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.
EXTRA WARNING: This chapter contains graphically detailed descriptions of rape and large scale terrorism.
CHAPTER IV
For four months, they traveled here and there aimlessly, avoiding contact with other space-faring races. At the end of the third week of meandering, Vegita set his mind to a course of action, and plotted a direct course to their destination. He did not respond to any of his companions' tentative questions as to where they were going. Four months, and they finally reached the outer-most frontier of the Empire...the Empire that was no more.
Of the four other survivors Rikkuum had rescued from Vegita-sei, two took their own lives in the first week after the end---the end of everything. The remaining two, young warriors of an age with Vegita, were made of sturdier stuff.
Vegita ate little and spoke less as they traveled. Bleak, gray day bled into dream-harrowed night, growing in a steady progression of time into weeks, then months. He began to train with Rikkuum for the better part of each waking day out of habit, and to relieve the nervous energy of unaccustomed inactivity. His body was still strong, his reflexes and fighting skills undiminished. If the big warrior did not use his ki in any way during a bout, Vegita could still best him every time. If he didn't use his ki...
"Perhaps it will heal," Rikkuum suggested hopefully, as the four of them fought into the tenth hour of a tag team match. The ship had reached the outer spiral arms a few days ago, the very edge of civilized space. The systems they still carefully skirted were growing less dense, less technologically advanced. "Your head, I mean," the great fool elaborated helpfully, dodging Vegita's furious roundhouse and the flurry and lightning fast blows that followed. "All men say that your people always heal from what does not kill them...and return all the stronger."
Vegita snarled a wordless affirmation. The lunkhead had finally, after several months to think it over, touched on the thing that kept his two Saiyan companions going, when there was nothing else to live for. The hope, distant and fragile, that the centers of their brains that governed ki would heal slowly, given time.
Vegita had taken turns with the other two survivors of the wreck of Vegita-sei, spending one-hour, therapeutic sessions in the ship's on regen tank. They had done this every day since the fall of their homeworld.
Thus far...thus far, it had not helped a wit.
He could feel nothing, touch nothing, sense nothing, of the near god-like power that the Tsiru-jin plague had burned from his brain like a wildfire consuming dry grassland. Nothing...
The medical texts filed in the ship's database, a compiled generalized knowledge from scores of worlds, held nothing that could give him an answer one way or another, and nothing related to this sort of malady where his Saiyan's were concerned. The sons of Vegita-sei did not take ill under any set of natural circumstances.
Hope was a cruel, taunting siren to his companions, he knew. Lying down with them each night, soothing them into troubled sleep---and fleeing at the beginning of each new day. For Vegita, not weighed or baited by hope himself, waking was worst. Rising through the waters of sleep to the phantom scent of dying rose petals and the sweet sound of his woman's voice singing softly...
"Will we stop soon, Ouji-sama?" Coran gasped from where he lay bleeding and perspiring across the width of the ship's hold. He had been Vegita's warm up match and had taken the worst of the Prince's morning battle with despair that only found a voice through his fists. Coran's brother and squad lieutenant Okuda sat silently beside him, waiting his turn to spar with wordless patience, sunken inside his own thoughts. Coran was well-spoken and educated, a nobleman ranked as super Elite---a welcome relief from Rikkuum's loyal but dull-witted retainership on those rare occasions when Vegita felt like conversing at all. His younger brother spoke only when addressed, sometimes not even then. At first, Vegita had merely assumed that this was a sign that the younger warrior would shortly be opting out of a life without power, home or people---as their other two companions had done months ago.
Coran had shook his head at this suggestion. "No. He has always been that way. He never says much."
Okuda had inherited his taciturn nature from their mother. It had taken more than a month before Vegita and the two brothers were sufficiently emerged, each from his private place of shock and grief, to be capable of holding any sort of sustained conversation. More than a month before he learned he was traveling with two of Articha and Turna's three sons. This fact, even though both men were strangers to him, had given Vegita an inexplicable sense of gladness. Coran and Okuda's eldest brother had died early on in the war, in a Maiyosh-jin nuclear strike on the colony he was stationed on as deputy governor. It was only logic, Vegita thought solemnly, that the sons of Articha and Turna should have been too strong in body to be felled by the plague.
"If we run across Okassama and Toussan," Coran had told him several nights past, "We will have to flee them, or risk exposing them to the virus. We may be carriers now. And if they are lured into any port in the Empire before they learn what has befallen our people---"
Vegita made a soft growl of disagreement. "Neither of them is gullible or slow to suspicion when things do not seem right. They will had monitored hyper light transmissions, and be on their guard."
"Okassama told me the full count of girls on their carrier convoy was eleven thousand," Coran murmured. "Another eleven thousand survivors---and that added to the brats in Med Center. We must hope your Lady manages to contact them before they are exposed. She has saved our entire race single-handedly with her vaccine."
Vegita had given both brothers an extremely edited version of his last meeting with Bulma. He had told them she had left him to die with his world at his own insistence. That neither of them had known it was possible to survive the plague. He had told Rikkuum to hold his tongue on pain of his life, though the big man seemed convinced at this point that ‘Bulma-sama’ could not have known Vegita could be saved.
The truth...the truth was between Vegita and his woman alone. The truth held too much pain and sorrow, love and murderous rage, to put any words to. He could barely contemplate what he would do, what he must do, when he saw her again, much less speak of it.
Vegita drove an elbow into Rikkuum's kidney and the giant warrior stumbled, gasping. He finished the bigger man off with a quick, brutal jab to the temple. Rikkuum fell with a reverberating, metallic crash as his armor struck the hold floor. Vegita pulled a towel off one of the wall rails, wiping his face, thinking over Coran's seemingly casual question. The power cells would last a hundred years or more, but life support and provisions would not. They were running dangerously low on water, food and oxygen. There was no longer a choice, but he would prefer not to stop until they reached their ultimate destination. It was time to tell them what he planned.
"We will stop soon. Come."
Moments later, the three of them stood around a holo-projected star chart, while Coran pulled up file after file of information on every system within a week's travel from their present location.
"This one," Coran said decisively, pointing at a binary system with two viable worlds. "It is six hours travel from our co-ordinates and doubles our chances of finding what we need. And...none of these worlds in the outer rim territories will have heard the name Saiyan. They will not attack us on sight."
Okuda did not speak. He simply pulled up an enlargement of a small, singe star system with one habitable satellite. It was eighteen hours travel still...less than a day. Okuda eyed Vegita questioningly, a small quirk at one corner of his mouth making him look very like his mother.
"You knew," Vegita said. "How?"
Okuda shrugged. "It is in our direct line of flight. The Imperial expansion records list it as being purged, but never colonized. Each recorded purge is filed in the database with a short report by the commanding officer, giving cursory details of the battle and mop up. It is a good guess that she would go there---it is the only other world she knows." That was the most Vegita had ever heard the man say in one breath.
Coran sat down heavily. "I am a slow-witted fool. Nine years for the dust to settle, the skies to clear. The vegetation and the sea life will have begun to rebound. It was only a flash fry purge...just enough to destroy the indigenous population, not enough the wreck the world’s biosphere for re-colonization. Yes! Gods, it is a brilliant hiding place for the brats as well! It is months from the center of populated space, and who would think to search for them on a purged world!"
"It is not certain that we will find them there," Vegita said curtly. "But it is my best guess. If I am wrong and we find no one and nothing, there will still be fish, water and air aplenty to restock the ship. In any case, we will be there tomorrow." He was growing tired of talking, tired of even this limited interaction with Rikkuum and Articha's sons. "Do not disturb me until we are approaching orbit."
He made his way to his cabin and closed the door behind him.
Chikyuu...
It was by no means sure that Bulma had hidden her precious cargo there, but, as he had said, it was the best guess possible. He sat down on the narrow bunk, breathing hard, trying to still the shaking of his hands. In less than twenty hours, he might very well be standing face to face with his woman.
And then...
There was no honor left for him among his people. No honor in continuing to live. He should let them think him dead, a heroic martyr of legends, the savior of his people. He should die. But he could not. Not yet. His duty to his people and to her would not allow it. He must find her. He must hold her again. He must speak the three words his people did not say, the words that did no justice to all that she meant to him, to all that lay between them. And then...
And then, by the debt of vengeance and honor she owed him for her crimes against his people, and by the love he owed her as her mate...he would kill her. Quick and painless, as his father had commanded him, implored him to do, time and again. And in that final act of love, he would end the misery of her madness. He would end her life and his own in the same breath. His Ki was gone, but he was still sufficient master of his own body to stop his heart at will.
And perhaps, the gods who had smiled on Bardock and Romayn would let them meet again, love again, under a happier sun.
He lay back on his bunk, pulling his woman's med satchel, the satchel Rikkuum had taken from Med Center, up to his lap. The great, faithful oaf had snatched the entire sack of her personal effects in his hurried pilfery, knowing there was an encapsulated mini troop carrier somewhere inside, though he had no time to rummage for the one pellet that contained what he sought.
Vegita had indulged himself with a solitary pleasure, once every ten days since this journey to nowhere began. Every ten days, he would choose one pellet, one thing that had belonged to her, and open it. It was a game he played, a thing to anticipate, as pathetic as it seemed. But it had kept him alive.
At first, the capsules yielded nothing but medical necessities, but he quickly discovered the internal pouch that contained her personal effects. The first pellet had produced a single red rose, encased in a tiny cryo-stasis orb, frozen in the perfection of full bloom for all time. The second, ten days later, yielded a light blue summer dress that perfectly matched the color of her hair. Even clean and freshly laundered, the garment had carried her scent so strongly Vegita had destroyed it after two days. He kept waking in the night, rising out of sleep for a few blissful seconds of forgetfulness, smelling her, reaching for her...and finding himself alone.
He took one pellet from the satchel and smiled grimly, scanning the encapsulation volume measurement to be sure the contents were not bigger than the ship itself. He had found several that had such an enormous reading he was certain they must be other ships.
He popped the capsule, waiting as the metallic smoke cleared to reveal a small data disc. He turned it over in one hand. Music? She would frequently blast his more sensitive ears to near deafness when she thought herself alone in the villa as she worked in her workshop. She had collected a selection of rhythmic noise pollution from several dozen different cultures and worlds over the last months...
But she also used these discs to record her work and help order her thoughts as she moved through the steps of a medical or mechanical project. It might very well be a disc full of the sound of her voice.
Bulma's voice...
He rammed the disc into the bedside computer and ran a file scan with shaking hands. It was tri-partitioned---one tiny section of audio, followed by a slightly larger section of written text. The last section of the disc went back to audio…strange. He took a deep breath and opened the first file.
His woman’s voice, sweet and so young sounding, began to speak.
Raditz gave me this data disc today. He said I could ‘do whatever fool-girl thing I wanted with it.’ Which is his macho, Saiyan way of saying, ‘Here, darling, I brought you a baby shower gift.’ This morning, we finally pulled Karot-chan out of the portable incu-pod Bardock pilfered for us. He opened his eyes, his big blue eyes, and frowned at me. He looks just like his father, except for his eyes…and he has Son-kun’s hair pattern. Raditz picked him up by the scruff of the neck, counted ten fingers, ten toes, and one little brown tail.
Then he smirked and said, "You’ll do just fine, brat!"
He says the baby looks completely Saiyan except for the eyes. Bardock says he can get someone to die the baby’s eyes black permanently when he’s a little older. So, no one will ever know he’s half Chikyuu-jin. Bardock and Romayna-san have both told me at different times that this happens a lot more often than you’d think because of the twenty to one ratio of men to women among Saiyans, and in spite of their inherently violent nature, they are an instinctively monogamous race.
So it’s not common, but it does happen. Warriors developing "foolish affections" for their alien courtesans---which is a pretty way of saying "pleasure slaves."
I asked Raditz if he had developed "foolish affections" for me and he humph-ed angrily and said, "No! But I am careful to appease you because I am afraid of waking with one of your bombs wired to my tail." Which is Saiyan for, "I love you, too."
Why am I recording this? I should explain that, shouldn’t I? At first, I thought it might be a diary for Karot-chan to hear when he’s older, so he can know the part of himself that is me, the Chikyuu-jin part. But now…I think it’s more. So that some history of me, of my world, of who and what I am, will go on. And maybe one day, someone will read this, my son or one of my Saiyan great grandchildren…and maybe they’ll grieve for Chikyuu and all the other purged worlds and peoples that are lost and unremembered.
