Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ the difference knowing makes ❯ Chapter 5

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]

[let your disclaimer be as though a monkey on a treadmill: confused, and tripping around.]

***

chapter five

Zarbon tears violently out of his artificially-induced sleep with a single, burning thought: those cheeky, flea-ridden monkeys had gone and gassed him!

He checks his temper and sets his fingers flying over the nav-con*, and in no time he's punching through atmo, rocketing across a taupe-white sky, and crash-landing into the glutinous, pod-catching cushion of an Alliance-grade space port. Once settled, he forgoes the convention of waiting for the hatch to open itself in favor of snapping the door clean off its jointed hinge, which is a more efficient (and damn gratifying) method of exiting one's pod, anyway.

The carnage hits him all at once, the great sulfur stink of singed hair and broiled viscera the putrid-sweet complement to a likewise gruesome visual: all that's left of the Kare-jin** greeting party is a grisly scorch mark colonnade, garlanded with sundered body parts and garish splashes of olive-yellow ichor, stippled every which way with freshly-charred chunks of flesh and metal and fabric. And beside him on the landing pad, three pods, tugged into a neat little triangle, pointedly open and just as pointedly empty.

He feels the first, tentative stabbings of one seriously vicious headache coming on and begins gently massaging his temple with one hand as he reaches up to tap his scouter on with the other, instantly apprehending the situation when his eyepiece beeps its frantic tattoo against his eardrum, indicating someone of Nappa's strength is almost certainly having his ass handed to him by someone else registering a power level roughly three times the Commander's battle maximum…somewhere within the port-adjacent palace.

Zarbon sighs, clicking over to the only other noteworthy signatures in the area: Vegeta and Radditz, stationary for the moment, but definitely in Nappa's immediate vicinity, likely watching the fight.

"So much for trying to talk things out." He murmurs sullenly to no one.

As Lord Freeza had been mulling over the possibility of inviting the Kare-jin into the Alliance as an Associate World anyway (in pursuit of securing lasting access to what his Master had deemed 'visionary' ki technology), it'd seemed as good a time as any to deliver on his promise to the Prince's father, who'd agreed to send the boy to foster with his competition on the chief condition that his heir be instructed in the administration of rule as well as the much-loved labor of 'imperial expansion.' The younger Vegeta stands to inherit one of the most extensive and powerful Sister Realms in the Planet Trade Alliance***, after all (even if he presently amounts to little more than a valuable bargaining token), and must be taught that Empires cannot stand on strength alone.

Hence, the dictum to seriously attempt reaching diplomatic agreement, and to use force only as a final resort.

Somehow, Zarbon doesn't think he's quite up to the task of trying to sell his Lord and Master on the fiction that the wholesale annihilation of the Kare-jin welcoming committee within ten clicks of arrival had been the desperate consequence of a 'final resort' -particularly as he's in no mood to be granting favors after the scheming urchins sabotaged his pod! Stalled his arrival! Gassed him!

As Zarbon sets off for the royal keep, no longer in any real hurry, he resigns himself to the hopelessness of salvaging this mission, politically-speaking, and also bleakly to the inevitability of Freeza's displeasure.

At least, he resolves cynically, at least he's going to treat himself to the show of Nappa's thrashing before his Liege treats him to a first-hand demonstration of insides becoming outsides.

/-/

"I suppose negotiations broke down unavoidably, through no fault of your own." Zarbon's tone is dry as he touches down in time to see silver, splinter-flicking energy shear Nappa's thigh through to the bone -and then through the bone, too, the jagged wound gaping open like a mouth, huge and luridly red, a clotted mesh of tendons all that spare him immediate dismemberment.

The Commander roars, agony inscribed into every taut line of his body, and an unmistakably exuberant smile stretching wide across his lips.

Standing just ahead of him, Radditz's face also threatens to burst open with giddy gladness, because of course he's elated that he, too, might have the happy opportunity of being carved into so many thick, furry steaks by this drastically more powerful fighter.

Cracked, Zarbon concludes, every last one of them. The 'different strokes' bit only holds up in so many situations, and he's pretty sure the Saiyans' species-wide death wish doesn't qualify as one of them.

