Bulma stood gazing up from her perch on the fuselage front of her Cap Corp Mk 87 flyer and watched the moon come, feeling an anti-climatic surge of relief when nothing earth shattering happened. It had taken less time than she would have thought to mount to reconstructed bits of her brute ray cannon on the flyer, but polarizing the device itself had been a pain in the ass.

"Will it kill them?" Juuhachigou's light voice might had been asking if it would rain sometime tonight. The android sat on the porch swing adding the finishing touches to one last reflector collar. Mosquitoes buzzed around her and retreated, confused. Must be nice, Bulma thought, smacking another blood-sucker off her arm.

"No," she replied. "The brute ray enhances ki, strengthens it for a short time. I've sort of reversed the affect. It should completely disrupt anyone's ability to harness ki for a few hours. The reflector controller has a bio-stat reading on it. If it starts to look like Son-kun and Vegita are on the point of killing each other, I'll turn the hose on them, so to speak."

"Hm," said the other woman. She stared up at the red sunset. Her beautiful, immobile features betrayed no emotion, but her eyes tracked the route her husband had taken moments before. "He is making a "parameter sweep", she said, sounding mildly annoyed. But the pale, cold eyes warmed fractionally as Krillan swooped into view. Bulma hopped off the flyer and made her way inside, letting the other woman greet her husband in private. In the living room a the spacious mountain retreat lodge, Bulma had scattered a collection of deceptively harmless looking capsules and tools. Several dozen clips of a sedative she'd had developed years ago, tailored around Saiyan physiology. One pellet would kill a dozen grown male elephants. It had made Vegita wobbly and disoriented for all of fifteen minutes. Trank guns for the clips, her reflector controller, a med-kit, a tiny pouch with the two senzu Vegita had given her this morning, her collar tracer---

Where the hell was her tracer?

Something terrible occurred to her, a flash of insight that had no logic attached to it, and she ran to the door of the house that faced a rolling green expanse of woodlands. The Son's air car was gone.

A scream sliced through her thoughts and she bolted back through the house, to the bedroom where Pan had lain feverish and half-conscious all afternoon. Pan and Gohan both lay on the floor, gasping for breath.

"What's happening?" Videl cried. "What's happening to them?!"

The two women watched in horrified fascination as father and daughter writhed in agony as their tails grew back, ripping their way out of the backside of their pants. After what seemed an interminable time, Gohan twitched and rolled onto his side with a weak laugh.

"That really hurt," he said faintly. "I forgot how much it hurts."

"Gohan-kun?" Videl looked as though she was going to pass out. "I can take our daughter going into heat, but I don't know if I can deal with this." He laughed again as she helped him sit up. Krillan and Juuhachigou came rushing in and stopped, taking in the scene.

"Oh my," said the android.

Gohan began trembling with reaction to the change. On the floor beside him, Pan was still curled into a ball, whimpering slightly. "Pan? Panny? It'll ease up in a minute. Just ride the pain out, honey."

"Are you going to be okay, Gohan?" Krillan asked tremulously.

"I…" Gohan's voice was harsh, his posture more tense with each passing second. "The reflector's still working, but it feels…over-loaded now…I feel---Kuso, Videl! Don't touch me!" he swatted her gentle hands away from his arms, and she yelped involuntarily at the look on his face. He put his head in both hands, shaking. "I'm sorry…I'm sorry. Just don't get too close right now, Videl." His eyes flickered red, then brown again.

"…Trunks…" Pan muttered.

Here we go, thought Bulma. Oh KamiKamiKami, please let the collars hold for both their sakes, for all our sakes!

"Trrrrrunkssss," Pan sprang to her feet in a half-crouch an batted her mother across the room almost casually, her new tail swishing slowly behind her. Head lowered, she eyed her father hatefully, growling low in her throat.

"Get out of my way, Poppa," she said softly. She darted left in a feint and squirreled back to the right, running Krillan down. Gohan hooked a hand around her foot and jerked her back. She spun on him and slashed his face with nails that were suddenly long and unnaturally distended like claws, drawing blood. She wriggled free of his grasp and bolted----into the implacable steel wall of Juuhachigou. The android raised one pale, perfect eyebrow and felled the girl with one blow.