I looked into Karot-chan’s eyes when Radtiz set him in my arms. I thought…I had been sure he would be the one. But Kami-sama said I would know Son-kun when we meet again. And my baby…isn’t him.
One thing has been worrying at the back of my mind all day today, a sort of tiny dark spot in the middle of a good day. What Kami-sama said…what he said about the "long, dark road" I would have to walk. This isn’t it. My world and everyone I ever knew before Vegita-sei is gone. I am not a free woman. I get desperately lonely when Raditz is gone, even with Noira and her family to talk to, and I have very little to do in the way of work or any sort of project other than my garden. I got so lonely when Raditz left on that ‘mission strike’ on Corsaris that I even taught that fucker Bardock to play chess. But…I’m not as sheltered as Raditz thinks I am. Romayna and the house slaves---Noira, her little girl Dusca, and her husband Hiru---have all told me how bad it could have been, how unbelievably lucky I was to be given to a man like Raditz, who loves me and thinks of me as his wife in everything but law. So, if I’m occasionally lonely and bored, if I still sit and cry some days all day for my family and my world, if I have to let Raditz be the undisputed boss in our relationship, and if I’m still sick at heart because I couldn’t make him understand why I was so cold and angry after the purge of Corsaris---I know it’s not as bad as it could have been. My life has a great deal of happiness as well as grief. And today… The soft, gurgling sigh of a very young child, followed by his woman’s soft, wondering laughter. …today I’m very, very happy.
Vegita hit the pause control on the computer. After a moment of motionless silence, he began to realize that he had stopped breathing and inhaled slowly.
He would hear it all. From beginning to end without omission. Even if it took every waking hour from this instant to the moment they landed on Chikyuu. Even if this tale cut and gouged his heart like a razor-whip drawn through his innards. Even if he wept like a babe before the end of it. He would hear the story of her life on Vegita-sei in her own words without turning away. He owed her this debt.
He lay back on his bunk and unpaused the disc.
If I tell you the story of how I came to Vegita-sei, maybe it’ll explain my flower garden a little better.
There was a chill in the air on the morning of the last day of my world. I had just pulled a jacket out of summer storage in the attic. Momma always packed my clothes away with a potpourri of petals from her own gardens in the pockets. As I went down to breakfast, my boyfriend Yamcha called to me from his room sort of pitifully, asking if I could bring his food up to him after I ate. He had finally decided what he wanted to do with his life a few weeks ago. He had left to go train with Son-kun and Krillan under old Kame Sennin, and then broken both his legs on the first day of training. There were no ripe senzu to be had, so he was having to heal naturally. The boys brought him back to Capsule Corp. I had told him that it served him right. That he was only posing anyway, going to Kame House to train because his friends were doing it, not because he had any great commitment to be a warrior or a hero. I ignored his pleas for food and went downstairs. That was the last time I saw him. The first boy I ever kissed, my handsome, gentle, desert bandit wanna-be. Kami, I was so mean to him, not just then, but all the time. And he just took it, hunkering his shoulders down and looking hurt when I would yell at him. Poppa said once that Yamcha was a good boy, a strong, brave boy…but that he was not strong enough for the kind of woman I would become. The last thing I ever said to him was something snotty and rude. I wish…oh gods, I wish I had treated him better.
I went to my workshop and collected the little ‘project’ I had been working on, then went outside for some target practice. As I passed through the kitchen, Momma asked me to water her petunias while I was outside. I took the watering pot with me, but I forgot to do any watering. I wish I had. Instead, I played in the quad yard with the dogs for a little while as Momma cooked. Poppa passed by me as I began recalibrating the energy wave burst pattern on my ‘project’. He had been in his own workshop all night working on something. He kissed me on the forehead as he passed by, but I was so absorbed in what I was doing I didn’t look up, just mumbled, "Morning, Poppa." I never saw him or Momma again.
The instant the kitchen door closed behind my father, I heard it. The Voice in my head.
Bulma.
"Kami-sama?" I whispered, suddenly very afraid. Not of him, but because, even at seventeen, I knew that god didn’t just strike up a conversation with you for no reason. Even if you had met him in person.
Take your flyer and go alone to Kame Sennin’s island. Go now. Don’t go back in your house or stop to think about it.
I remember thinking that this was the start of another adventure. I remember jumping into my flyer and gunning it into the air. And I remember how the next words he spoke killed all the happy excitement inside me. Listen to me now, child. Time is short. Piccalo Daimo is locked in a battle he will shortly lose, and when he dies, so shall I.
"No!---" I said.
Be still, Bulma! And hear me. Son Gokou is slain and Kame Sennin with him. And all of Chikyuu will soon follow.
I couldn’t even react to the enormity of it for a moment. Then I began to argue with him, almost crashing the flyer as I screamed that he was a liar, that it was impossible. It is happening. Something in his voice, something I can’t describe with words, shut me up. Go to Kame House, he said. Fate will take you into its hands after you arrive. Hear me! Son Gokou’s soul will return to you soon, Bulma. He will be born just as he was before, clothed in a body that is a replica of the one he wore in this life. You will know him when you see him again. My God, the Kai of Kais, has told me this--- and here, his voice became a Voice, and seemed to be doubled. I heard another, greater, Presence speaking through Kami-sama’s soul into mine. The future of this galaxy, this entire universe, will one day rest upon his shoulders. You must guide him to his destiny. But you will walk a long, dark road first, sweet child. I would more than anything that I could take this cup from your lips, but I cannot. Do not give way to hate and vengeance, daughter, or you will fail Son Gokou, and thus, all life everywhere. No matter what befalls you, remember your father’s teachings, remember his good heart, and try to see the good that might be, rather than the evil that is. There is no soul so black that it cannot be shown the way to the light. Do not seek vengeance, Bulma Briefs, or let hate rule over you…or you will fail your charge.
And then he was gone. Just like that. A few minutes later, I came up on Kame House and decapsulated my little ‘project’, something I had dreamed up as a nasty surprise for Piccalo if he ever showed his ugly green face again. I climbed out of the flyer with the rifle in hand, a hand cannon that shot an energy wave which disrupts the brain waves associated with Ki. I walked past the blasted bodies of Roshi and Oolong, past the charred wreckage of Kame House. A gust of hot air whipped my hair. To the east, just past where the sea fell away at the curve of the earth, the clouds scattered out in a ringed pattern around a huge mushroom fireball. And I knew, somehow knew, that Piccalo was dead, and Kami-sama with him.
Everything seemed unreal and overly bright. All I could see was the man bent over Son-kun’s body, stroking his hair, his face set like a stone. I knelt down beside him and touched Son-kun’s face. He was cold. "Little brother," I whispered. Bardock looked up at me and seemed to notice me for the first time.
"Who killed him?" I asked softly.
"I did," he said matter-of-factly, without any expression at all. I didn’t think. I raised the cannon and fired at him, point blank. Then something hit me from behind and knocked me out cold.
I only woke once before we reached Vegita-sei. I was strapped into Bardock’s space pod, sitting across his knees like a little girl on her father’s lap. I looked out the port window, down on Chikyuu from orbit. The world, the whole world, was on fire. I started screaming and he put one hand over my mouth. "Hush, girl." His voice sounded almost kind, and weary to the bone. "It’s all over and done." He punched a hyper wave com link. "Is everybody in formation and prepped for hyper-light?"
Replies of "Hai, Captain!" filtered through the com.
"Initiate cryo-sleep sequence," Bardock said when they’d all sounded off. "Let’s go home." He sounded tired and angry and…I don’t know what else. Then the cryo-gas flooded the pod and….and after what seemed like a long night’s sleep, we were making planetfall on Vegita-sei. I have a woozy memory of the bone-breaking jolt when the pod landed, then nothing until I woke that night in Bardock’s house.
The sounds of a fire burning and of men’s voices, were all around me. I sat up from the giant throw pillow I had been lying on face down, pushing off the heavy fur blanket someone had covered me with. All the conversation around me stopped.
"Damn," one of the men said softly. I stared around at the firelit faces of the men seated around the hearthpit. A woman’s cool voice broke the silence.
"You need to put your eyes back in your head if you want to keep them, Toma-kun."
They all burst into rowdy, good-natured laughter, this band of warriors who had just destroyed my whole world, everyone I’d ever known and loved. Toma flushed bright red. His mate, Celipa, only smiled sweetly and returned to demolishing her leg of cho-deer.
"Eat, girl," Bardock told me. I spat at him and swatted the plate back in his face. That sent the rest of them into another round of laughter. I wasn’t thinking clearly, wasn’t even really thinking sanely at this point. I jumped up and tried to run for it, but he wrapped his tail around my ankles and pulled my feet out from under me.
"What are you going to do with her, Captain?" A barrel-chested heavy set soldier asked.
Another man snickered. "Romayna’ll have your balls for earbobs if you keep her."
Bardock frowned and seemed to tense up at the mention of Romayna’s name. Toma caught the change in his posture and cleared his throat. "She’d fetch a king’s ransom if you sell her to one of the high class courtesan merchants," he suggested casually. "Even more is you put her up on private auction block for the nobility."
"Auction?!" I screeched. The tail around my ankles tightened painfully and I broke off, gasping.
Bardock shrugged, not even glancing in my direction. "What the hell does a soldier need with money," he said. "I’m giving her to Raditz. I owe him for helping me out so much with the Tsiru-sei expedition."
The talk died down after a while, and one by one the others left for their own homes. Toma hung around until all the others were gone, glancing back from where he stood with Celipa with his hand on the door at Bardock’s solemn, troubled frown. "She will understand, Captain," he said.
"Perhaps in time," Bardock told him softly. "But I must face her tomorrow, and she will…" He shook his head despairingly. "She will grieve as though she had raised him herself."
"Call me in a few days," his friend said quietly. "We will hunt drakets in the mountains."
Bardock didn’t speak or move for a long time after Toma and Celipa left. I just sat their beside him. I didn’t have much of a choice. "Who is Romayna?" I finally asked. He didn’t answer me, just lay down on the great pillow bed we were both sitting on and promptly fell asleep. After a while, I did the same.
I woke just before dawn and sat up very, very slowly, staring down at the man asleep beside me. I reached down and gently unwrapped the tail from around my legs and stood. I might have killed him. It occurred to me that there must be something somewhere in this house that I could drive through his heart. But…his face in sleep looked so much like Son-kun’s, like the man Son-kun would have grown into, I couldn’t do it. Do not give into hate. Kami-sama’s words came to me suddenly. As I stood over him, his eyes shot open, and again, I didn’t think. I brought my foot down on his tail as hard as I could, turned and ran for the door instead as he shrieked behind me, curling up into a ball of agony. I tore the door open, and found myself hauled up, off my feet, by the scruff of the neck like a kitten. The tall, beautiful woman who held me strolled back into the house, carrying me, and stared down at Bardock’s prone form, one corner of her mouth quirking up. She had a deep warm laugh.
"If she’d had a weapon, you’d be dead now," she told him as he sat and stood painfully, facing her. She eyed me, then him, narrowly, raising one eyebrow. "This girl-child reeks of your scent, husband."
"She’s been strapped across my lap in a one man space pod for four months," Bardock grunted. "I thought I might make a gift of her to Raditz."
Romayna set me on my feet and studied me closely. The curl of her lips widened minutely. "She will give him a great deal of trouble. But Raditz was ever one for trouble. He has done nothing but brood and growl since Soi and the rest of his squad were slain. He will certainly find this one diverting."
She turned back to him, her face sobering, an unspoken question in her eyes. She was silent. He didn’t say anything either. Finally, she spoke again. "Where is my second born, Bar-kun? Where is Kakarott?"
"He failed his infant purge," Bardock said. Both their faces might have been made of granite for all the emotion they showed. And I realized that this must be a cultural thing among their race, that the more something was tearing them up inside, the less they let it show on their face.
"The natives slew him?" She asked.
"No," Bardock said heavily. "He was injured, brain-damaged, after crashdown. He lost his infant conditioning and a good portion of his wits, and---"
"And you murdered him!" I screamed. "Your own son! He wasn’t ‘damaged’, you fucking monster, he just grew up thinking he was Chikyuu-jin!"