"Clearly, you've done everything in your power to establish our interest in settling things amicably." He sighs long-sufferingly (as long suffering he has indeed endured in the months since he'd been appointed the post of Royal Nanny and entrusted the -endlessly disagreeable—task of priming Vejiitasei's Crown Prince for the throne he'll one day publicly assassinate his father to assume), "I especially applaud the decision to send Commander Social Graces in to broker the deal; he's just the silver-tongued devil we needed to smooth over that whole 'welcome party massacre' fiasco." The Prince, at his side, says nothing, though he smirks rather loudly. Exasperatedly, "Vegeta, this was meant to be a diplomatic mission."

The boy sweeps his hand dramatically across the horizon, where the warring pair are currently locked in close-quarter combat.

"Behold, Saiyan diplomacy." Vegeta's Smug hits critical mass, and Zarbon watches with detachment as Nappa's opponent -whom he recognizes from the mission profile as the Kare-jin Queen—blows a sloppy, fist-sized hole clear through him, meat and muscle and pureed vital organ slicking across the throne room floor in steaming, viscous gobs.

Sarcastically, "Well, I'm certainly impressed." And actually, Zarbon acknowledges as an aside, he is impressed, that Nappa's still somehow not only conscious but also continuing to make the effort to fight.

…not much of an effort, obviously; the brute's losing blood by the bucket (primarily in the region of his stomach, where his new viewing port's just been installed), but even as his movements begin to slog and he undertakes a second battle with himself to remain conscious, the Commander maintains -at the least—an unabatedly furious verbal onslaught, code-switching deliriously back-and-forth from Standard to the coarse, dissonant language of his people.

"Still, I'd wager this isn't quite the 'enriching political experience' Lord Freeza meant you to have. Or the King, for that matter." He catches the movement of ten tiny fingers curling into two tiny, powerful fists at even the sideline mention of the man.

The lordling's father is ever the sorest of subjects: small wonder, when the price the King had (all-too-willingly) paid to secure a probationary moratorium of hostilities between the Saiyans and the Cold Empire had been his only son and heir. Or, more accurately, his heir's fealty and freedom, to ensure all future generations in the House of Vegeta continue in the tradition of their forebears: as vassals in service to Freeza.

Zarbon likes to pick at the boy's paternal scab for this very reason -the better to keep the wound tender and the pain fresh. Vegeta's far too easily agitated about it for starters, and obstinately refuses to deal with it for another; as such, he sees little recourse other than to deliberately provoke the child into confronting his demons. They will otherwise come to rule him, and given time, what currently exists only as superficial injury will fester into every bit as dangerous a liability as his fatally sensitive tail (the latter of which was only recently revealed to him, after he'd tweaked the thing out of curiosity and found himself faced with the obsessively proud royalty dropping to the floor in keening, fetal agony, completely at his mercy).

Unfortunately, purging Vegeta of his weaknesses continues to be an uphill battle; his narrow-minded pupil has yet to accept -or fully understand, or really buy into—the concept of 'centering oneself,' and without proper appreciation for the vital necessity of a warrior to work from a place of psycho-spiritual equilibrium, the stubborn monkey will likely never willingly endeavor to resolve his Daddy Issues…and it'll be his own potential suffering for it.

As for his tail trouble…there're no records to testify one way or another on the triumph or folly of attempting to desensitize the area (since, according to Radditz, 'Saiyans don't believe in recording histories, only in creating them -or, preferably, in destroying them'), so Zarbon's been playing things by ear, hoping until one of them comes up with a better idea that rigorous overexposure to (painful) stimuli might eventually do the trick -which in less elegant terms means he plans on squeezing the bejeezus out of the pesky-be-damned thing until the Prince stops squealing.

His pensive bubble bursts when the Commander of the Saiyan Armed Forces punches through the ground some twenty paces away, out-of-sight and immediately out-of-mind with the very final-sounding impact of face meeting solid stone at 200 kilometers an hour.

From her airborne vantage, the claret-hued Queen roars something unintelligible in a heavy brogue, which his scouter interprets for him as: 'Who among you villains shall next receive my judgment?'