"Pan-chan!" Gohan turned the unconscious girl, who was still breathing heavily and thrashing like someone in the grip of a nightmare. "Dammit! You didn't have to hit her so hard!" The words came out of his throat in a rumbling snarl. He lay the girl's limp body back on the bed.

Videl had crawled back to her feet painfully. "She nearly got aw---Gohan! Your hands!" Her husband's eyes had burned red again, his fingers curling, morphing into razored claws. He cried out hoarsely, half-collapsing with the effort to reassert control again, his hands and eyes returning to normal. And Bulma smelled something that scared her more than Gohan's aborted transformation---the burning smell of electrical circuits straining beyond capacity. It was coming from Gohan's collar.

"Okay," she said, making Videl jump. "Plan B. My tranks are half sedative and half muscle relaxant. It won't put you out completely, but I think it'll take the edge off what you're feeling."

"Get it now!" Gohan rasped, tearing his eyes away from Videl, and the growing impulse to grab her and---"Now!!"

Bulma stepped around Juuhachigou who was tenderly tending a swelling bruise on her husband's head to the coffee table where her assorted tools and "weapons" lay strewn. She scooped up the hypos, the controller, and all the tranks guns and shoved them into a satchel, swinging the strap over her head. She might need to be highly mobile before the night was over. Aside from the other odds and ends lay a flat black pistol. She stared at it for a long moment. It was filled with enough lethal poison to kill a heard a rabid dinosaurs. Just in case…She encapsulated the gun and shoved in her belt, her face blank. Just in case.

Videl was huddled on the far side of the room, behind Krillan and Juuhachigou. Gohan knelt on the floor, his head lowered, his face hidden, but something violent and primal and nameless seemed to be radiating from him like heat.

"Stay away from me, Bulma-san," he said softly. She backed away. "Let Krillan-san give me the injection." She nodded wordlessly and handed the hypo to Krillan. Gohan arched in renewed agony as the drug hit his bloodstream, and slowly, by infinitesimal degrees, began to relax, his labored breath slowing.

"I think…I feel better now," he said. His voice sounded normal again. Videl ran to him and stopped short.

"Can I---should I not touch you?"

He opened his arms, his eyes suddenly overly bright with tears, and she fell into them, sobbing. "I'm okay. I'm okay," he whispered. He glanced down, his flushed face growing fractionally redder as he noticed he had an embarrassingly prominent erection. "I feel like we're sixteen again and you just kicked me out of the back seat of your father's car after making out for two hours." He laughed shakily. "If this goes on the rest of the night I may not be able to walk tomorrow." Krillan began chuckling painfully, and Bulma felt her own lips begin to twitch.

Both men's face's suddenly went blank, their eyes unfocused, some kind of message or communication blipping through the scope of their ki. Krillan paled. "Oh shit."

"What is it?" Bulma asked, not wanting to hear the answer.

Gohan stared at her, his face grim and fearful. "It's Trunks.

They found Vegita." Her breath stopped in her throat. "He's alive. The boy took all his memories since he first arrived on Chikyuu, then told him you've been holding him prisoner all these years. He somehow managed to get the better of both Trunks and Toussan and now he's looking for you, Bulma-san."

"Gods…" Krillan said softly.

Everyone was silent, watching her as she digested this information. When she finally spoke, she was amazed how calm her voice sounded. "When he arrives, Gohan, I want you to hold him just long enough for me to zap him with the brute ray, " she told him. "Then we'll pump him full of tranks and see if that keeps him out til morning."

"Bulma," Krillan began. "Tomorrow or tonight, it won't make any difference. You remember what he was like---"

"I haven't forgotten anything!" She snapped. "I can only work this problem one step at a time, dammit! Until we can figure out how to put him back to rights, I'd very much appreciate it if you didn't kill my husband!"

Gohan's harsh cry cut through the tortured current of her thoughts as the younger man turned to the bed and saw what no one had had time to notice until now. His daughter was gone.

Trunks sprang into the sky, tail slashing the air around him. Toussan! He had no way of knowing if his unfocused broadcast had warned Gohan and the others or not. He kept his eyes lowered as he shot off in the direction his father had taken, but his reason was rapidly bleeding away, and a part of him---an ever-increasing part of him---was happy for its loss.