"Does she speak the truth, beloved?" Romayna asked softly. The deep olive tint of her skin had turned almost white, her hands were clenched at her sides convulsively.
"He wasn’t right in the head, woman!" Bardock said harshly, taking a step toward her, his face cold and hard, his eyes imploring, begging for forgiveness. "I swear it on my soul. He was unusually strong for a cub his age, and would have fought us to his last breath for the purge of his ‘home’. He would have never made a soldier of Vegita-sei, and would have gotten himself killed in less than a day if I’d tried to bring him back!"
"Not under my care!" She said coldly. "What does a soldier’s son need with a full set of brains?! He could have learned our ways. I would have trained him myself, even if you had no use for him. I would have trained him from birth if you had not made the decision for both of us to send him afield!" Her voice was like ice when she spoke the next words. "The son I lay in cryo-stasis after you left for Chikyuu is mine! You shall have nothing of him hereafter. Nor of me!"
He just stood there, like he was frozen in place, and watched her leave. And that was…I think that was when the realization I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge the night before as I watched Bardock and his men sit and talk like old, well-loved friends, as I saw their rough affection, their love, for each other for what it was---I think that was when it really struck me. They were Vikings. They were marauding Mongol or Cossack or Hun tribesmen. They were a hundred warlike Chikyuu-jin cultures who practiced land or sea piracy as a matter of custom and
livelihood. Violent, murderous societies and ideologies….populated by people. Not monsters. Just people. And that one realization changed everything for me, I think.
Though it didn’t change what I felt for Bardock and his crew personally. I couldn’t stop hating him, no matter what Kami said. I just couldn’t. I stood there watching him as she left him, watching the way how much he loved her didn’t show on his face, but was so evident nonetheless…and I thought Good! I want you to die inside for what you’ve done, you bastard! Even if you don’t know or care that it was wrong. I want you to hurt and hurt and hurt---right up to the moment I kill you. And I will kill you, Bardock!
I don’t know how long he stood like that, immobile as a stone, but after a long time, he seemed to see me standing there, glaring at him, and he set his mouth in a grim line. "Let’s get you where you’re going, girl," he said.
In the midst of too many things to absorb, none of his statements about his plans for me had really sunk in, let alone the implications of what they meant. The only thing I clearly remembered at that moment was a suggestion one of Bardock’s warriors had made the night before, something about an auction. So, I turned and ran from him, screaming and crying at the same time. He ran me down, cursing irritably under his breath, and put me back to sleep as he took off.
The first thing I thought when I woke was that I was getting really tired a being knocked out. I was in a bedroom, in a new place, a different Saiyan house. This house. I sat up in the big bed. My hair felt damp and clean and my clothes were folded in a neat pile beside me. An ivory-skinned woman with huge, circular shaped black eyes was sitting beside me.
"I’ll stat-bag your clothes for you, child," she said softly.
"Stat-bag?" I whispered.
She took my hand and helped me out of bed. For some reason, I felt a little woozy and disoriented. Too much sleep, I thought. Four months of it, according to Bardock. I stood and looked down at myself. I was wearing a silky white, ankle length dress that flowed around me and clung to my body when I moved. Good thing is isn’t see-through, I thought. Because I wasn’t wearing any underwear.
"It preserves what you seal inside," the pale woman answered. While she spoke, she guided me gently to sit in a chair and began brushing the tangles out of my hair. "When my homeworld, Ansou-sei, was conquered, the Saiyans made most of my people domestic slaves. I preserved everything I was wearing the day
the cargo carrier brought me to Vegita-sei in a stat-bag. If you have your clothes particle analyzed, you can clone a little piece of your homeworld for yourself. Resurrect a plant or and animal your had contact with when you wore those clothes.
I bit my lip to keep from crying. "My…my mother put a potpourri of flower petals in my jacket," I told her. "Made from all the flowers in her garden. My Momma..." I started to cry in earnest then, and she let me and washed my face when I was done.
"We’ll make your mother’s flowers live again," she said gently. "We can start tomorrow. The master will not begrudge you that."
"The master?" I sniffled. Then I remembered some of what Bardock’s men had said the night before. "Am I---is this a ‘courtesan house’? They were talking about selling me to---to---" I was starting to get hysterical.
She shook her head firmly. "Our master is Raditz, son of Bardock. You remember Bardock, I imagine." I nodded numbly. She placed a glass of wine she must have poured even before I woke in my trembling hands. "You’re a slave in the household of Raditz. I doubt you’re kindly disposed toward Bardock-san, child, but he did well by you in this. With that lovely face of yours, he might have sold you to a whorehouse for a small fortune. But he gave to his son’s household instead. If one must be a slave, Raditz-sama is a good, fair-minded master. He is not a cruel or temperamental man, and he does not beat us when we make mistakes. Drink your wine, love, it will calm your nerves." I drank obediently.
"He bought my family---my husband Hiru and my daughter Dusca and myself---four years ago. We are the entire domestic staff."
"I’m Bulma Briefs of…of Chikyuu." Oh gods, I was so innocent, so naïve, to ask the next question. "What….what will I do here as a slave?" At least until I can learn to fly a spaceship and escape, I thought.
Noira’s face went carefully neutral. "Well, for the moment, you have to take dinner with the master. He’ll get to know you a little, then he’ll decide."
I didn’t know…so many things. I didn’t know that Noira was a medic as well as housemaid. I didn’t know that she had been commanded to give me a thorough physical as I slept. To determine bone density and strength. To determine my age and if was even sexually mature for my race. To determine if I were a virgin or not. I didn’t know that this kind-hearted woman who became my friend was sending me through the bedroom door and into the hearthroom to become her master’s pleasure slave.
There was a mountain of food on the dining table, and it all smelled like ambrosia. I hadn’t eaten in…if you count cryo-sleep, it had been four months.
The hearthroom seemed to be deserted, the only sound was the crackling of the fire. I didn’t sit down or use a plate, I just dug into the spread and began to
eat.
"Try the wine," a man’s deep voice said, and I very nearly jumped out of my skin. I saw him sitting in a chair just outside the edge of where the light from the hearthpit shone. He stood slowly and limped toward me, out of silhouette and into the light. I stood there with food in my mouth, gaping at him as he approached me.
He poured us both a glass of table wine and I took it mechanically. He was gorgeous, tall, with a warrior’s full muscled body. He was like a statue carved out of bronze and olive-hued marble, with high cheekbones, and dark, arched Saiyan eyes. He looked, I thought, like a male version of Romayna.
I chugged the entire glass of wine in one gulp. "You’re Bardcok’s son Raditz" I said stupidly.
"I am Raditz," he agreed. He took the empty cup from my hand and filled it again, handing it back to me. I took another sip, wondering what I should do next.
"What is your name, girl?"
"Bulma. Bulma Briefs."
His raised one eyebrow, looking even more like his mother with that half-amused expression on his face. "Is it the custom of your people to stand while eating, Bulma Briefs?"
"Um…no." I sat down, feeling like…like I was somehow on a first date with a man---a grown man---who was far too old and sophisticated for me. He must have eaten already, because he only picked at his food as I wolfed mine down. He seemed surprised when I finished.
"I think Chikyuu-jin stomachs hold a lot less than Saiyan," I told him. In spite of the huge meal I’d just eaten, I felt light-headed and warm inside from all the wine. I don’t remember any of the actual conversation, though I know he told me a little about Vegita-sei and the Empire. And that he emphasized how large the Empire was. At some point, he stopped the small talk and fixed me with those dark, hard eyes. "I know you are thinking already of how you might escape my household and this world. You’d be a spiritless little thing if your thoughts were not turning in that direction." His lips twitched. "And you are anything but spiritless. There is nowhere to run to, girl," he told me flatly. "And an alien woman with you face and form---" He eyed me pointedly. "If you are not someone’s property, not legally under that protection of a strong Saiyan warrior, you can be taken and used by any warrior who desires you. Do you understand what I mean by that?" I nodded, feeling my stomach began to do a slow rolling somersault. "You are neither a fighter nor Saiyan, and you must be owned by someone to have any sort of protection under that law."
"That’s wrong…" I whispered. I was shaking, my eyes burning with helpless anger.
"It is the world as we find it," he said implacably. "I will not shackle you or fit you with a surgically implanted tracer, Bulma. But I warn you of the world that lies beyond this house. If you are wise, you will except the protection I offer."
I didn’t say anything for a few moments. Then I began to cry, and once I started, I couldn’t stop. He seemed completely unsurprised by this reaction.
He put his arms around me and I clung to him as he picked me up and carried me like a child to sit on a down-stuffed animal skin directly before the hearth’s rim. He held me while I cried, running his hands through my hair. And when I’d cried myself out, he listened to me tell him about Chikyuu, about my parents and friends,
about that last day, inexplicably chuckling when I told him how I’d shot his father. I think the enormity of all I had lost hadn’t really hit me yet, and at some point as I sat crying in his lap, some deep, self-preserving part of me pulled back from it. It was too soon, too over-whelming, the wounds too raw to deal with yet. So, my mind just pushed it away. I wiped my eyes as my sobs tapered off slowly, and asked a question so out of the blue it shocked him.
"Are you hurt?" I asked. "You were limping when I first saw you."
He shifted me in his arms and frowned. "I am not wounded. Not truly. My squad was part of a garrison stationed on Shadras. A month ago, a terrorist movement called the Red Demons detonated the energy cells of a grounded troop carrier’s engines. A side effect of the energy wave from such an explosion is that it does great neurological damage to the central nervous system of lifeforms in its path. I was healed of my bodily wounds in a regen tank, but the neural damage is slower to heal. The medics tell me I will be fully well in another month, perhaps two." His voice dropped to a rough whisper. "The rest of my squad…my companions, my lover Soi…Only one other of our number survived and he still hovers between life and death at Med Center in the Capital." He stopped talking, his face drawn and hard. I didn’t know how Saiyan children are grouped into squads, almost from infancy, in a fighting unit that will remain constant throughout their lives. How squad mates are, for that reason, closer than any blood family. But I had a sense of how much they’d meant to him, and how devastating and heart-breaking the loss had been. He took another long draught of wine and raised his cup to my lips to share. His black eyes looked so sad and haunted.
"It makes you feel guilty, doesn’t it?" I asked softly. My head was spinning now. The whole room was listing and my only anchor was his arms around me and those black, intense eyes. "To be the only survivor. I keep thinking ‘Why me?’. Why should I have lived when everyone else is gone?"
His eyes, so close to mine now, widened, and for just a second his face looked young and vulnerable. And that’s when I kissed him.
Bulma’s voice paused for a moment before she sighed softly.
He didn’t hurt me. Not even a little bit. He was so slow and gentle and… I know he didn’t seduce me so gently and sweetly that first time out of the kindness of his heart. He just understood women very well. And it was his personal preference that nothing is so sweet as what is freely given. He knew that if the first time was sweet and slow, it would create a bond of affection inside me that would run deeper that any set of chains. Especially in the highly vulnerable emotional state I was in. Momma always told me that you will always love your first lover a little, no matter where your life take you as you grow older. I remember his big warm hands and his lips being everywhere at once, while I lay back, holding onto him with my head spinning. It’s all a pleasant blur, really.
It didn’t occur to me until sometime the next day what my duties as a slave in his house would be. Gods, I was such a little girl. But after that first night, it was too late to object, even if I’d wanted to. I didn’t object. He was big and warm and strong, and above all, he was something to hold onto. I held on for dear life.
And…once he’d introduced me to a little of what he knew, he opened a floodgate of appetite inside me. Over that first year, he taught me everything, every way he knew that a man and a woman could please each other. And by day…he was kind to me. I don’t think I realized this until a few months ago, but two things changed our relationship into something much more than it might have been. My question and my words about survivor’s guilt struck him a lot deeper than I knew, and, I think, opened up a chink in his emotional armor that a slave and an alien would never have been able to penetrate. And if I was vulnerable, so was he, in his own way. We had both just lost the people closest to us in our lives, and that, coupled with the next two months he spent on medical leave, with no one but me for company, created something much deeper than the off hand affection he might have felt for me otherwise.