He supposes the theatrical challenge fits the character profile of someone who -according to reconnaissance reports—enjoys global worship as some manner of major divinity, both for having lived nearly a thousand turns on a planet where the expectancy isn't half that, and for possessing the only fighting-level ki anywhere in her world -and a formidable ki, at that.

For all this, she appears woefully unaware that both he and the young Prince outmatch her. Himself drastically, and Vegeta only just so, though from what (admittedly little) he's seen of her in action, the boy's far and away her better in form.

She's no intuitive sense for combat whatsoever, no concept of movement economy, and quite clearly very little in the way of training to properly harness her ki (for what incentive does one have to learn the art of fighting from a master when the crudity of strength is all that's ever been needed?); her quantitatively superior strength and speed were enough to overcome Nappa, but it's going to take a great deal more than that to best the Saiyan no Ouji.

"Imagine, Zarbon," Vegeta begins, "how amenable these wretches will be to an open discussion of terms after I've murdered their Immortal Sovereign." The adolescent Saiyan at his back has his arms folded over his chest and arrogance splashed bold across his face as he stares up at Nappa's executioner (he prefers to believe the Commander's dead until proven otherwise), and Zarbon realizes belatedly that the Princeling's knowledge of the Queen's social standing means he'd either been listening at the briefing or he'd taken the time to run through the mission profile independently, which is progress however you slice it; as recently as a month ago, Vegeta was still insisting that operational details meant nothing to a warrior of 'his caliber.'

He supposes he should be glad the pig-headed mammal had any thought for politics whatsoever; yet, in spite of this (mediocre) progress, the fact remains: the Prince's plan is dubious at best, and one hell of a risky gamble besides, rife with the potential to end Very Badly. If it happens that the God-Queen's disciples are fanatical, for example, willing to die to the man rather than kneel before the destroyer of their faith, this could get very messy indeed. And if, for this same very messy reason, they fail to obtain an open door exchange of technology; if later, after the Saiyans' counter-productive 'negotiation,' Freeza's scientists are unable to reproduce the technology and there's no one left alive to walk them through the process, then his Lord's reproof will be a fearsome sight to behold.

But…then again, the Kare-jin may fall immediately into line and offer an unconditional surrender, as Vegeta's so audaciously predicted. Only the outcome of this battle will tell.

/-/

In truth, the 'battle' can scarcely be called as much; the work of a moment is all the Prince requires to methodically disassemble the lissome 'immortal,' who remains remarkably composed for someone whose life is drawing so violently to a close.

At least until, in her final moment, she begs in raw timbre for mercy—

"Please, don't—"

-but of course he does, whipping his arm across a chasm of inches to remove her trachea, easy as he might pluck a leaf from a tree.

The following instant finds Vegeta irritatedly flicking the Queen's bright life's blood from the fingertips of his gloves and spinning in mid-air to address the court even as her body impacts the pearl-lustrous staircase abutting her dais with a great, wet crunch; every squat, sorrel-skinned member can be seen cowering in various shades of Pure Terror behind massive slate pillars at the far end of the throne room, unable to flee through or over the smoking pile of rubble that had once served as the chamber's only entry and escape.

Smirking, Vegeta demands categorical compliance with the Alliance's terms, promising mercy while their Queen drowns noisily in her own fluids below him.

At the end of the day, they have a dead god, a contractually binding exchange of technology agreement, tentative assent to enter into the Alliance under Associate title, and a regrettably -if miraculously—mending Commander Nappa.

Meaning they all probably live to see another day.

But also almost certainly meaning it'll be impossible now to convince the Saiyan Prince that any tactic other than Example by Gruesome Murder might be worthwhile when undertaking 'diplomacy.'

***

The situation with the woman had had to reach a head eventually. They've been racing for this pass full-tilt for nearly four months now.

Within seventy-two hours of dumping President Briefs on the lawn, Vegeta hits the ceiling of his potential under 50Gs, and sets out at once to retrieve the woman's father and have him 'dial up' the gravity well to maximum capacity…only to be waylaid outside the old man's principal workshop by a twitching canine scientist who promptly informs him that Dr. Briefs had, with the President and his wife in tow, vacated the property the previous afternoon.