"Touuussssaann!" He howled through distended fangs, raking the air with clawed hands. There was one conscious thought spinning tenaciously through the whirlwind that was enveloping his brain, and he held to that thought like a stake driven to ground in a cyclone's eye. He must stop his father from killing his mother!

She sped through the hot night air, her long black hair whipping madly in her face. The air car whined as she pushed it harder, beyond the limits of the second hand engine her son had taken such care in restoring the previous year. In the seat beside lay one of Bulma's trank guns, clenched in one hand was the pilfered secondary tracer. Bulma would have to forgive her this little theft.

She had ambled aimlessly around the ostentatious hunting lodge, watching the others prepare for the night ahead, as the sun dipped ever lower. Then she had seen the tracers lying side by side among the other technical doo-dads Bulma had brought along, seen the blip that was Gokou-sa begin to circle and bob, the vitals spiking like Everest. They had begun to fight. She watched in mute horror as her husband's signal dipped, the stats registering unconsciousness or injury, her heart leaping up into her mouth. Trunks signal wobbled, then winked out completely. Oh Kami, had Gokou-sa or Vegita killed him or had he just lost his reflector? Was her husband lying injured, unable to move? Had he killed Vegita?

She didn't care. The thought was angry and defiant in it's selfishness, and for once she didn't give a damn. Gokou-sa was definitely still alive and she would plow through Hell itself to keep that bastard ex-murderer from taking him from her again. She had tried to be charitable over the long years, tried to be forgiving. But the fact of what Vegita had been and what he had done when he first arrived on Chikyuu was something she could never forget. Or forgive.

Chi-Chi spun the car as she caught sight of Trunks rising like a missile into the night. The force of his slip stream as he tore past her screaming his father's name sent her into a wild wheeling fish tail. She crashed to the ground, rolling over and over before teetering to a stop with a dull thud. She sat for a second or two in shock, unable to believe she had survived the wreck without so much as a scratch. Gohan's car! He'll be so upset! She still held the tracer tightly in one hand and fumbled in the floor until she found the trank gun. She vaulted out of the crumpled cab, following the unerring signal of her husband's reflector.

She was not a fool.

She was not mad or irrational or any of the hateful, self-deprecating words that leapt to mind in the light of what she was doing. She had understood the full weight of everything Vegita had told them, had seen the terrifying look of dark, growing need in her husband's eyes when he'd kissed her goodbye. But gods, gods, gods! She had only just gotten him back. And she knew in the deepest part of herself that Gokou-sa was hers now, in a way he had never been before. She had loved the man he had been, sometimes past the point of bearing. She would not have thought it possible to love him more.

But she did.

This new man who listened to what she said, understood what she said. Who told her he loved her, instead of just assuming she knew it in the same way she knew the sky was blue. Who saw her faults and still loved her. For the first time in her life she knew she would never again have to worry about always initiating lovemaking. She knew instinctively that the man her husband was now would never forget that it had been one week, two weeks, since he had held her, taking her to bed with a good-natured sweetness that had always left her wondering if it wasn't just to make her happy, always showing more interest in a good meal or a good fight---always, in some guilt-ridden back corner of her mind, leaving her feeling ugly, undesirable.

From the moment she had first understood the full weight of what had happened between Bra-chan and Goten, an idea had crept into her head, refusing to rest or be silent. She stood now over his shaking, half-conscious body and saw with some relief his collar was still intact. He opened his eyes. She would not lose him again. She would not. Even if it meant her life.

"Chi-Chi…go…"

"Shh," she said, kissing him. And shot three of Bulma trank pellets into his arm.

Vegita sailed along a straight unwavering b-line toward the power readings he'd sensed earlier. He hissed with anticipation as he felt a solitary spark of ki streaking toward him. It was incredibly high, though less than one or two of the others. Much, much lower than his. A scout maybe? Good, he grinned. An appetizer before the main course. He dropped down beneath the tree tops waiting, then launched upward suddenly into the oncoming path of the enemy, who literally ran into him. He froze, gazing down at what he had just caught, shock momentarily cutting through he mad song of the moon. The squirming, snarling girl in his arms locked brown eyes shot through with gold and crimson on his face and her small body stilled against his. Saiyan…One of Kakarott's whelps? A slow, full smile spread across his face, the second real, true joy he had felt in longer than he could remember washing through him for the second time in one night. Wonder upon wonders…he had literally stumbled onto the one thing that did not exist anywhere else in all the worlds in all the galaxies in creation.

