aren't the same now.

"The man I was two hours ago had your heart, did he not?" He whispered.

"Yes..." She said just as softly. "But he's gone now."

"And now..." He shook his head despairingly. "You could no more care for me than I could take the Red Prince as my sworn brother. There is no road back from that launch pad where Raditz and your son died. And no road away from that island in the Western Sea where we began."

She seemed to be thinking, wracking her mind, scouring her heart for something to give him hope, for some way back to what she had given him with all her heart a few scant hours ago. "Maybe there is," she said hesitantly.

"Tell me."

She fixed him with a stare that seemed to flicker between deathly coldness and a banked furnace of sweet warmth. The unattainable warmth of her heart. "Give me back everything you took from me," she said steadily. "If you can understand what it was you took, if you can overcome your pride enough to give it back...then...then maybe I'll be able to see the man I loved this morning inside the man you are now."

He closed his eyes, swallowing down the spate of angry, demanding words, swallowing the knee jerk impulse to grab her, to shake her, to command her to give him what he so desperately needed from her. It would not work. And if it was not freely given, it was as sickening and twisted as those moments when he had kissed Jeiyce of Maiyosh's boots and called him master. But...oh gods...he did not even know where to begin.

A crowing, piping voice, followed by an answering canine yip and a faint spike of Bardock's Ki warned him they would soon have company.

"Mommma!" The boy came tearing over the flowering moors, just as they managed to pull their clothes back on in a hurried rumpled fashion. The brat's father came trailing behind him, carrying the carcass of a cho-deer slung across one shoulder.

"Edeeeta!" The boy cried, mangling his name, barreling into his arms, embracing him in a fashion he would have thought impossible for a Saiyan child.

His woman had frozen, her face a still mask of veiled fear. Bardock had paused as well, from his stance on the crest of the hill above them, sensing the difference in his Ki. The man was poised like an arrow in a bow, ready to spring forward and give his life for the child if need be. A year ago, he would have found the man's reaction impossible to fathom, the mark of a sentimental weakling and a fool. Vegita slowly pealed the brat off his chest and held him up in both hands, studying the boy with a puzzled frown while Bulma's son continued to babble about "Fy-yin' all day wit Toussan."

The memory of how he'd lain beside his woman with this cub nestled between them, feeling an unthinking acceptance of such a thing as normal and natural, feeling a kind of peace he doubted he would ever have again---It was nauseating to the man he had been, an image he might have slain both the boy and the woman to erase from his mind one year ago. To the man he was now...he did not know. There were too many changes to take inventory of in so short a time, too many conflicting impulses raging in side him to be sure of anything. He would have to learn to know this stranger he had become. But one thing had not changed, he decided with an internal snarl of defiance at the years of reactive conditioning that told him he should hurl this warm, squirming thing in his hands away with a violent, vicious curse. He would do as he wished. He would make his own law and custom, as he wished, and pity the man who tried to gainsay him. Slowly, very slowly, he sat the boy in the crook of one arm, and turned his gaze to meet Bulma's.

"Sleep in Med Center when you wish, or in my bed when it pleases you. Bring the boy to my house when you come. I will not have my foster son sleep alone at Med Center with only that Madrani Scopa to attend him." He fought the surge of hope that burst inside him as he saw the brief, brilliant spark of warmth flare in her blue eyes as he spoke. The unspannable chasm that lay between them would not be bridged overnight. He was seeking the path across in the darkness without so much as a map to guide him.

Vegita grunted disdainfully, and she uttered a soft laugh at his next words. "The brat might be permanently damaged by such company and grow to become a physician."

* * * * *

(COMING SOON: Chapter III: The war comes to Vegita-sei, Mourom is closing in on the identity mysterious "mastertech", and Vegita finds he's not as recovered as he thought---He can't bring himself to kill anymore.)