When he demands to know where in hell they'd gone and for precisely how long, the fidgety beast adjusts the thick glasses at the base of its snout and alleges it's got no idea, that they'd gone 'to see friends' and that that's all the information anyone in the Company'd been given.

Grumbling, he dismisses the useless mongrel and casts out his senses, meaning to fish out the underhanded little female (whose departure had been timed entirely too conveniently to be misunderstood) and finally dispose of her…except that, after a disorienting moment of failure, he realizes further attempts to locate her psychically will prove a fool's errand, that she's obviously moved herself beyond the limits of his awareness.

There's no way of knowing why he catches himself keeping company with the bizarre assumption that he'd be able to intercept her nothing-signature no matter where or how far she might flee; however distinctive her ki may be here, where the stamp of her presence is impressed into the very air he breathes, she's still every bit as shockingly weak as most of the billion or so others inhabiting this puny world, and just as easily lost among them. How he could ever have conceived a thought otherwise is a mystery.

With scarcely a week left before Kakarrot's revived, Vegeta makes the flip judgment that Bulma isn't worth the time he'd waste searching for her; he needs to train, to stay focused on his ambition, to put that unstable, unyielding shrew as far out of mind as possible. She'll have to return eventually as it is, and likely sooner rather than later, as both her life and her livelihood are tied intimately to this place. Meanwhile, he's gained time to cultivate his vengeance, to refine his enmity for her to its final, lethal purpose.

With this comforting thought in mind, he cuts right back toward the ship to pick up where he left off, fully intending to wait the woman out, to reserve The Reckoning for her homecoming.

(Until.)

He finds her note taped to the refrigerator door late the following afternoon, printed on bright, colorful paper and positioned thoughtfully next to the handle so as not to be missed.

Vegeta—

Food's in the fridge if you're looking for a snack; dom-bots are programmed to prepare breakfast n' dinner at 12hr intervals.

Took mom&dad to Chi Chi's, will be back...eventually.

Train hard, but pace yourself, since there'll be no one around to recalibrate the GR for you.

-B

It's a tacit acknowledgment of her explicit intention to stonewall his progress by leaving when she had.

It's a challenge and a malicious rebellion; an insult.

It's the end of his patience.

***

Bulma wakes with an ominous feeling nestled snugly into her gut, a painful, restless weight with claws; she can feel the sharp knead of them against her belly, and her body reacts instinctively, tensing, locking tight.

She stares up at the ceiling in the semi-dark of dawn, waiting for the terror-without-origin to pass; when it does, some three hundred ticks of the clock later, she rolls herself off the sofa in her usual limp noodle fashion and unthinkingly stumbles left for the bathroom -before she remembers this isn't her house, and the bathroom isn't on the left. The bathroom is outdoors, actually, because of course it is -this's Son-kun's place and it's in the godforsaken middle of nowhere and obviously the universe hates her this morning. Aggravated and still weary but too awake now for that to matter, she grumblingly winds her way down the hall and into the kitchen.

Chi Chi's there, in the midst of laying out the ingredients for breakfast. Bulma opens her mouth to greet her unsmiling host, and instead has the breath stolen from her by a monstrous yawn. Blinking sleepy tears from her eyes,

"Oi; sorry, Chi Chi. Still kinda fuzzy." Goku's wife nods stiffly, mouth creased into a stern, solid line…which Bulma takes to mean she's still angry about last night.

They'd gotten into it after Chi Chi'd blindsided her with accusations of being irresponsible, for not enforcing Gohan's rigorous homework schedule over their two month trip to Namek, for 'letting' him go into battle against 'that crazy alien lizard,' and for the repeated infraction of Not Calling to tattle on her son the past dozen or so times he's skipped out on his studies and shown up at Capsule Corp to go running off with Piccolo to engage in 'who-knows-what delinquent-type activities.'

Bulma, never one to take abuse lying down (deserved or not), had come back with her own scathing indictments, against Chi Chi's obsessive over-protectiveness, her mulish, psychotic disregard of the Bigger Picture, and her 'freaky-creepy' preoccupation with systematically sucking all the fun out of her son's life by way of 'fascist study regimens.'