A Saiyan female.

He inhaled her scent and it burst inside his brain and his body, turning his knees to jelly. She was in the full bloom of her first heat. One small, bird-boned hand trailed up his chest and throat, halting at his face. "Ve-vegita-san…"

"You know me?"

She blinked, her eyes kalidoscoping from gold, to red, to brown. "All my life," she whispered. "I want…" He smiled. He knew his scent was filling her mind, burning out the thought of anything else but his presence here and now. Then her eyes faded to brown again and she shook him with surprising force.

"I want Trunks! Where is he? Where is Trunks?!" Her breath was becoming jagged, almost panicked. "I don't know what I want anymore! I don't know what to do!"

"Lift your head, girl," he breathed softly, staving off the violent need to take her until the moon and the forces raging inside her body drove her to mark him and initiate the chase. He would not ruin this for himself or for her with impatience. "Raise your eyes to the moon and let your mind go. Your body knows. It knows what to do. We do not need our minds tonight." He tilted her head back, watching as her eyes flared into the color of sweet fresh blood, her small chest heaving against his. Around her exposed throat he caught sight of another of those hellish collars, choking instinct and nature out of her. But if he tore it off, would it injure or incapacitate her as it had done the boy? Then her head whipped down and her teeth sank into his shoulder, and he shrieked as her fangs drove a dagger of pleasure into his body so intense it was almost painful. She pulled back, hissing defiantly, fists pounding ineffectually, but he held her firmly, pressed to his body. She calmed slightly, shuddering and growling against him, laying her head on his shoulder as he rode out the first wave of pleasure from her bite. He pushed her dark hair to one side, baring his fangs against her slim olive neck, savoring the unutterable sweetness of what he was about to do.

She uttered a half-sob, trembling against him, little arms wound around his neck, and lifted her head from where she'd buried it against his shoulder.

"You have to show me what to do," she said softly. "I…I w-want you. I think I do…but I'm afraid…"

The break in her voice, the look of complete trust in her heart-shaped face, was like an icepick driving through the fire raging in his brain. It wasn't just the collar, he suddenly realized. She was young. Years and years to young to have come into her first heat. The body crushed against his was a woman's, but the voice and the face…He brushed her thoughts and another stab of cold lucidity lanced through him. He stared into her tear-streaked face. She was not a young woman, she was a very young girl. She was little more than a child. And she was afraid…

He pushed her back, fighting with a nauseous, suffocating wave of self-disgust and desire, swirling together in the pit of his stomach like confection laced with poison. He could drown the highest peak of this world in the oceans of blood he had shed, but he would not do this. He would not!

He cuffed her lightly and she collapsed with a grateful sigh against him.

He had to find a safe place to hide her, from himself and others, while he still had the strength to do it. He would return for her in the morning and take her back...somewhere. Not Tsiru-sei. Someplace safe. She would be his mate, but not this season. Not for several years yet. After he had destroyed Tsiru-sei and every living member of the Tsiru-jin race, after he had dealt with Frieza…He planned to take months, years maybe, to kill the old monster. Then he would take the reigns of Frieza's pirate empire, and he and the girl would begin to rebuild their race.

"Vegiitaaa!" A bolt of ki slammed into his back, and sent the girl flying from his arms. "What did you do to her?! What did you do?!"

"Nothing!" He turned snarling at this new enemy. "And I deserve a fucking medal for the effort it took! But I do not mate with children."

The other man, another of Kakarott's brood judging from his face, calmed a bit, touching another of the hateful black collars around his throat. Above and to his side two women and an old man hovered. The darker of the Chikyuu women was now holding the girl protectively.

"Videl," Kakarott's son called sharply over his shoulder. "Take Pan back to Bulma-san."

Bulma-san…

"I'm taking the girl with me, half-breed," Vegita grated. "Give her back or I will blast that woman out of the sky." The woman tried to dart away, and he hurled a shot at the small of her back, lightly, so as not to injure the girl, dropping her. He laughed. "I warned you."

