Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ Chizzari-Raditz ❯ Breeder's Regrets ( Chapter 21 )

Months have passed. Enough to make up at least a couple years, but time in space is rather iffy, so I'm not really sure. I've trained every single day I wasn't out on a mission - and I've completed my missions as quickly as I possibly can. I no longer turn to Zarbon for protection, or comfort. I don't see him now unless it's business, or about my sons.

I have three children… no one knows about the third. My daughter, product of one of the rapes I went through after I left his protection. I'm still being raped. I never tell. Who can I tell? I left Zarbon's protection willingly. Vegeta still doesn't speak to me unless he has to. Nappa… has been in on more of the rapes than I care to remember.

My daughter was beautiful. She looked like me. A lot like me. Her hair was just like mine. She was so beautiful.

I lean against the doorway that leads to the hall, not activating it yet, recalling every perfect feature of my daughter. Let that bittersweet feeling of knowing I had helped create such beauty sweep over me. Let the pain of her death wash over me again, the guilt of having been the one to kill her. I allow myself that moment to grieve, then activate the door, stumbling towards the first of the rapes that will mark my path to the regeneration tank.

It's a ritual, almost. The Ginyu force goes first. All except Jeice. It seems odd, considering how he looked at me when I first arrived, but he has never been present. Nappa next, if he isn't on a mission. Dodoria gets me then, Nappa usually gets a coin for handing my battered body over to him. By the time they've finished, I'm too far gone to know who has me after that, or even attempt to keep them off. All I know is that someone will throw me in a tank, so they can have more fun with my body tomorrow.

It doesn't hurt anymore. Emotionally, I mean. I'm just… numb to it now. I don't usually manage to get in more than one or two blows before they've knocked me around so much I have no ability to fight what they want… sometimes I wonder if I would have more of a chance if I wasn't so used up when I get out of the training room. I've lost three more children… five now, dead before they had a chance to be born. And my daughter, killed before she had a chance to live.

Ginyu appears, right on schedule. I look at him dully through blood-matted hair, realizing suddenly that I've lost the will to care what he does to me. I make only a token protest, then let my body rest as well as it can while he violates me again. I'm so tired. I'm always tired now. I'm even tired when I get out of the tank, when my body has been repaired from the damage done to it.

It takes me awhile to figure out he's finished, that someone else is behind me now. I remember I should be protesting this, manage to get one hand to twitch. I can't seem to make myself do more. The men who take turns on me don't seem to care that I'm little more than dead. But after a time, I'm finally left alone. The last one to use me drug me as far as the corridor to medical, leaning me against the wall so I would be able to see the doors of the tank rooms. I just don't happen to be in any condition to reach them.

"Damn, it's gonna take me forever to get my hair clean!" I'm not sure which surprises me more, the complaint - or that the person muttering it has draped my much larger form over his small shoulders and is taking me to be healed. "Dammit, Raditz, you gotta stop letting them do this. Your friggin' carcass is heavy… more awkward than anything else, but you aren't a feather."

The hands that plop me into a tank and fasten the sensors are small, efficient. I manage to crack one eye open long enough to make sure I have really heard who I thought I did. A pinkish-tinged blur of mostly white blurs in my vision, so I close my eyes again. He's not my prince, and that's all I really care about at the moment. That I am still unworthy of his touch.

There is no one around when the tank releases me, but there is a fresh uniform waiting. I pull it on, motions automatic. Slowly, I look around the room where I spend so much of my time. I've learned how to make the scouter read me… and my shoulders slump when I discover that, again, I read so weakly.

Oh, not that I read as low as I did when I first came to the ship. My feet carry me to the door and down the hall towards my quarters. No, I'm no longer that weak. But my strength has hardly grown at all. All my training has done is leave me too battered and exhausted to properly defend myself. The rapes have left me pregnant four times, the beatings that go with them have killed three of those children.