After he fully recuperated and went back on active duty, he was around a lot less, flying home between shifts of duty and on his days off. He spoiled me like a father with a favorite child, bringing me gifts from all corners of the Empire. Heh…it sounds strange, but in an odd way, he was sort of a father to me at first. He was more than twenty years my senior, I found out, though he looked to be in his early twenties by Chikyuu-jin standards. So maybe…maybe I didn’t let myself be owned so much as I let him take care of me until I grew up a little more.
That’s what I tell myself anyway.
I’ve decided that breast feeding isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, especially when your baby is already demonstrating Saiyan strength when his dinner is about to be pulled away from him before he’s full. You’re going on the bottle, starting today, buster. A high, gurgle was the only reply she received. Where was I in my life’s story when I stopped last time? Oh, I remember. Well…things sort of went into a pattern of his comings and goings, while Noira’s family and I ran the house. She seemed scandalized that I wanted to do any work at all. I gave her a look and told her that sex with a skilled lover wasn’t my idea of hard work, and I needed something to do or I’d go nuts. The one sticking point with Raditz, one he’s never given way on no matter how I cajole or wheedle, is that I can’t have a lab or a workshop to build…well, anything. I’m sure Bardock told him about my
Ki-zapper, but the reality of my abilities didn’t impress itself on him until he actually took a long look at some of the domestic gadgets I threw together in the first couple of months. He shook his head and said, "No more, Bulma."
I pitched something just short of a tantrum until Noira explained to me that if anyone ever saw what I was capable of, I’d be confiscated and put to work in the Capital as a slave engineer for the Crown. "During the day, anyway," she finished darkly. "You have heard enough of Romayna-san’s tales to know that you would not be left alone to do your work. I think you know by now how very lucky you are in Raditz. Do you want to be taken from him and used like a whore by other men?"
I could have argued that no one was going to ever see my machines, because no one ever came to the damn house other than Raditz’ one remaining squad brother and his parents. But I just slumped in defeat and nodded obediently. I wonder if a big part of me, the wild, defiant part of me that always seemed so close to the surface when I was on Chikyuu, sort of…died for a while. That I was sort of a muted version of my real self at first, until I began to recover from the blow of losing so much. Well…it didn’t mute itself with Bardock, that’s for sure.
During my first year on Vegita-sei, I tried in deadly earnest to kill Raditz’ father no less than 13 times. Every single time he came to visit, in other words. He seemed to visit a lot more since Romaya had put him aside, Raditz told me once with a troubled frown. He never said it outright, but his parents’ estrangement bothered him a great deal. He didn’t, however, have any trouble with my multiple attempts on his father’s life. Someone please explain that to me.
I failed every goddam time. Granted, Raditz’ house is rustic and almost bare of technical appliances, but I made do with what I could find. Actually, I think some of the things I came up with were pretty damn ingenious considering what I had to work with. Raditz found the whole thing funny, and in fact, I think I finally gave up on the murder attempts more to keep the whole pack of them from laughing at me. Bardock’s entire squad found the idea of their Captain being wounded by me to be a source of never-ending amuzement.
Romayna-san…she comes by less often that Bardock, but I enjoy her visits. I wasn’t sure of what to make of her when she visited the house the first time and strolled into my garden, still in her armor. She had asked for assignment offworld right after she learned of Son-kun’s death, and was on a two day layover on Vegita-se at the time.
"These are flowers from your world?" She asked me without any sort of introduction.
"Yes," I said, eyeing her curiously. The only other Saiyan woman I’d ever seen was Bardock’s squad sister Celipa, who was small and deceptively delicate looking. Romayna was nearly as tall as Raditz, but she was very feminine
at the same time, and very beautiful. As beautiful as her son was handsome.
"Tell me about my second born, girl," she said softly, sitting down. "Tell me about Kakarott."
I told her everything, all that had happened on that last day, even the things Kami-sama had told me. She shook her head. "I am sure stranger things have happened, but I cannot believe it without more proof. When you believe he has returned to you, I will come to see him and make my own decision."
I learned, as I got to know her, why she was so different from most Saiyan women in her maternal instincts. The people of the Turrasht mountains are a breed apart, more steeped in the truly ancient ways of Vegita-sei than any customs that have sprung up since they became a space faring race.
"The old way," she told me, "was to cast all cubs into the wilderness at six months and let them forage for themselves. If they survived a year on their own, they were taken back into the tribe and trained as warriors by their parents. This weeded out the weak and sickly, and kept out people strong as a race. But this…this pandemic ideology of tossing our children away like rubbish, to be trained by strangers, is a custom of the Great Northern Tribes, who’s strongest son became our first worldwide king after the Tsiru-jin invasion a thousand years ago.
They were a harder people than the tribes of Turrasht, and their customs have overborne all others since the first Vegita came to the throne. We in the South keep our ideas to ourselves for the most part---but we keep them, nonetheless."
And so my life went for the better part of three years. A little better each year, a little more in love with Raditz than in need of him. Until Corsaris. Karrot-can…he was born as a direct result of----no. Let me back up and tell the whole story.
Eleven months ago, Raditz came to me while Noira, Dusca and I were pruning and watering in the garden. He dismissed them with a look and kissed me hard, lifting me off my feet, pressed so tightly against his body I almost couldn’t breathe.
"What---?" I finally managed to gasp.
"I have been granted to right to lead an attack on the primary base world of the Red Demons," he said intently. "Kyouka and I petitioned the Prince himself for the honor because we are the only two survivors of the sneak attack on Shadras. But it will be a hard fight. The Maiyosh-jin rebels are strong. They are not a warrior race by nature, but we have known since the purge of Maiyosh Prime that they can fight like mad dire cats when cornered. If I should fall---"
"You won’t die!" I screamed in his face, and he blinked, truly startled. I had never raised my voice to him, not like this, in all the time he’d owned me. "Don’t say ‘if’. You won’t die!" I was crying now, and he carried me to our bed without another word.
He made love to me all afternoon and into the evening, sometimes sweet and gentle, sometimes almost violently, and we didn’t speak again until dawn. One last time, we moved together and then he---then he put his mark on me, driving his teeth into my shoulder as he came, and for one brief instant I could feel everything he felt for me, how much he loved me, flow inside me with his seed. I knew what it meant that he had done this, and I also knew it was something that was not done, even among third class warriors and their alien mistresses. And Raditz…he had been pigeon-holed as second class at birth, but he’d requested re-evaluation as a young man. He was a first class warrior, the highest rank a man of common birth could ever hope to achieve.
"Raditz…" I whispered. I couldn’t catch my breath as he lay over me, every inch of his huge frame trembling.
"Shhh…" He spoke against my lips. "You have been mine since the day you
came to me, but now I am yours as well. Custom forbids it, but there are no written laws. As long as we are discreet." He kissed me again. "I have asked my father to stay here while I am gone---" He felt me tense against his body. "I have willed you and all my household to my mother in the event of my death, but she is stationed on Arbatzu now. Toussan would care for you until her tour of duty of was over. He will see you are safe, should any ill befalls me," one corner of his mouth curled up, "so try not to kill him while I am gone."
"You’re not going to die!" I whispered fiercely. "It won’t happen."
He’d left me dozens of times, on scores of battle missions, in the past three years, and though he’d never given me any details (and I didn’t want to know them), I knew that the enemies he had fought had never been sufficient to give him
so much as a run for his money. So, I’d never worried about him dying, or what my fate would be in the aftermath of such a catastrophe.
"Peace, beloved," he said softly, and in spite of everything, something leapt inside of me at the sound of that word. Beloved. A Saiyan word, used without exception, only between husband and wife. "I would be a poor protector if I did not make sure of your safety should the worst happen. I cannot tell you where we are going, but our plan of attack is sound. The danger is not great, it is simply…
present."
I waited with my heart in my throat. No word came from the hyper light news feeds, nothing for more than a week. I could see from the grim set of worry on Bardock’s face that this was an ominous sign. I tried to keep busy. Noira and I unpotted the cherry tree saplings I’d kept under my heat lamps all winter and began planting them in what would be my orchard a few dozen meters from the house. Noira and Hiru gaped like baited fish when Bardock offered to help. By that time, I was so frantic with worry, I didn’t even object or remember to be nasty to him whenever we ran into each other around the house. Saiyans have no familial love my ass! I’ll loathe him til the day I die, but those horrible days of not knowing convinced me that Bardock did love his son---his oldest son, anyway.
On the tenth day of this hell of waiting, word came. Bardock dragged me out of bed to come listen to the hyper light wave transmission, a detailed report of the battle. The target had been Corsaris.
Corsaris…
The last seat of parliamentary monarchy and relative freedom in the galaxy. The Lord Regent had held off enslavement beneath the Empire’s heels for thirty years by providing a tithe of its rich grains and water supplies---until Imperial Intelligence discovered that Prince Jeiyce of Maiyosh, old Lord Corsaris’ foster son, was in fact the leader of the Red Demons. Until it was learned that that the docile-seeming world was harbor to some 60 thousand Maiyosh-jin supporters of the "terrorist movement" and their families.
And their families…
Raditz had been right. The Maiyosh-jin fought like cornered dragons when they realized their backs were to the wall. And they discovered, only after drop, that Corsaris had not been home to merely sixty thousand Maiyosh-jin---the numbers were closer to six hundred thousand. All of them righteously pissed. Raditz lost most of his primary assault unit in half and hour and ended up fighting back to back with his squad brother Kyouka for his life. Meanwhile, ships full of refugees packed into anything with the means to achieve orbit were launching all around them. Then, the Saiyan backup force---a twelve pack of giant troop carriers---dropped their legions onto the planet. It was still a pitched battle for a while, but Raditz marshaled an organized attack. After five hours of fighting, the Saiyans won the day.
After that…they didn’t just purge the world. They made an example of it and anyone not lucky enough to escape during the first assault. It’s not…it’s not the nature of Saiyan warriors to do what they did that day on Corsaris. Saiyans kill without mercy or remorse, but they always kill quickly. Jeiyce of Maiyosh was not on Corsaris when the attack came. Raditz later learned that he’d missed the Red Prince’s departure by a matter of two hours. Jeiyce was not there---but his family was.
At some point during the purge, old Lord Corsaris was killed, torn limb from limb with deliberate slowness. At some point, Jeiyce’s little son Jehan was killed, tossed from soldier to soldier, screaming his poor little heart out while they laughed, breaking all his bones before they finally crushed his head against a stone wall. And at some point, Raditz himself drug Jeiyce’s wife Lady Jula out into the midst of the slaughter and gave her to his men. And after she watched them kill her son, they raped her to death.
Raditz was wounded badly during the first part of the battle, though he kept on fighting. Bardock offered to take me to Med Center to see him. I said no. I wondered around in a frozen daze, the field reporter’s words praising "the righteous, fiery vengeance for Arbatsu" ringing in my head over and over. Bardock watched me closely, probably sensing how very, very close I was to bolting.
Then Raditz came home. I saw him fly home from where I stood pouring tree nutrient in the orchard. I didn’t go to meet him.
The…the hardest thing to accept was that he truly did not understand why I was angry. No...not angry. Sick and grief-wracked and half crazy with horror at what he had done. I tried to explain it to him when I finally calmed down enough to speak to him. I knew how much he had loved his squad brothers, all of whom had been killed by Jeiyce and his men. I tried so hard to make him understand.
I wish I could say that my coldness lasted until he saw what he’d done was horrific, until he wept as though his heart would crack for all the innocent people he’d murdered. But he never understood, and considered my anger an insult to his slain squad brothers. It seemed to him I was saying he had no right to avenge them. And my coldness…it only lasted a few months.
He left after that scene in the orchard, cold and angry himself, and hurt more deeply than I realized. He took some sort of assignment in the Capital, until I "got my fool head back on straight" and I didn’t see him for three months. Not until Romayna came to spend her furlow in our house and saw the secret I had been keeping.
"Raditz does not know," she stated simply. She sensed the baby growing inside me instantly. "I..." I put my hands together in a protective pose over my stomach, suddenly terrified. "Romayna-san, please...please!"
She had always been kind to me in her gruff, proud way, had always treated me like a person...but I still backed away from her with a shriek as she advanced on me. I knew the laws. I knew that what I carried was a death sentence for her son as well as me if it ever became known. She gently but firmly held me in place while she lay a hand over my no longer flat stomach, her face unreadable. Then she grinned, a full Saiyan smirk.