"Videl!" The man screamed. The others, the pale woman and the old man,

were flying at him. He swatted the man away irritably, sending him spinning down into the dark forest below. The blond woman uttered a shrill cry of rage and rushed him. He grinned at her. She had no measurable ki, but he could sense her enormous, somehow unnatural strength. She would have made mince of any warrior he had ever met until this night---and her power was nothing compared to his. He dodged her barrage of ki bursts with no effort and sent her careening downward to join the weakling in the darkened woodlands. He turned to see Kakarott's brat speeding toward him. They traded cursory appraising blows, and Vegita hissed as the other man caught him in a clench.

"Is she your sister?" He sneered into the bigger man's face. "No…your brat." He hissed in frustration and rising rage. He couldn't break the bastard's hold. The man was nearly as strong as Kakarott, and that was with the slave collar that Vegita sensed was somehow dampening his full potential. If his opponent were freed from its constraints, Vegita realized, he would be a serious threat. "I will not take her this moon. But she is mine all the same. Do you not see where she marked me?" The bigger man growled and drove a fist into his ribs, cracking them. "I will take her with me when I have killed Kakarott and the woman Bulma and blown you and this planet out the other side of Hell's back door!"

The younger warrior ground his teeth, still holding on to Vegita grimly. "Vegita-san…try to remember---"

"Why would I want to do that?" He spat in disgust. "How can you defend the woman who put an animal collar around both out throats?!" He tore halfway free of the half-breed's grasp and spun, slicing through his enemy's ribs with a scissored sweep of his claws. "You cannot defeat me while you wear it."

"Then I'll take it off," Gohan rasped. He reached up and snatched the band off his neck, and a wave of agonizing paralysis shot through him. Don't try to take them off, Bulma-san had said. Vegita pushed through the other man's momentarily frozen defenses, driving his fist deep into the bigger man's bleeding side. He followed his enemy's fall to the ground, summoning enough power from the bottomless well of ki he was now tapped into, enough to finish this dangerous bastard off. What kind of monstrous, unfathomable power would this man have if he were not hobbled by the collar he wore? Better not to have to find out. He hesitated, scanning for the girl's ki, and dove downward with a grin. By some bizarre twist of fate, father and daughter had landed only a few meters from each other on the soft pine needle carpet of the forest floor. He bent, checking her for injuries.

"Noooo!" The force of the blow that seemed to come out of nowhere sent him headfirst into a nearby hillside.

Trunks knelt over Pan, clutching his head with both hands. He couldn't think! He couldn't think! His arms and legs had carried him of their own will to the spot where Pan lay. His face was twisted, nails slicing into the palms of his hands. Could he manage to knock himself out? Did he even want to stop anymore? He lay one hand on her face, and hers eyes opened at his touch, drowning thought and sense and conscience.

"Trunks," she smiled. "I found you…" He pulled her up into his shaking arms, all doubt and hesitation flown like a half-remembered dream----and choked as a bloody hand locked around his throat and yanked him backward.

"Hold still, dammit," Gohan croaked weakly.

"Give him back!" Pan screamed, flailing at her father. "Give him back to me, Poppa!"

Something cold and metallic replaced the hand around his neck and locked into place with a soft snick. The pounding in his ears dulled and Trunks almost sobbed with relief as the night and the forest became clear and focused. He stared at Gohan who was holding Pan in an easy grip under one arm. Trunks touched the reflector around his throat and saw with horror that Gohan's neck was now bare.

"Your father wants to kill Bulma-san and take Pan away with him," Gohan ground the words out with effort. "I can't stop him while I'm wearing the collar. Can you think straight now?" Trunks nodded mutely. A harsh roar of rage, distant but growing louder, told him his father was coming. Gohan shoved his squirming daughter into Trunks arms. "His mind is gone now. Take her. Get her away from him. Anything is better than what he'll do to her." The hand clamped on his throat again, and he half-gagged as he was pulled nose to nose with his older friend. "I'm trusting you, Trunks. Promise me…promise…"

"I swear, Gohan," he said, without knowing how he would keep his word.

Gohan growled furiously with the effort it took to speak. "Whatever happens tonight…please…please don't hurt her!" Another howling scream, closer. It was hard to believe that noise had come from his father's throat. "Go!" Gohan cried.

Trunks rose less than ten feet above the ground and took off, dodging and swooping beneath the cover of the trees, his precious burden wound tightly in his arms.

"Please…" He whispered against her lips. "I don't want to hurt you."