I throw myself across my bed, the hair over my face hiding the scalding tears of shame and guilt that flood my face. My beautiful little girl… you wouldn't have known she wasn't a full-blood Saiyan. But she wasn't. She was conceived while Nappa was off on a four month mission, so I knew she wasn't.

Shally's tiny body is properly buried on the planet where she was born. I finished that mission in record time, but took every day Zarbon had given me to finish it. She was born the second day I was there - amazing what a breeder in labor can do to the population of a planet. They were all dead before she was born. I had a week with her… a week I spent determining her future, and making the most of every bittersweet moment we had together.

I roll onto my back, staring at the steel gray curving over my head. I review my life, trying to put it all into prospective. I can't do it, but I keep trying. Eventually, I give up and turn my mind to an even more confusing issue - why had Jeice helped me? I cannot come up with even one reason why he would consider it to his benefit to have assisted me, unless he has plans to use me himself. I reflect over his words, and realize that it's probably not the first time he's put me in a tank.

He watches me, I know that. There's always been a hint of interest in his eyes. But more often than not, I've seen pity. I can't understand why he would pity me. I'm Saiyan. The least of the Saiyans. I suppose my rapes and beatings are ship-wide gossip, kept only from Prince Vegeta. Everyone is afraid of him - afraid of what he would do if he knew what was going on. No one fears me. I only look like I should be dangerous.

Maybe that is why I see the pity. Because I'm not what I seem. I sit up, hands and tail clasping lightly around my knees as I lean back to regard the ceiling again. Maybe what I need is to get away from here. Get away from everything. Maybe then I will be what I should be… what I look like. I am a warrior only when I purge. Mind made up, I leave my bed, making for Zarbon's office. I will ask him for a mission - a tough one… and then some shore leave. I haven't had any of that since I came to the ship.

I'd like to be the one doing the laying for a change.

The purge goes beautifully, it is wonderful to pound out so many of my inadequacies. To taste blood that isn't my own, and use my battered victims to slake my frustration. When they are all dead, I celebrate on a silent world… and my loneliness crashes around me once more. There is no one with me to celebrate my victory, no one to share the news with that my objective was met in considerably less time than expected. I wander that dead world over the next week, finding myself wondering how many of the dead I freed from the type of misery I live in.

The small wounds they managed to inflict on me heal. I spend a great deal of time swimming in the lakes and oceans of the dead world, and darting through the trees in the forests. For a little while, I pretend I am a child again, before I became a warrior. I don't really remember those days very well, but I remember playing in the trees and going swimming, so that's what I do.

The day after I am supposed to have completed my task I call in to tell them it's done. I'm informed Zarbon wants to speak to me, so I keep the line open and wait, watching some small fluttering things moving between the flowers. I almost feel peaceful.

"Raditz."

"Zarbon."

"I've been reviewing your records, Raditz."

Uh-oh, that doesn't sound good. "Yes, Zarbon, what of it?" At least I sound like a testy Saiyan wanting leave.

"You're to come back to the ship. After we've discussed your… service…" I don't like the way he stretches that out, "we'll see if you deserve any shore leave."

"WHAT! Dammit, Zarbon!" I need that time away!

"Report to my office as soon as you arrive. And Raditz," his voice is suddenly silky, and I realize I'm in a hell of a lot of trouble, "you'd better get here as close to yesterday as you can manage."

Make that shiploads of trouble. What could he… I freeze, suddenly realization making my eyes widen. My voice is shaky, submissive when I reply, "Yes, Zarbon."

All I recall of my trip back to the pod is the ground beneath me blurring as I shoot over it. I set the controls so that I'll be asleep within moments of the pod taking off - I really don't want to watch the stars go by… and I sure as hell don't want to think about why Zarbon wants to see me.

I wake in time to be brought into the docking bay, and my unease is not in the least decreased when I realize Zarbon is waiting for me. I barely have time to get out of the pod before he's got a fistful of my hair and is dragging me along behind him. He slams a door behind him - difficult to do when the things have those automatic sliding deals - and shoves me down into a plush chair. It takes me three seconds of squinting through the pain of being dragged by my hair to know I'm not in his office. I'm in his quarters.