"He is strong, your firstborn." Her eyes met mine. "Male to female, our race is nearly thirty to one, girl. This happens more often than you would think. If he looks Saiyan, he may be quietly acknowledged as Raditz's son. It is not common knowledge, but even a DNA scan cannot distinguish between a half-blood and full blood Saiyan. Our blood is so strong it overbears that of other peoples when we mix with them. If he bears your face, his fortunes will be less prosperous and his tail will have to be removed. It is an old law that half breeds must die, but..." She shrugged. "One cannot be called to accounts if a crime is never known." She frowned at me with mild displeasure before going on. "Think well on how you will greet my son when he returns to you. He has given you more than most men in his position would ever consider. Even to the point of letting you, his legal property, turn him out of his own house and bed. Has it never crossed your mind once how lucky you are in him?"
She told Raditz of course. And he came running home, just as she'd known he would. And I...I took him back. I................
I should hate him for the things he did on Corsaris...but oh gods, I can't! Not just because he's a man who loves me and is good to me, not just because of Kami-sama's warning against hatred. But because there wasn't just me to consider now. If my coldness finally managed to turn him against me---it was my baby's life that I was putting at risk as well as my own.
He was ecstatic about the baby. I don't know what Romayna told him, but he came home like a penitent prodigal, as though he had seen the truth in my accusations, and I received him with a warm, "I'm sorry for being so unreasonable" embrace. But it was all a pose, on both our parts. He knew I needed him now, that I had no choice but to open my arms and take the love he offered. The love and the protection. He had me over a barrel and we both knew it.
When he came to our bed that night, he…he took me. Took everything that was his, with a kind of controlled ferocity, again and again. At the end, he collapsed on top of me with a deep, contented sigh. He knew I’d never turn him away again. The baby would keep me obedient and loving and at his side for the rest of my life. He loves me. I don’t doubt that. But…he also means to keep me…and I think, at least initially, the biggest part of his happiness over the baby was knowing that now…now he could keep me forever.
"You are mine, beloved," he whispered, just before he fell asleep.
"Yes," I agreed softly. "I am."
He was too fast asleep to feel me shaking beneath him. I cried the rest of the night.
Contrary to the novels of high romance my mother was so fond of reading, you cannot "mourn in sorrow all your days" over anything. There is too much good, too much joy in simply being alive, in every single day, to dwell constantly on all the things your life isn't. Especially when you're pregnant. Raditz took an extended leave using the clout of his new promotion to field marshal after Corsaris, and hovered over me until he nearly drove me out of my mind. He wasn't used to the day to day rhythms of the house, and at first, he just got underfoot. All six feet ten of him. Noira and Hiru nearly died of shock one morning when they saw him sitting beside me in the garden, awkwardly potting a handful of pansies.
Things between us got easier after a few weeks of having him back. Then they got comfortable. And by my third trimester, it was good again...mostly because I had asserted some level of equality in our relationship by that time. We lived together, except for his increasingly frequent trips to the Capital. We worked on the house and gardens. At night, we sat before the fire and talked, his hand caressing my tummy, feeling in fascination how the life inside me grew stronger every day. It was good, as I said, after things came to a head over Noira and her family around the fifth month of my pregnancy.
He wanted to kill Noira, Hiru and Dusca, at first. I could see the knowledge that they knew about the baby become a tangible, gnawing worry in his eyes as I began to show. I could also see that he had decided, almost as soon as he returned home, that he would take care of the potential threat in a final, permanent, Saiyan fashion. The only question in his mind was whether he would do it before or after the baby's birth, since we would need Noira when it came time to remove the baby and place him in the incu-pod Bardock misappropriated from Med Center for us.
"Don't do it," I told him in a flat cold voice across the dinner table.
He didn't have to ask what I meant. He shook his head very slowly. "They will be a threat to you, the boy and myself as long as they live. They have been good, loyal servants, but---Bulma, think! They could blackmail us, or simply expose us, with a word!"
"They won't," I said. I stood and walked over to his chair, leaning down nose to nose with him. "Listen to me, Raditz," I said, almost in a whisper. "Noira, Hiru and Dusca have been my friends since I came to you. They are good, kind-hearted people and I love them. They won't betray us. If you are nervous about having them around, use some of the fortune in spoils you took from Corsaris and give them a ship and their freedom. I love you, Raditz." I had never said it before, and he looked startled and somewhat unnerved. He ‘humphed’ and looked away uncomfortably, but I took his cheek in one hand and turned his face back to mine. "Do you love me, Raditz?"
"Bulma---" His face had reddened with a mix of anger and embarrassment.
"Just nod your head 'yes' if you do," I said softly, refusing to be cowed by his thunderous expression.
Jaw clenched furiously, he nodded once and looked away again with an angry growl. "Then don't do anything to hurt them. You'll kill everything I feel for you if you do."
He met my eyes for a long, hard moment and I didn’t flinch under that black, intense stare. Then he took my face in his hand and pulled me down to meet his lips. "You," he said softly, "have grown from girl to woman while I was not looking." And he smiled.
Everything was better after that. Noira told me covertly that Raditz had given her a terse command to bone up on medical texts concerning late pregnancy incu-pod transfers and C-section surgery. Nothing more was said of the matter, and the rest of my pregnancy went fairly smoothly.
Raditz began to come and go with a great deal of frequency during my last trimester, never giving me any sort of satisfactory answer when I asked where he had been. Bardock finally told me that Raditz had been formally presented at court by the Prince himself in honor for his "heroics" on Corsaris. That explained why he hadn’t mentioned what was still a touchy, raw subject we never discussed. The Saiyan no Ouji, the Heir to the throne of the Empire, had officially taken Raditz into his circle of Royal Companions, Bardock said. The Crown Prince’s own personal squad.
"It is something unheard of," Bardock said with a frown. "He has said nothing to you because he came to the Prince’s notice in the same way he came into his new wealth and rank---by his victory on Corsaris. But also…" Bardock’s frown deepened.
"What?" I prodded, staring down at the chessboard between us without really seeing it.
"He has risen higher in rank than many highborn warriors deem seemly," Bardock growled. "You remember the news feed reports during the battle, girl! The victory on Corsaris was very nearly a loss. Raditz turned the tide of a pitched battle with cunning, bravery and level headed iron will. It made him a hero. A famous one. It brought him to the notice of the Prince who has now befriended him. He is the son of a back country, common born squad captain. Can you imagine how many enemies his sudden rise in station, not to mention the Heir’s regard, has earned him among the Elites?"
"It is a double-edged sword I am holding," Raditz told me that night, after roundly cursing his father for a tell-all. "I did not seek fame or court life, but I cannot snub it without giving offense. I did not seek Vegita-ouji’s company, but a man cannot refuse a Prince’s offer of friendship." He swore softly. "And now I am trapped. I must come and go as he bids me, fight at his side, laugh at his jokes, and spurn the my true squad brother Kyouka and even my lowborn parents
to keep company with a pack of---" He stopped himself before he said something seditious. "If it were the Prince alone, it would be great fun, but all the others who surround him---it is like a nest of vipers, all vying for his regard."
"And the perverse thing," I said thoughtfully. "Is that he probably gives you more attention because you don’t want anything from him---all the others do. Maybe he wants a friend who doesn’t kiss his ass."
Raditz snickered. "There you are wrong. He likes it kissed well and frequently. He’s of an age with you, but still very much a boy. A boy who must always have his way."
Noira took the baby in a scarless C-section about a month ago. She and Raditz both assured me in no uncertain terms that I would probably not survive a natural birth, and Raditz told me we weren’t going to wait and find out. I’ve spent the last five weeks staring at him through the glass of his pod, watching him sleep and suck his thumb. I was a little sad that I couldn’t see anything of me in his face---until I held him. Until he opened his eyes and stared up at me…his bright blue eyes.
There followed a series of seemingly never-ending entries, all revolving around the child, her garden and Raditz---in that order, it seemed. Vegita began to drift off in a light doze, lulled by the sound of her sweet voice---until a note of mild panic in her words brought him back to full wakefulness.
We’re having guests tonight. As in right now! Shhh…shhh, sweetie, it’s just a storm… It’s okay. The boy’s warbling cries quieted beneath the sound of distant thunder. The storm’s clearing up already, and they’ll be here any minute. Raditz just called and told us to "get ready". I don’t think he had much choice in the act of "inviting" his guests tonight. There’s no time to move the baby, he said, but there is no reason to worry. No one will see him. He told me to stay out of sight with Kakarott and everything will be fine. Kami…they’re here. I have to go.
Fighting, blah-blah. Now, that was a great battle, blah-blah. Murder and mayhem, blah-dee-blah-blah. The conversation downstairs has been frightening and dull at the same time. I don’t know why I’m so interested, except they’re the first new people I’ve seen in five years. Their voices have gotten softer and a bit slurred in the last hour. I think they’re all plastered, my dear mate included, but it’s getting interesting now. They’re drunk enough to be honest with each other.
Hmm….the deep, velvety young man’s voice must be the Prince, because they all defer to him. He’s saying something about "no strong enemies left to fight." Like a young Alexander, mourning that there was no more world left to conquer. More like Alexander’s heir, if he’d had one. It must be hard to grow up in the shadow of a father who conquered the whole damn galaxy. Nothing left but punitive subjugation purges and the boring beaurocracy of running an Empire. I wonder if he---Oh, Kami!
Shit. Shitshitshit! I have to remind myself to explain at a more appropriate time the concept of Murphy’s Law. Fuck!!!
I know I closed the window! Somehow, Karot-chan got outside and crawled over the edge of the cliffside on the northern face of the house. I don’t know how it happened. I crawled out after him and found him stuck on a rocky overhang ten meters below the drop-off, crying for Momma to help him. I got halfway down to him and nearly fell myself before Raditz swooped down and picked is both up with an angry curse. He was angrier and more frightened than I’d ever seen him, but he calmed down a little too quickly when I explained what had happened. I think I know why, too. He left the damn window open!
All’s well that ends well, I guess. But there’s one last thing to tell. Something more than a little frightening. Raditz’ guests must have seen him bring us back inside through the garden courtyard, though they didn’t see the baby, thank the gods. As I went back to our rooms through the kitchens, I found Noira and Hiru prepping breakfast for the men in the hearthroom, pulling an all-nighter in case a guest needed the least little thing in the wee hours. Noira saw me and put one finger to her lips. I stopped beside her, just behind the servants’ kitchen entrance, listening. They were talking about me. Like men discussing and admiring a prize winning show dog or a thoroughbred filly. I went to our rooms and crawled into bed with Karot-chan beside me. That’s where I am now.
Kami…I am lucky. So very, very lucky, to have fallen by chance into Raditz’s hands. And not into the hands of one of those men downstairs.
Oh Kami…I left Karot-chan with Noira and went downstairs this afternoon like an idiot. Raditz had said they would be gone by daybreak. He was wrong. I didn’t realize I was singing out loud until I heard the hearthroom doors creak behind me and---
A slamming noise cut off her words, the sound of booted heels striding across the floor.
"He put his hands on you!" Raditz voice hissed harshly, sounding muffled, as though his face were buried in her hair.
"I’m okay," she said, but her voice trembled slightly. "I haven’t been pawed since I was in high school, but it’s not fatal. It’s okay…it’s over."
"It is not," Raditz rasped. "He has asked me to sell you to him. Commanded me, more like---Bulma!" She had made some kind of horrified moan. "He will not have you! He will not come for you for a week. There is time to---to think of some plan. I---I can perhaps make him believe you’ve died by some accident or that you have run away. I will think of something! I---" There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of Bulma’s soft sobs. "He…he will not believe me. He will kill me and tear through every friend I have to find you. I know him too well now. There is nothing and no one he will not rend to have what he wishes when he is in this humor. It is my fault! I left the fool window open, thinking the boy could do with some fresh air! I---" The sound, fevered and desperate, of his lips on hers.
And in spite of everything, Vegita felt his hands clench in jealous, black rage. "I will think of something, beloved. He will not have you! He will not!"