The inevitable skirmish followed.

It hadn't been pretty.

"My pa and Gohan're already up and gettin' ready;" Chi Chi tells her coolly, "I'll throw together some breakfast n' wake your folks, an' we can be headin' out inside an hour." Then, Gohan's darling-benevolent angel of a mother holds out a steaming, heavenly-smelling cup of sweet, sweet coffee…which Bulma takes to mean Chi Chi's not so mad, after all. She accepts the peace offering with a sleepy smile, sips at it gratefully.

"Thanks, this really hits the spot." After another small gulp, "I was gonna head out to the plane and run through a quick pre-flight check; I'll leave the loading doors open for whenever the boys're ready to start packing up." Lifting her mug in a gesture of reiterated gratitude, she breaks for the outside world, newly optimistic for as long as it takes to reach and open the front door, when the frigid morning chill wraps itself like an icy shawl at her shoulders, bare but for the thin straps of her tank top.

Her sunny disposition promptly ices over.

Muttering a curse as her flesh breaks out in goose-pimples, she sprint-walks for what she gauges is the half-way point between the main household and the modest dwelling Goku's grandpa had once called home (mindful of sloshing her Divine Beverage as little as possible), and hurriedly chucks the capsule containing her favorite compact passenger plane onto the lawn, racing for the interior almost before the smoke clears to fire up the engines and pump some much-needed heat into the cabin. By the time she manages to dig her spare jacket out of the supply closet, she decides it's too damn cold outside to follow through on her casually tendered promise to leave the back hatch open for Gohan and Ox; instead, in the interest of Not Freezing to Death, she resolves to leave it closed 'til they actually need it otherwise.

Really, it's not that big a deal -the press of a button and the space of four or five seconds and voila! Doors open, problem solved. And in the meantime, she'll have gotten the plane nice and toasty for all her passengers. No need for anyone to get worked up and raise hell over a silly-trivial little thing like an (ostensible!) failure to honor her word when there're extenuating circumstances to take into account. No need to totally overreact or demonstrate one's full-blown lack of impulse control by RIPPING EXPENSIVE DOORS OUT OF EQUALLY EXPENSIVE WALLS!

…in retrospect, there's a chance she might still be nursing a grudge against Vegeta over his whole 'barbarian thug' shtick.

Ugggh, Vegeta, she recalls, biting back the rancor he inspires in her even from afar, and trying her very-very hardest to shift back into her diligent Not-Thinking-About-Prince-Bastard Mode…which unsurprisingly accomplishes the opposite effect, and leaves her unable to think of anything else. Gritting her teeth in irritation, she flips on the master switch with more force than strictly necessary, and checks the fuel level through a fine, red haze.

She'd been doing so well distancing herself (mentally and physically) from her amoral houseguest; hell, want of reprieve from his bitter-bastardy comprises at least half the reason she'd flown the coop!

…or anyway, he's the reason she'd flown the coop prematurely; even had His Haughtiness not seen fit to liberate her lab door or toss her on her ass on the lawn, Chi Chi'd made plans with her months ago to spend the week before The Summoning at Capsule Corp, and Bulma'd promised then to make the trip personally to retrieve everyone, and possibly to spend a couple days visiting, too. She'd never been to Goku's cozy house in the woods, or borne witness first-hand to the life he'd made for himself out here with his wife and son (and occasionally his father-in-law, as well), and though there's a heartsick part of her that wishes she hadn't had to come without Son-kun himself present, she knows all the same she wouldn't have missed this opportunity for the world -and definitely not for some heinous extraterrestrial prick with the personality of a shark tank and the social graces of…well, a monkey.

It'd just been a happy coincidence that her decision to head for the Sons' a couple days ahead of schedule also meant inconveniencing Vegeta -although, admittedly, she hadn't needed (or, before he threw her out of her ship, intended) to cajole her parents into coming along for the trip; that particular move was meant as a preventative measure to ensure her dad couldn't be wrangled into GR duty in her absence, and had purely spiteful motivations.

