World Enough and Time
By: Lisalu

  

Prologue

  

She stood looking at the blackened skies, her young face a mask of agony and abject despair that made her look a full decade older than someone three months shy of her nineteenth birthday. Her eyes panned over the scorched panorama of dead world below. Nothing stirred. Nothing breathed. Nothing was left alive anywhere on the planet that had been a lush, green garden only this morning. There was no measure for shock and grief of this magnitude. Momma, Poppa, Son-kun…Yamcha…

"We will have revenge," said the man who towered beside her. The dark slanted brows, the familiar cast of features so unnerving on a stranger's face, drew together as he strove to mask his emotions, reliving through her his own pain and loss. Helpless and completely incapable of weeping as she did now. It made him look much younger than he was for a brief moment.

"When we find Namek, we won't need to," she whispered. "We can bring them all back. My people, your people, everyone."

He snorted, his disbelief in things as seemingly miraculous and contrary to the physical laws of the universe---what he had always been taught to be the physical laws anyway---evident in the nearly immobile cast of his dark expression. "If you 'Kami-sama' spoke the truth…"

An alarm beeped, shrill and warning. She steered their little ship---a cobbled junk heap of spare parts from the wreckage of two Saiyan space pods and one prehistoric Namekian explorer---around, cutting behind the shadow of the moon, out of sight and away from the battle cruiser that swept by them without notice, lazily making its way back into deep space. Perhaps they had not been seen. Or perhaps they were just beneath notice. "Why…why would they take Son-Kun alive? If they came to Chikyuu to exterminate him simply because he was Saiyan, why didn't they just kill him?"

The man beside her glowered, anger and a seething hatred rolling off him in an almost visible wave, the rise in the coiled power of his enormous ki so evident she could feel it even with her limited senses. "As a display animal perhaps…maybe to torture to death slowly…I don't know. Damn the addle-minded brat to hell for not listening to me when I told him how dangerous and strong the Ginyu Force really was!" He breathed in and out deeply, controlling the emotions roiling inside his great chest with effort. Kami, he was a big man…

"Son-kun couldn't have set by and let them kill Krillan and…and Yamcha and done nothing," she said softly. "And he never…I don't think it ever occurred to him once in all the time I knew him that there was anything he couldn't do. Or any fight he couldn't win if he tried hard enough."

The man's grim visage deepened. "His blood runs true, for all that he's forgotten who and what he is…I don't know what they'll do with him, but…there are rumors. In the three years since Frieza destroyed Vegita-sei,

we've gathered allies from every quadrant of the galaxy to rally against Tsiru-sei for this war. It is said by some that he has a team of scientists trying to develop a super-race of mindless warriors to serve him, using Saiyan DNA. Frieza has methodically wiped out every base, colony world, slave world and pod seeded system he could find, and taken prisoners in almost every instance. We have also heard tales that he was given a prophecy foretelling his death at Saiyan hands. That may be true. What is certainly true is that he has sought our race out and killed us wherever he could find us. Even to the point of sending his death squads to outlying worlds on the outer spiral arms to kill third class castaways like Kakarott. Though why he would send his best crack team of killers after one half-grown boy is beyond me." He cursed softly and turned to regard her intently, watching the dull shock playing around the edges of her eyes, remembering how he had stumbled blind and half-insane through the charred rubble of his own world, weeping like a mewling infant. She saw him shudder involuntarily, saw him push down feeling and memory and all outward signs of this empathy for her and her world, feelings he could not have conceived of four years ago. "Dream of your magic dragon balls, girl. Believe or think whatever you have to to keep going. But if you can craft the constructs you say you are capable of building, things like the weapon that killed Berta, and Guldo, then perhaps when we storm the Ice Palace of Tsiru-sei together, we will find Kakarott and many others there alive." One giant hand caught her chin and tilted her head up, as he watched her eyes fill with tears once again. "You can be as strong as you have to." It all broke inside her, the terror and the loss and the grinding pain of this week, that had begun with the arrival of the man before her, and the band of killers who had followed on his heels. The Ginyu Force had made planetfall less than an hour after he had bluntly announced himself, his mission, and the alien origins of the stunned fifteen year-old-boy who had been her friend for three years. Son-kun…He's all that's left of home, all that's left of everything I ever loved…what will those monsters they do with him? She fell forward and into his broad chest, fists pounding against him in helpless anger.

His arms were around her suddenly, lifting her from her feet, cradling her body against his, moving with her. She felt a brief moment of panic as he laid her down on the floormat bed in the rear of the one-room ship's bridge, felt a tremor of fear as his hands began to move over her neck and breasts and hips, over every inch of her, peeling away her clothing and his own, one piece at a time, still holding her pressed tightly against him. But the warmth and the presence of another living creature, touching and caressing, hands almost hot to the touch, the mere feeling of having someone hold her, of not being alone, drove away the grief for the moment. And in some dim back corner of her mind, she sensed that this was his way, the only way he knew, of giving and receiving comfort. He was huge. A few inches shy of seven feet tall, and every inch of him corded with muscle. She touched him shyly at first, his thick arms and his broad planes of his chest, sculpted and beautiful, her explorations growing slowly bore bold. None of her countless fumbling make-out sessions with Yamcha had been anything close to this…this trembling, half-fearful fascination that was quickly giving way to a deep, insistent burn of wanting, like nothing she had ever felt before. His hands were smoothing up and down the curves of her body, slipping between her legs with experienced ease, touching her, fingers delving inward gently, until she arched her back and cried out. His face was intense, his black eyes burning with need, and he pressed his hips downward, sliding his body into position between her thighs. She had one brief instant of apprehension, one tiny flicker of fear amid the fire he'd set burning inside her. Then he drove into her and she locked her arms around his great back and screamed as he pushed forward where no one had been before him. He did not stop or pause and she didn't ask him to. It hurt. It hurt so much----but it drove out the thought of everything else, if only for now. He slid fully into her, filling her up. He began moving inside her, slow for only a brief few strokes, before he increased his rhythm, thrusting into her with a tearing force and pace that pummeled the breath out of her, that she couldn't move with or escape, that she could only except. She couldn't catch her breath, couldn't think, could only hold onto him as he moved toward some climactic pinnacle. Then his hand plunging between them, touching her, stroking her, even as he moved within her, in a place that…that…She bucked beneath him and shrieked as it all exploded inside her, taking everything with it, all the pain and all the horror, leaving her gasping and dazed in his arms. He lay above her, panting, shuddering against her, raising up only to take her quivering lip in his teeth and nip it lightly. "Sleep, little thing," he rumbled softly, pressing his face against hers, the light sheen on his sweat falling onto her. "Tomorrow we will be on Madran, our main base of war preparation. And you will swear allegiance to the Saiyan no Ouji and join our fight against Frieza. And if the gods smile on us, we will win…with your help."

"I won't sleep," she said softly. Her head was already spinning with ideas, with thoughts of the things she would build, the improvements on her designs she could make with the technologies of dozens of different worlds at her fingertips. And with thoughts of revenge. "But hold me…it's better if you hold me."

His black eyes softened in a face as hard as granite, flawlessly handsome like a statue of some Grecian god. "Hold you?" Said Raditz quietly. "I don't know if I'll ever be able to let go, girl."

 

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Table of Contents
Chapter 1