"Oh, shit." Defeat and despair fill my tone. I'd hoped I was wrong, but if he brought me here… three levels up from his office. And the way he dragged me along… dammit! I raise a hand to make sure that he didn't really yank my scalp off - it hurts bad enough - but he didn't. Guess I managed to keep up well enough to keep that handful of hair.

His voice is tight. "I have dealt with the offenders. Including Dodoria. I left Nappa to Vegeta's mercy."

I manage to snort, Vegeta isn't known to have any mercy in him. But… I manage to shrug. "Nappa'll live."

"I thought when you left, you were doing better!." He kneels in front of me. I blink a couple times, but he's still kneeling, and he still looks concerned. Something's wrong about that, but my brain is still waking up from pod sleep, and I can't put my finger on it. "You know I have to review the records of anyone asking for the length of shore leave you put in for… why didn't you tell me?"

"Tell you what?" I can't figure out why he sounds so concerned about it.

"Dammit, Raditz!" Why does everyone keep saying that to me? "I had to have a few of the computers fry themselves to delete the data on your pregnancies! If you'd just told me, I could have erased that within a few minutes of you being out of the tank. Now there's a chance that Frieza has that information… and will use it against Vegeta."

"Can't get pregnant." Oddly, that he's only worried about my information because of Vegeta depresses me. I don't want to think about the implications of that.

The hand on my bare thigh is nice and warm, and the one that pries my chin up so I have to look at him instead of my knees is firm. I meet his eyes briefly before closing my own and repeating what I'd said. "Vegeta can't get pregnant. Frieza couldn't use that information against him."

"You can."

"Doesn't matter." Now I do meet his eyes, my words suddenly formal as I face the hurtful truth I've never allowed to pass my lips in an attempt to keep it from being as true as it was. "The Prince Vegeta cares little for the health of this particular vassal."

I am embraced suddenly, pulled from the chair to land heavily against his chest. His fingers tug their way through the snarl of tangled spikes that make up my mane, feel carefully along my tail. Zarbon knows that I have no qualms against breaking it myself to focus inner pain somewhere else. His breath comes out in a relieved sigh against my forehead. "No, I'm aware of that, as well." He pushes me away, moving to sit in the chair he pulled me from, and continues using his fingers to comb out my mane.

"How long after you left me?"

It's not a question I want to answer. I don't want him to know. I was the one who'd said I was ready to be on my own, the one who insisted we have a 'big production' of a break-up. I don't want him to know how wrong I was. But I don't really have to tell him, do I? All I have to do is say, "I thought you looked at my records."

His hands still in my hair. "I did." He sounds puzzled. Why puzzled? If he looked at the records of my times in the tanks, then he would know how long it was. "All of your…" his voice trail off, and his fingers clench in my hair. I know he's figured it out. I was in the tank less than a day after we staged that scene. "How long?"

"I barely got out of your sight," I admit at last, after his fingers have resumed their combing and I have relaxed some. "Went around that corner straight into a fist, never even had a chance to fight."

"I told you I would help you heal."

"Then give me the leave!" I turn, pulling my hair from his grasp, leaning against his knees. "Let me get away from here! Away from…" I gulp, then just say it. "Away from this place where all I am is a worthless failure."

He stares at me a long moment. I manage to hold his gaze, trying to make him see how much I need to get away. At last, he smiles a bit, reaching out to cup my face, running his thumb over my cheek. I shiver beneath the touch, and he draws back. "Leave granted, for the period of one ship year."

I smile up at him through tears of relief. "You still got that rotgut you make?"

He feigns being insulted, nose up in the air. "Of course! As if I would settle for that inferior trash the kitchen produces?"

I chuckle at that, accepting a glass of the fiery stuff a few minutes later. I think I'll spend my first day of leave seeing if I can outdrink Zarbon.