"You won't," Chi-Chi said, closing her eyes and reaching deep inside for the reserve of power she had not drawn from since she had first begun to train Goten to use his ki. Her aura flared up around her, red laced with streaks of twilight blue, lending strength and steel hard density to her flesh and bones. The smoldering smell of over-taxed circuitry rose again from his reflector, and he flipped her, rolling to a stop above her, his body pressed hard down the length of hers, purring low against the nape of her neck.

"I need you, Chi-Chi," he growled softly. He began pulling feverishly at her clothing and his own until there was nothing separating her heart and his but bare skin and bone.

"I'm right here, Gokou-sa," she breathed in his ear. "You can have me." He kissed her deep and full and slow. Then with a grateful cry, he plunged into her--into her body and into her mind. And she felt…everything. His mouth against her neck, incisors piercing through soft skin as he had not done since the night they had made Gohan, drinking in her blood and sweat and the musky scent of her arousal. He was driving into her, too roughly even for her strength, so forcefully she couldn't breathe, only exhale in a long soundless scream of pleasure and tearing pain. His mind inside hers, thrusting inward as deep and hard and unstoppable as his body, shattering lifelong barriers of hidden pains and resentments and every semblance of privacy and reserve. He seared through every thought, every feeling, every moment and memory of her life. And she saw him as well. The boy he had been, the man he had become, the man he was. Life and death and resurrection, his embrace of this world he called his home with perfect love and acceptance of every living thing on it. His unfaltering belief that anyone, whatever they were and had been, could change for the better. And she saw that the little fool of a Tsiru-jin had not really changed him, had not deminished his sweet goodness in any way, had in fact strengthened and crystallized it, making him more than he had been, because it was effortless to be good when one was a complete innocent in most ways.

And the wonder of it all was that she now saw that the miracle was not that he loved her as much as all the other people in his world, but that he loved them as much as he loved her. There were no words for it and the breadth and depth were immeasurable. She was weeping softly, drawing in gulps of air where she could against the backbreaking rhythm and force of his thrusts. She felt the pressure of release building up inside his mind and body and it carried her upward with him, even through the pain, scaling some dizzying height of need and desire and pulsing primal crescendo. She came screaming his name until her throat was raw, and he thrust forward one last time, his cries drowning in hers. She felt the sweet, warm surge of him as he came, filling her up with his half of the essence of life, and she knew beyond logic, reason, or explanation that if she lived through this night, she would bear his third child. He collapsed onto her, sobbing, and she realized dimly that she had never seen him cry before this last change, not once in his entire adult life before last night.

"Chi-Chi…" He was kissing her. "Chi-Chi, please…Please be all right!"

"I…I'm okay, Gokou-sa," she said faintly. She put one arm around him and held his head against her chest as he wept. She couldn't move the other arm for some reason. But she could feel his mind threaded through hers in an invisible, permanent skein. The Saiyan bond. She smiled and held him close.

They spun and tore and slashed, gouging deep furrows in the ground, flickering from earth to sky and back again. The oxygen in the air around them ignited with the heat of their ki blasts. He remembered he had once had a name, but it was lost for the moment and he did not mourn its passing or the loss of thought. He had a sense that the entirety of his life had been fettered down and strangled by too much thinking. No more. He was free of all constraint, manners, and responsibility, good and bad were so much ash and smoke in the wake of the fire raging inside him. He was killing the other, the one who'd threatened something---what he could not remember--- important to him. Beating him to death with his fists, pulping bone and muscle with each blow he managed to land. He had always, always, held something back, some piece of reserve that did not want to hurt anybody or anything. But some dim kernel of memory told him that this enemy had been the first to make him raise a fist in anger long ago, that this man had been in a very real way the death of the peace and safety of his earliest years.

He was not holding back anything now. Unbelievably, the other man was grinning at him as they clashed and circled again. The planet beneath them convulsed with the backlash of power each time they traded blows. He struck the enemy again, hearing the sweet satisfying crunch of bone, and blurred behind him, hands gripping the man's throat before he could recover. He spoke the next words without realizing he uttered them before, more than thirty years ago. "You killed my friends and you hurt my Toussan! Now you're gonna die!"