Hi. It’s been several days since my last entry and it’s a gross understatement to say that a lot has happened. Raditz came up with a plan all right. We’re leaving Vegita-sei tonight. As soon as Hiru gets back with the full med lab he’s heisting from Med Center in the Capital. As soon as Raditz finishes priming our ship’s engines." A soft, plaintive child’s whimper. "Shh, baby. On top of everything else that’s happening, Karot-chan is teething. Raditz bought the ship from his squad brother, his real squad brother, Kyouka, no questions asked. Noira is putting Dusca to bed in one of the ship’s two cabins, and Raditz is in the engine room, having a minor nervous breakdown. He was a lot worse before Hiru told him he used to be a freighter pilot on Ansou-sei and can plot a hyper light jump. I think Raditz is thinks he can memorize the flight manual in the next hour. We don’t know how long we’ll be traveling. To the edge of Imperial space and beyond, so it’ll probably be months before we stop running.
Raditz hasn’t told his parents what we’re doing so as not to implicate them in his defection, but I’m terrified of what the Prince might do to them out of spite, and Kyouka as well, since he knows the three of them are Raditz’ closest friends.
Raditz says he’ll send a direct communication to his them as soon as we’re away, and they can decide whether to lie low or ride Vegita-ouji’s royal tantrum out and hope for the best. Raditz…gods.
He’s giving up his world, his friends, his family, his rank and wealth---
All to keep me.
All to save me.
I don’t know which of those two desires is stronger in him now, but…I love him for it. I don’t just need him anymore. I love him. A little silence, punctuated by the baby’s soft, drowsy breath. Her voice fell to lighter than a whisper.
I promised absolute honesty in this diary, didn’t I? Yes, I did…
The first thing I thought when I saw the Prince of Vegita-sei standing in my garden, looking me up and down, those cruel black eyes burning over my body with this…this raw, brutal, animal lust…the first thing I thought, even before I thought "Asshole!" was…was "beautiful".
Beautiful.
And wild and dangerous and wicked and--- She broke off and released a trembling little sigh. Absolute honesty, right? When he put his hands on me, I was outraged and terrified…but my whole body seemed to catch fire. And I could imagine him having me in the darkest hour of the night, our sweating bodies moving together toward this super nova of a climax and---
Damn…
He saw it. He felt me react to him. And I think…I think it’s all my fault this is happening.
But this is not a bad thing in the long run, is it? Or even in the short run. My husband---and he really will be my husband after we launch, not just my owner who loves me---is leaving to wholesale murder business forever. My baby won’t be trained to be a cold-blooded killing machine. And I’ll be free. So…so what’s bad about that? Not a damn thing.
After tonight, everything changes. My life begins again.
Come on, Karot-chan. Let’s go outside and watch for Jisan Hiru.
The audio file clicked off, and the bedside comp beeped, signaling a change in file format. Of course. The next section would be nothing but text. Nearly a year’s worth of Silenced text. Vegita sat and pulled the terminal screen into his lap with mechanical slowness. He would listen. And he would read. Every word, without omission. It was part and parcel to his blood debt. He hit the execute command and read.
I will kill him. He’s going to die. I will. I will I
Raditz is dead my baby is dead. My baby is dead my baby baby my abay m
A monster tore him out of my arms and crushed him. He cried when it happened he hurt
my baby hurt
Am I dreaming? I can’t wake up. I dreamed a memory of how Karot-chan kicked when I was carrying him. I’ve been asleep since it happened.
It was like a car wreck. It happened too fast, without any warning or ceremony, the way catastrophe always blindsides you
they caught us
The evil prince and the monster when I was little momma told me princes killed monsters
I never saw wher they came from. The giant grabbed me and lifted me up in the air. He was laughing. Then he pulled Karot-chan away from me and made this noise of disgust when he saw it was a baby. My baby is dead
He killed him like he was slapping a bug and just tossed him away like a piece of garbage. A heard someone shout at him angrily. The giant dropped me when the Prince attacked him. I don’ t know why he attacked him. I could see Raditz lying dead on the the ship’s boarding ramp. I crawled over to Karot-chan and tried to wake him up. After a minute or two I decided he must be sleeping very soundly so I began to sing him his lullaby the song Momma always sang to me. Someone asked me a question and I remember looking up just once to tell the Saiyan no Ouji to hush. Not to wake my baby. Then I went to sleep. I don’t remember closing my eyes.
It’s later. I am on some serious drugs right now.
While I was asleep, the Voice that had spoken to me behind Kami’s voice spoke to me again, He told me to be strong. He told me my long dark road had come for me at last.
I told Him to fuck Himself and give me back my baby.
I came back from catatonia-land screaming. The staff medic gave me a shot so I wouldn’t wreck the place and myself. The house slaves here told me I’m in the Prince’s summer house, somewhere in the Western Sea. I had this diary in the waist pouch I was wearing when they caught us. So, I thought I’d do something besides sit and rock back and forth. The drug has helped that, though it hasn’t impeded my motor reflexes. It’s helped me keep in mind that there’ll be time enough for a complete mental breakdown after I’ve escaped.
Noira and Dusca were still in the ship when we were attacked, and Hiru hadn’t returned yet. I have to find out what happened to them and take them with me when I leave. I’ve only had Hiru’s four day crash course in space ship piloting, but at this point, I don’t give a damn.
But I have something to do first. Prince Vegita will be arriving shortly, the housemaids just told me. I can’t speak. That’s why I’m writing this, or trying to. The medic gave me some kind of vocal muscle relaxant and I can’t make so much as a peep. I asked him why and he lowered his eyes and looked away. I think I can guess why.
I have dismantled several choice machines around the estate while I’ve been waiting for his highness to arrive. I’ve jury rigged a reasonable duplicate of my
Ki-zapper, the same energy wave I used to plug Bardock back on Chikyuu. The energy wave that disrupts the brain centers where a warrior’s Ki resides. Vegita no Ouji is going to get the shock of his life when he arrives. Then he’s going to get his fucking throat slit.
It didn’t work it didn’t kill him he was too strong. He was so strong.
I’m escaping today. I’ll swim to the mainland if I have to. I’ll be gone before he comes back this evening.
I know now why they Silenced me
He caught me in less than an hour he brought me back to his summe hous back to his bedd
M baby is dead Raditz is dead my baby is dead I am dead and this is hell
Its been a few days I don’t know how many mor e than 3 I think. I’ll try again to get away today
I can do this! The Ki rupturing theory is sound, I proved that when I shot Bardock. I just need a bigger power source and a narrower energy funnel for a more intensified burst. There’s not shit to work with on this island!
Failed again, but only partially. I took his energy down to the point where I was able to stab halfway through his shoulder with nothing more than a steel fire poker. I’ve made the mistake of not taking into the account inherent Saiyan physical strength. The energy wave has got to be utterly debilitating to work on someone as strong as him. But I’m encouraged. It didn’t stop him, but he finished up a lot sooner and had to stagger off to Scopa before he bled to death. Scopa, gods love him, told him he should spend the rest of the night in the regen tank, which is good, because the murder attempts seem to just turn him on more. Before he left me tonight, he leaned down and kissed me in the Saiyan way, nipping my lip with his teeth.
"Dangerous woman," he said softly.
The housemaids are twin sisters named Batha and Caddi. They’re both Anousei-jin, like Noira and Hiru. Scopa is the staff medic and he’s a Madrani. The twins asked me this morning not to use any more of their culinary appliances. I already fragged their juicer and the smaller micro oven. They’re worried I’ll leave them with nothing to cook with, and Batha finally told me bluntly that if his meals aren’t ready when he arrives in the evening, they can both pretty much kiss their asses goodbye. I won’t take anything else from the kitchens. Besides, there’s still Scopa’s surgery.
Still no success. I had something really promising, but the "test subject" is one fast son of a bitch and I think he realized that the new prototype was an improvement on the one that got him stabbed last time. So, he squashed it. It’s been several days. Scopa says it’s been several days, anyway. I sort of lost count at some point. I haven’t tried a royal execution of an escape in a while. I think I’ve spent the last couple of days sitting and staring. I don’t really remember. I want my baby. I want my momma. I have to focus on killing him and not slip away like that. If I do, I may never come back. But I still fight him. I guess I’ll die fighting him one of these nights.
I’ve stopped eating. I can’t keep anything down, so Scopa gave me a sedative laced with some kind of cannabis-like herb that inhibits the regurgitation reflex. He’s not supposed to do that unless my health is in danger, but he says I’ve lost too much weight. The Prince doesn’t want my senses dulled, Batha says. Not while he’s breaking me. Breaking me. I guess like you break a horse to ride.
Wow, this is a good sedative.
Batha and Caddi help Scopa put me in the regen tank every morning. They’re all nice. I told them they should escape with me, that we could all get away together.
The first morning after, the twins held my hands and caressed my face while Scopa set my shoulder, my collar bone, and my ribs and put my hip joint back in its socket. They cleaned me up while Scopa set the bones in my wrists. The tank makes everything, flesh and bone, as good as new, but it can’t set bones. Batha told me she and her sister were garrison whores when they were young girls, used by common squad soldiers, one after the other. They survived. She told me I can survive.
She said I am very lucky as pleasure slaves go, to have only ever had one master at a time. I began laughing hysterically, even though I couldn’t make a sound.
That first night, I kept thinking it wasn’t happening. Right up to the instant he shoved himself inside me. I kept thinking I could make it stop. I couldn’t make it stop. I couldn’t make it not happen. He was on top of me, and then he was inside me and all over me and I couldn’t get away or even scream for him to stop. And as soon as he finished, he was ready again. It went on all night. And his face…it was never angry or cruel, just excited and really turned on. He was smiling half the time, like a boy with a new toy or pet he had wanted for a long time. That’s worse than if he hated me and meant to torture me. I’m just a pet he’s training to obey. If he hated me, at least I’d be a person to him.
Batha told me two days ago to stop fighting him. She said he’s hurting me so badly because he’s trying to break my spirit.
"And it time," she said. "He will. He’ll wear you down until your mind and your will buckles and breaks, child. Then you’ll be his ‘doll’. That’s what we used to call the pleasure slaves who broke completely. A ‘doll’. A Saiyan’s walking talking love slave, who lives to please him. I’ve seen some of them even kill themselves out of heartbreak when their masters were killed in battle or set them aside for a younger girl."
"I can’t!" I signed to her. Batha and her sister had taught me Silence, the signing language of Vegita-sei courtesans. "He killed my baby. He killed Raditz. All to have me! I can’t let him have me! It would be like spitting on my family’s graves!" I had just come out of the tank and I was woozy and light-headed. I always have to sleep an hour after the tank drain out to fully recuperate. She shook her head as she helped me into bed.
"I’m sorry about your baby," she said, tucking me in. "I cannot grieve for the man who butchered Corsaris, but the boy’s death must be hard to bear." She was trying to sound sympathetic, but I could see something in her eyes, something cold and murderous that must have been born inside her during her years as a garrison whore, that told me she would have had no moral problem with strangling a half Saiyan baby in its cradle---just because it was half Saiyan.
"Raditz loved me," I told her, sleepily.
"I suppose he did," she murmured, "though I have never heard of such a thing. I never met a Saiyan warrior who was not a violent beast."
Raditz was a man, I wanted to tell her. But I knew she’d never understand or want to. They’re all just men. It would be easier if they were monsters, but they’re not. They’re just bad people.
She stroked my forehead the way my mother always used to when I was feverish. "If you want revenge, Bulma….submit to him. He is young and you are the first pleasure slave he has ever taken into his household. He has born a great deal of his father’s and his people’s displeasure to have you---which is a sign that he is fairly obsessed with you already. Give in to him. Please him. In a month or two, he will have to move back to the Capital or risk angering his father even more. By that time, girl, you could be manipulating the little bastard to do anything you ask of him. Do you want to kill him, child? Do you want a chance to kill Lord Nappa, the one who killed your son?"
"Yes!" I mouthed. I would have screamed it if I could.
"You will have access to all the tech supplies you need when we return to the Capital," she said softly. "I’ll get them for you if it costs me my life. You can perfect that little weapon that almost gave a girl with no readable Ki at all the means to kill the strongest warrior on this planet. You can use it to kill that great brute Nappa and even the Prince in due time. Fighting him when he comes to you is futile, child. Believe me, I know. But there are other ways of fighting."
I ran.