The petty, needling note she'd tacked to the fridge after she secured her parents' assent had been left in the self-same maliciously defiant spirit; entitled royalty and depraved by nature he may be, but Bulma Briefs has never been any good at taking anyone's shit, even if that 'anyone' happens to be a supernaturally strong interstellar assassin, and it's a point she means to drive into the Prince's over-thick skull if it kills her.

...at the rate she's going now, it may well do just that.

Bulma realizes her behavior's completely irrational. Vegeta's entire life has been one giant blood orgy after another; intellectually, she's aware she should not be testing him. But she can't seem to help herself; he just…he sets her off, with his pointless, unrepentant cruelty, and in the heat of her agitation, she keeps forgetting to be afraid. (It doesn't help matters that her flight instincts are so severely underdeveloped, but when virtually all of one's closest friends are literally and by far the strongest people on the planet, it's difficult to muster a suitable appreciation for one's own relative helplessness.)

Still, facts being what they are (Vegeta: a rage-a-holic and serial killer by trade, and Earth: teeming with ever-so-murderable life and hopelessly vulnerable without Goku), she fully intends to see to his gravity needs when she gets back. Kami knows he'll never rest until someone does, and while she's not above indulging in a little harmless schadenfreude and letting him stew for a bit, she doesn't want him to flip his shit and start wasting people, either. Especially not people for whom she's directly responsible, like her employees, or all those poor, sweet Namekians.

For the time being, at least, she figures they're all (more or less) safe from his wrath; whatever twisted standard of honor Vegeta holds himself to has kept him from snapping anyone's neck so far (though he's certainly keen on threatening to), so she's gotten comfortable with the assumption that she can trust him not to start offing anybody 'til after he's beaten Goku (although obviously that'll never happen) and 'earned the right' to have another go at planet-wide genocide.

It's at this point the vid-phone just above the dash comes screaming to life, the urgent signal indicating her emergency line activated. A startled glance at the monitor reveals that the call's coming from Capsule Corp -the robotics division. The tummy-twisting presentiment that'd shaken her from sleep only twenty minutes past returns with sick vengeance. Willfully choking back the worst of it, she offers a small prayer to Whoever's Listening that something's only gone wrong with the newest generation of submersible suit, or maybe with the service bot upgrades, and that her selfish decision to leave a crazy homicidal alien alone with her employees isn't about to get them all killed.

Nervously, she takes a deep breath and reaches up with shaking fingers to patch the call through.

And there's Vegeta at the screen's margin, aura flaring, snapping at someone to his right.

Oh, Kami no.

***

*nav-con: navigation console; just thought 'nav-con' sounded more colloquial

**kare: a more or less phonetic rendering of the japanese pronunciation of 'curry'

***in the manga/anime, i believe the official moniker for the Colds' planet-bartering emporium was the 'World Trade Organization,' but i've gone with 'Planet Trade Alliance' because it abbreviates to PTA, which seemed appropriate since the Parent-Teacher Association is *also* an evil-powerful syndicate, whose ranks are swollen with villainous personages and whose name strikes dread-terror into the hearts of All.

/-/

a few notes:

first, i realize that, from a narrative perspective, it doesn't make a whole lotta sense for vegeta's flashbacks/reminisces to happen via zarbon POV. but what with zarbon being somewhat less-than-alive, it's the only way i could think to give the lovely green-ish fellow a voice in the fic.

AND.

i know we're all here for the v/b (i certainly am), but as much as i love the pairing, i also lovelovelove veggie-kins, whose past is too damn tempting not to fondle inappropriately every opportunity i get, as he's a character with plenty of history, but not so much in the way of personal backstory. which i think we can all agree is a TRAVESTY. so expect to see more of zarbon n' radditz n' nappa as we go along, and bear with me, darlings. we'll get to the steamy sexytimes in due course, and the wait'll make it all the more scrum-diddly-umptious.

and anyway, what's juicy-bleeding meat without fluffy-buttered potatoes? YOU CAN'T HAVE MEAT WITHOUT POTATOES.

...i may have lost the point.

next chapter: SEE ch. 4 preview; still applies.