The corner of his eye caught sight of the buzzing flying machine, of fair skin and blue hair brushed over eyes as hard and implacable as azure agates. He had one fraction of a second to think that the woman looked very familiar before the blast of freezing numbing white from the weapon she had trained on them struck him and the other full force in the chest, dropping them both like parachute-less boulders. "That'll teach you to go chasing after younger women, you bastard!" He heard a woman's voice mutter softly as he fell into darkness.

"It's over," Chi-Chi said softly.

He propped up on his elbows, gazing down at her and choked. Oh godsgodsgods! He tore through shreds of his discarded gi and found the pouch of senzu he carried, pressing one into her mouth. He pounded one fist into the smooth stone beneath them, fighting down another onslaught of fresh tears, seeing…seeing what he had done to her. The machinery around his neck sizzled as he slammed his fist into the ground again, fighting for control, and this time the mountain beneath them groaned from the force of the blow. The senzu flooded her shattered body with its healing magic and she sat up, wrapping both arms around him.

"It's not over, Chi-Chi," he murmured into her dark hair, his voice raw. "It's just begun. The moon is still climbing to its apex." He shook her lightly. "You have to go now! I know why you came. I understand," he kissed her again. "But the tranks are burning out of my system and the reflector may not hold another hour. If you stay, I will kill you. I won't be able to stop!"

"Then she must stay," said a high, light voice. Gurasia moved out of the shadows and sat cross-legged beside them. And Gokou realized he couldn't move.

Bulma stood in the burning forest, her face a tortured mask of indecision. She had watched the battle between Vegita and Gohan begin, seen the stray blasts turn the dry, brittle tinderbox of the forest below them into an inferno, and moved in low and quiet---praying neither of the terrifying, mad, howling things her husband and her oldest friend's son had become would sense her, praying that she would be lucky enough not to be hit by a random bolt herself. She had found Krillan, Juuhachigou and Videl quickly with the bio sensing equipment she'd installed in the flyer, and flown them back to the lodge. They were all out cold, even Juuhachigou, but not seriously injured. She had stood on the porch, watching the flashes in the sky darting here and there, and it suddenly struck her that Vegita would not win this fight. He still had all the power he had gained in his life on Chikyuu, but not the long years of control, discipline and experience in using it. And Gohan, without the conflict of inhibition and conscience, was more powerful than he had ever been. He would not stop with beating Vegita unconscious. Not tonight. Gohan was going to kill him.

How had they all been so arrogant to think they could estimate or reign in this force of nature, to think they could control the chain of events the boy had set in motion? She had grabbed the last reflector and thrown it in her satchel, and gunned the flyer into the air.The polarized brute ray had dropped both men like pole-axed oxen, but for how long?

Now she stood gazing down at her two changes. Both had their claws still imbedded in the other. If she left either of them here, they would burn to death or die of smoke inhalation. If she took them with her…

Gohan was mad now, and would remain so until morning, Vegita…she shook her head, willing the tears away. Vegita was a stranger to her now. Insane with the madness of Saiyan male rut---and worse, he would be no less dangerous tomorrow. She closed her eyes, trying to block out the memory of the young man, vicious and violent an murderous and only half sane, who had first set foot on Chikyuu so long ago. She walked mechanically from Gohan to Vegita and emptied the contents of one trank gun into each man's body---six caps each. They should take a little nap now. She hoped. The smoke was getting steadily worse. By the time the porterbots had hauled both men onto the craft, the fire was all around them. She set the control for autopilot and auto-land back to the lodge in case she had to deal with either of them in mid-flight. The flyer rose up over billowing waves of smoke and heat, and she fingered the last reflector. Gohan was more powerful, but…She hung the controller from her belt, and her hand strayed to Vegita's sooty, bleeding face. She had to believe there was a way to restore the last half of his life to him---she's go mad herself if she didn't hold onto that hope. She decapsulated her last two guns, one trank gun and the black pistol that was full of deadly poison. Just in case. She shoved both pistols into her waistband. She snapped the last reflector around Vegita's neck, sighing with relief as the latch caught---and she shrieked as one blood-splattered hand closed around her ankle. Vegita kicked drunkenly at the flyer's hatch and the door went spiraling away into the night, hinges and all. He rolled toward the gaping dark rush of air dragging her with him. Then there was only wind and smoke and darkness as they fell together to the ground.

* * * * *