I could see the logic in her words but I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t!
I found the rusted out hull of a sea skiff below the cliffs on the western edge of the island, rewired it, and took off without waiting to see if it was air or sea-worthy. It turned out to be neither. I went into the drink about five minutes toward the mainland, and then remembered why Scopa had warned me not to try swimming. They call them sea shrikes---they’re kind of a cross between a shark and an aquatic wolverine. I remember horror movies when I was little where the camera pov showed the open maw of a killer shark ready to swallow the victim whole. And I thought…I thought, it’s not so bad. Being fish food. It’ll be over quickly.
He showed up in the last second and saved me.
I was shaking all over from adrenaline, from the sensation of having mentally embraced death for those few seconds. Accepted it with a warm smile of welcome. Then having been rudely jerked back into the hell of living.
"Why?" I asked him silently. "Why couldn’t you just let me die?" I was crying a little bit. I hadn’t let him see me cry in a long time.
He touched my face then and smoothed the hair out of my eyes. "I do not want you to die," he said quietly. Then he looked forward, away from me, and snorted angrily.
And oh gods, I recognized that look, that combination of mannerisms. Raditz had always done the same thing when his feelings for me embarrassed him. And I knew Batha had been right when she told me I could be running him in a month or two if I wanted.
It was a way to find Noira and her family, to find out what had happened to Romayna and Kyouka and even Bardock. And I knew I’d never get at Nappa except through the little bastard who was even now sneaking a peek down at my face, trying to read my thoughts.
So…I just collapsed against him. And he smiled down at me, his expression a sickening mix of smug triumph and gentleness. He thought he’d beaten me at last.
When we got back to the summer house, I thought, I’ll just lie back and let him have me. And maybe if I don’t fight, he won’t hurt me so badly. But he wasn’t satisfied with just using my body. He pulled off my clothes slowly, his hands, his mouth, his body working mine against its will. When I realized what was happening, that after all these weeks of brutal rape, he meant to make me feel pleasure, I nearly broke and began fighting him again. But I didn’t. I held still and let him do everything he wanted.
And I discovered that there are much worse things than tearing, bone-splitting rape. There is pleasure under the hands of a man who has murdered my family and savaged me like an animal every night for two months. He took his time.
He was gentle and thorough and skilled and he rang every bell I had to ring. It was just as it had been that first day in my garden. My body caught fire under his touch. And when I locked my legs around his waist and moved with him, when I came that first time with him inside me, I felt my sanity tilt on its axis and nearly fracture into a million pieces. I know he thought he was being kind to me. Giving me pleasure as a reward for "behaving" now that he had what he wanted from me. But…it was worse, much worse, than having him rip me apart night after night.
I woke this morning just before dawn, and for the first time since he took me for his own, I wasn’t a bleeding broken mess. Just a little sore here and there. His arm was looped around me, his body curled behind me in a lover’s embrace. He was smiling in his sleep, a cat-and-canary smile of utter contentment. I dove back down into sleep, away from reality and away from him. And in the dreamscape,
I saw Raditz’ ghost with a hole through his heart, holding Karot-chan’s dead body in his arms. He bared his teeth at me and spoke one sentence.
"Whore!" He said. "It is all you fault!"
He was right. He was right. If I hadn’t given the Prince that flash of heat when he touched me, none of this would have happened and my family would still be alive.
I woke with a jolt and found myself alone. The height of the sun said it was nearly noon. I got up and ran out of the house in nothing but my skin, tearing as fast as I could toward the cliffs on the western face of the island. I would have jumped if Scopa hadn’t tackled me. Batha and Caddi came running up behind us.
"Don’t do it, love!" Scopa told me. He was crying, cradling me in his arms while I struggled and clawed, trying to get away, to the sweet blessed night that
would greet me at the bottom of the cliffs. "Don’t! Don’t let him beat you. There’s life beyond this, I swear there is. You just have to hold on and not let him win. If you give up, he’s beaten you!"
I went limp in his arms a few seconds later after he gave me another forbidden sedative. I could hear them talking around me, but their voices seemed to be coming through a hollow pipe.
"…have to tell her now," Batha was saying angrily.
"It can wait until later," Scopa snapped.
"It can’t wait and you know it," Batha told him in her cold voice. "If nothing else, it’ll give her incentive to stay alive until her mind is stronger. Tell her, boy!"
"Bulma," he said softly. "Can you understand me?" I nodded. "We three---Batha, Caddi and myself---are charged with caring for you while the Prince is away. If you die in our care, for any reason, he will kill us all. And…there is a slave law you should know. If one slave in a given household escapes, all the others are put to death."
The last nails in the coffin of all my hope. I can’t escape. I can’t even die. So, here I lie, waiting for my master to return. I am a whore. I am the Saiyan no Ouji’s obedient whore. My road….my long, dark road….
Fuck despair.
It’s three hours since I wrote last. The twins came into my bedroom a while ago and sat on either side of me. Then they literally gave me a reason to live.
"I want you to hear all that I am about to tell you before you consider what to do next," Batha said. "We want you to build your Ki disrupting weapon. We want you to perfect it. We’ve just received confirmation that if you’ll be given any materials you need as soon as we return to the Capital."
I sat there stunned for a few seconds, then signed one word. "Underground?"
Batha smiled slowly and nodded. "There is a quiet revolution brewing, my dear. You can be part of it if you want. I’m not wrong in thinking you want to join us, am I?"
I began to cry and hugged her, nodding furiously.
"We’ll set things up for you to begin as soon as we return to the Capital," Batha said. "The less you know for the moment, the better. But in the meantime…the Network wishes to ask a more difficult task of you. This is what we were originally commanded to ask of you, before we learned of your technical talents.
I know you wish to kill the Prince and Nappa. Based on what I have seen you achieve with lamps and kitchen appliances, I am willing to say that once back in the Capital, you will be more than capable of achieving both their deaths quickly.
We---our superiors in the Network---wish you to stay your hand. At least where the Prince is concerned. We do not want Vegita-ouji dead. We want him alive and well and sitting on his father’s throne as soon as possible."
"Why?" I mouthed, fascinated in spite of myself. This was starting to sound like a spy movie.
Batha grinned. "Vegita-ou is cold and brilliant and ruthless. He does not make mistakes or take one step in any direction without first thinking it through. As kings go, he’s a great man. He has led his people to conquer the entire explored galaxy. But the boy? He’s young, green, impatient, hot-headed and spoiled rotten.
Now, if Poppa were to have a nasty accident sometime during the next year, and if open, galaxy wide rebellion were to break out at almost the same time---Well, a young prince, no matter how strong, who thinks with his cock and his Ki, is very likely to make stupid mistakes and lead his people to defeat in all out war. So…let him live, my dear. Please him, flatter him, obey him, learn his moods, his habits---wrap him as tightly around your finger as you can manage. You may think that your face and body are a curse, child, but they can be powerful weapons. Learn everything you can about the doings of the Royal Council, especially planned purge strikes. The boy sits on his father’s right hand every day. Or he did until the scandal involving you and Raditz. He will be back in his father’s good graces soon
enough. The old monster dotes on the boy to distraction. If you can let us know about a punitive strike action in advance, you can prevent another Corsaris from happening!"
I said yes. Of course I said yes.
First thing tomorrow, after he leaves to go Ki blast puppies and bunnies, or whatever the hell he does when he trains, I’ll start drawing up a list of materials I’ll need.
"I understand why I can’t begin building seriously until we go back to the Capital," I told the twins, "But I the need some tech journals---no, a pile of tech journals. I want to learn as much as I can about the technologies available to me. Is there any way you could your hands on something like that?" Kami, the learning and sciences of several thousands worlds, the whole damn Empire---I’m salivating, just thinking about it! Batha gave me a generalized technical encyclopedia disc from the Royal College of Engineers’ Library in the Capital.
She said she had lifted it from Scopa’s tiny disc library in his little surgery.
"Just for orientation," she said with a grin at my bright-eyed, eager smile as I almost tore the disc out of her hands. "We’ll get you more when you’re done with this one."
My brain feels flabby. It’s been so long since I read an engineering journal or built anything. This wealth of knowledge, pirated from all the worlds in the Empire, is overwhelming! I’ll finish this disc tomorrow, but I already have some ideas, in addition to the Ki-zapper---I need to think up a more dignified name for it---that could potentially help a people with little or no fighting power, worlds like Chikyuu, stand a fighting chance against a purge strike. The Ki-zapper will give worlds like Corsaris an edge when they finally stand up together and fight for their freedom. But how many worlds will end up purged, or just caught and burned in the cross fire, when the rebellion begins? How many children like Jeiyce of Maiyosh’s son, like my son, will be butchered for their fathers’ deeds before it’s over?
Kami-sama’s words about not giving in to hate came back to me again while I sat in the sun this afternoon, devouring the encyclopedia whole. I think I know what the caution meant now. He was warning me not to let go of my heart. Not to become cold and driven and full of a cause because there’s nothing left in my heart but hate. Like Batha.
Some of the ideas that flitted through my head, just on this first cursory reading of a generalized introduction to all the technology I have at my disposal now…some of the ideas that began to come to me were terrifying. The ideas of things I could build, some of them nightmarish in their sheer simplicity, monstrous creations of mass destruction---they can never, must never, see the light of day.
It’s not just the old Briefs family genius at work here either. The Madrani are the only race who have even touched on the possibilities of machines over fighting power. The entire known galaxy has never even really explored the thought of world crushing machines, of pin-point hyper light compressed lazer cannons that could blow a sun to atoms from light years away, of--- You get the point. This galactic civilization has, for time out of mind, relied almost solely on the fighting power of soldiers to fight battles. So, no one has ever really thought long or hard about the possibilities of using machines to battle for you. But…the Chikyuu-jin mind doesn’t work that way. I could make a machine to collapse a planet from its core outward. I could build a cannon to kill a star from ten light years away.
This has got to be what Kami meant. That I must not let the hate inside me for all that has happened to me drive me to build such machines. I will not be an Oppenheimer. I will remember that Son-kun is coming back and will need me, that the gods themselves entrusted me to care for him when he comes. I will build defensive weapons only.
The Idrali-jin science of light and life force refraction in volume twenty of the disc gave me a great idea though. For a kind of invisibility engine to hide the children and families of the rebels. So no more men like Jeiyce will have to lose what matters most to them in the galaxy as punishment for standing up for what’s right.
Before they left me, Batha told me one more thing. Scopa is not Red Network and can know nothing about any of this. He would not turn them in, but he’s a devout pacifist, and would never join us. And anyone, slave or free, who learns the identity of a Network operative must be killed. No exceptions. Batha said that this sort of ruthless secrecy is the only way the Network can survive. I swore on Karot-chan’s soul to keep the Network’s secrets. I don’t like it, and I would stop them if they tried to kill Scopa, but…they’re the only game in town, so to speak. It didn’t occur to me until after they had left me that the logical progression of that policy of cell secrecy meant that if I had rejected their offer they would have killed me, too.
I will live. I have something to live for again, while I wait for Son-kun to arrive. It’s hard, very hard, not to hate the gods for what they’ve let me suffer.
And I know my dark road is nowhere near at its end. I want to make sure that, in my lifetime, no one will ever again have to suffer the kind of things I’ve suffered.
And I will.
It’s been four weeks since my last entry. I’ve been busy. Scopa’s let me download disc after disc from his surgery’s high speed connection to the Imperial Library. I told him I was the daughter of a mastertech trade house on my homeworld, and that the tech manuals and journals are my idea of the epitome of entertainment in reading material. He was so pleased to see me smiling and taking an interest in anything, he said to download whatever I want. Gods, he’s such a sweet trusting man. Batha didn’t believe I was going through the journals so quickly. I don’t know why. It’s not like I’ve got anything else to do all damn day but study.
It’s scary how any situation, no matter how horrific, can settle into a pattern a daily routine. I wake up each morning---sometimes I get woken up for a quickie or two before he flies to the mainland. Scopa comes in as soon as he hears the Prince leave for the day and checks me out, making the necessary repairs when needed. These days, I usually don’t need anything more extensive than a bone sauter for a rib or two, and a tissue knitter for bruises. Most of the time, I don’t even need the bone sauter. I want him to teach me how to use it on myself.
When that’s out of the way, I eat breakfast with Scopa and the twins. Then I sit out on the rocky beach and study until he returns in the evening. Scopa usually comes out and joins me at noon and brings us a little picnic lunch. He can read lips, so I don’t have to type out or sign our conversations. We eat and we talk about a little of everything, our childhoods, our lost homeworlds. Madran was destroyed when he was three years old. He’s been a slave his entire life.
Yesterday, he was supposed to give me a booster injection for the Silencing.
He asked me if I hate him and I was honestly surprised.
"I Silenced you," he said softly. His amber face was twisted up in anguish, and I realized this had been eating him alive inside. "I patched you up every morning so he could have the pleasure of breaking you again that night. I still do. If he had commanded me, I would have had to---to give you a susaji juice aphrodisiac or even---even—" I stopped him with a hand on his arm.
"If you had refused, he would have killed you," I said silently.
"I am a coward," he whispered. "It is no excuse to do evil or abet evil and say, ‘I was commanded to do these things on pain of my life.’ It is no excuse! I have betrayed all I ever held sacred to save my own life. I have spent my entire life in Med Center, Bulma. I was trained as a trauma surgeon. I have never been asked, in all my years as a slave of the Empire, to do anything other than heal the wounded and tend the unborn. When…when the Prince brought you to this island, he commanded medical admin to send him their best physician…"
"And they sent you," I finished for him.
"I thought he wanted me as his personal staff medic…for himself," Scopa said dully. "He has a well known tendency to train dangerously. I felt honored. When I arrived here, he led me to where you sat and I saw that you were in some kind of deep withdrawal shock. He told me to wake you and prep you for---for his use. I gave you a series of gentle shock stims to pull you out of the shock. Then I sedated you after you woke and Silenced you, and…and just left you for him to---to---" His breath caught in a soft sob. "I could not have taken you to safety, because it would have meant Batha and Caddi’s lives, but I should have done something! I should have died before I did as he asked. It was the first true test of whatever moral fiber I have and I was too frightened to do anything!" He was kneeling beside me on the blanket we always used as a picnic spread as he spoke.
Slowly, he put his face and palms to the ground before me in a pose of such utter submission, I choked on tears myself. "I beg you…I beg you, forgive me. I will not compromise what I know to be right again. I will not give you the Silencing injection, even if it means my life."
My hand was shaking a little when I took the hypo from his hand gently and pressed it into my own arm. I took his shoulders and pulled him up slowly to face me. "If it wears off, he will kill you," I said. "And I won’t let you die on my account. I don’t blame you, Scopa. Please don’t blame yourself. It’s not your fault. It’s mine. All of this is my fault." Something in the way I smiled at him made him pale with worry. For just a second or two, I saw myself through his eyes and recoiled a bit. The fragile, haunted, too-thin girl mirrored in his dark eyes looked like she was stumbling along a precipice of madness. She in no way resembled the woman with a cause I believed I had become. She was in no way as ‘okay’ as I thought I was.
"It is his fault, Bulma!" He said, reaching out and shaking me lightly. "His! Raditz’ death, your son’s death, the way he has used you---it is his fault, not yours!
How are you at fault? Because you are beautiful? That is the ravisher’s excuse since time began and it is a lie!"
I couldn’t tell him about the garden. I couldn’t make him see that I knew I had invited the Prince to take me when he touched me that first time. Some things are too shameful to ever tell another living soul. And if I’d told him the whole truth, Scopa’s gentle heart would have tried to grant me some kind of absolution for my sin. I don’t want any. I know I deserve everything that he’s done to me.
Batha and Caddi are nice to me, but I’ve had time to realize they watched the Prince use me night after night with a kind of cold calculation behind their sympathy and comfort, knowing that if I survived the initial ‘breaking’, their cause would have a loyal, devout new recruit, strategically placed in the Crown Prince’s own bed. Their cause, our cause, is right, but…
Batha is, beneath the kind, smiling mask she showed me as first, ruthless and agate-hearted. Caddi is a study in introversion, silent, never meeting my eyes…but under that stoop-shouldered, broken pose is a woman as dedicated to her purpose as her sister. On some profound level they’ve subverted their hearts and morality to achieve their ends.
Scopa is not a freedom fighter. He’s just a good man trying to live in evil times and do the right thing. And he’s my friend. Oh Kami, it’s so good to have a friend again.
We moved back to the Capital yesterday. He has a surprisingly low key villa in the hills, overlooking the huge city. We loaded up the flyer everyone had somehow kept hidden from me during the weeks of my escape attempts and flew across the sound. As I watched Scopa and the twins load their few personal possessions and the mini-surgery, I could have kicked myself for not thinking of capsulization technology sooner. It had nearly innumerable uses to a hunted rebel force that needed to travel quick and light. I drew up full design plans, the nuts and bolts on up, from memory while we flew and gave the data chip to Batha.
"Give that to your cell leader," I told her. "And after they’ve built it and tested it, tell them there’s a hell of a lot more where that came from. I’ve included a wish list of supplies and materials I’ll need to get started on the Ki-gun. But I’ve got to have some sort of lab to give them anything more complex."
"You’ll get it," she said emphatically.
I spent the next few hours reading out on the stone deck that faced the hill country, listening to the distant roars of ships launching and descending at the space port on the western edge of the Capital along the coast. Leaving
Vegita-sei…
I am trapped. If I leave, I cause the deaths of everyone else in the household. If I die, same thing. If I kill him…
I asked Scopa what would happen if I made it look like an accident. He went pale and shook his head. "No, Bulma. Even if you succeed, you can’t be certain there would be no suspicions. The tiniest suspicion would be enough to get you torn apart by the Inquisitors. And the King would take out his grief on every slave on Vegita-sei."
So, I can’t kill him. I knew that anyway, it’s just a pleasant daydream. Not yet, Batha told me. I understand why he needs to stay alive. Why he’s worth more to the Red Demons alive than dead. So, I’ll bide my time. But Nappa…he’s a different matter altogether.
Last night, the Prince introduced me to susaji juice. Scopa didn’t mix it for him, he brought it home fermented into a bottle of expensive goldberry wine.
It tasted like honey mead on my tongue, and he watched me as I obediently drank the full glass he’s poured me, those black eyes glittering with expectation. I thought it was only wine, his idea of a ‘home-coming’ toast. When I finished the glass, he left me sitting at the dining table and moved over to stoke the embers of the hearthpit, a small smile on his lips. I followed him, wondering what new game this was and what I should do. He sat down after a moment in a big blackwood armchair and I knelt down before him. He smiled again as he ran a hand through my hair, like a man petting a lap dog. I took the hand in mine and drew it down my face, smiling myself, picturing him impaled on a bed of knives while I removed his guts with a dull scalpel. He didn’t say anything or make a move on me. I knew why, or thought I did.
It hadn’t taken him long to start demanding that I do more than just submit and respond to his advances. After a while, he began to want me to make the first move. To do things to him, rather than just lie down and comply. I played dumb in this, pretending that I had very little in the way of advanced skills in this area. He believed it of course, and even made some nasty comment about low class warriors like Raditz having little idea of how to please of woman. I jumped on him and began pummeling him with my bare fists when he said that, screaming soundlessly that Raditz had been twice his size, in every sense of the word, and had never hurt me once. He thought the bare-handed attack was hilarious, but the idea of me rebelling against him because of his slander toward Raditz made him angry.
"You need a reminder of how things were and could be again if you do not behave yourself, woman," he hissed. He hurt me badly that night. He only stopped when he realized he’d broken my spine and I was dying.
But on the whole, he seemed pleased that I appeared to be sexually unsophisticated. He believed he was teaching me as we went along.
I kissed the thin skin over his wrist, imagining it slit open, is life’s blood pouring out. I put both hands on his knees, moving my body between them, sliding my hands up his thighs, preparing to give him a lengthy and thorough blow job. Each moment it took meant another moment he would not be inside me, making me come, making hate myself and all the gods in creation for giving me over to this nightmare. He always makes me come, again and again, but always hurts me, too---he has every night, except that first night when I gave in. He’s skilled in what he does, but at some point, he always loses his control and either cracks a bone or tears me up inside by going too hard and too fast. On a good night, if I’m lucky, he’ll hurt me at the end of the night rather than at the beginning. If it’s at the beginning, I’m SOL, because once he starts, he won’t stop. He may think the writhing in agony under him is me getting off, but in the end, he really doesn’t give a damn. Though he did growl at me angrily once when I stopped moving with him because of the pain.
"Are you getting bored, woman?!" He snarled. Then he increased his pace and strength and hurt me worse for having stopped,
That’s a long way of explaining why blow jobs have become my specialty. I began kissing my way up his thigh, but he stopped me with a gentle push, shaking his head. "You do not want me yet," he said. "Not truly."
No-fucking-duh! I thought. I sat back with my legs tucked beneath me, wondering what the hell he wanted from me now. Then the susaji juice began to kick in. It was like going mad with an insatiable craving in the space of an instant.
It was like starving and smelling roasting beef right in front of you, like dying and coming upon a pool of cold clean icy water. Only what I needed, what I was starving for, was sex. My blood felt like it was boiling, as though every nerve in my body had been teased to the brink of a thunderous climax that has yet to come.
I felt like an addict shrieking for a fix. I leapt on him, ready to tear his clothes off and have him in the most animal way imaginable. There was no sense, no thought, no hate---just need. He pushed me back gently a few more times, smirking now, then got up and strolled leisurely into the bedroom. I followed him, clinging to him, the desire inside me growing to a kind of burning internal pressure. He stripped and lay down on the bed, but he didn’t have me for a long time. Not until I groveled and begged him with silent words and tears. He let me beg for a long time. Finally, he chuckled affectionately and opened his arms to me. I jumped into them, sobbing with relief, and we went at it like wild animals in heat until dawn.
I woke this morning, unhurt. Uninjured. I must have been so pumped up with adrenaline that I was nearly a match for him. If he gives me the juice again, I think---no, I’m sure---that my mind will just snap in half like a twig. I’ll go out to lunch permanently and not come back.
If I have a choice, I’d rather he hurt me every single time. Anything is better than wanting him like I did last night. And the way he made me beg was worse than all the rapes combined.
I have a lab and a workshop. The twins took my capsule plans to whoever they take stuff to, then all the way up the chain of command to the Red Prince himself, who apparently nearly wet himself in excitement over the possibilities of encapsulation technology. They’ve brought me everything I asked for over the last couple of months, smuggling tools and supplies in baskets of laundry and market sacks. Scopa is always up and out of the house my midmorning, as soon as he’s finished patching me up on the days I need it. The Prince gave him permission to work at Med Center during the day, though he’s always on call for me, or if the Prince hurts himself while training---which he does frequently, I’ve learned.
Scopa always returns through the servant’s kitchen entrance well after dark, so he’s never around to have to hide my work from. I don’t know ho
Sorry about that. He came home for a lunch hour quickie. Damn. I have to be more careful with this journal. The twins sure as hell don’t know about it. They’d destroy it and probably kill me as well. Make it look like I killed myself. It would mean their lives and Scopa’s as well, but since we’ve returned to the Capital, I’ve seen, a little more all the time, just how little they value even their own lives where the Network is concerned. I know it’s absolute madness to keep this diary now. But I need it desperately. It’s a memory of Karot-chan, so it won’t be forgotten that he lived and that I loved him, even when I’m dead. It’s a place I can tell all my secrets, pour out all my pain. I can’t speak, but here I have a voice. Even if I could speak, I might never be able to tell anyone the things I’ve lived through. Here I can. And it’s a release to right down what I’m surviving, even if no one ever reads it. I think in the very real way, this diary is keeping me from coming unglued.
I found out today what happened to Noira and her family. Scopa found Hiru.
He’s working out of Med Center as a ferry ship pilot. He’s alive. Noira and Duska are dead. Vegita blasted the ship to pieces with them inside after he killed Raditz, beat the hell out of Nappa, and knocked me out. I don’t suppose he knew or cared that there was a woman and a little girl inside. Why should he? They were less than nothing to him. I sat and rocked back and forth, wishing I could make myself cry for them all day, a year and a day. But I couldn’t cry. I can’t remember how long it’s been since I cried. Caddi came and sat down beside me with her knitting. She is such a quiet person, letting Batha