A lovely anon on Tumblr asked me for my thoughts on Uub, and this fic kind of emerged out of that.
Spoilers for Battle of Gods and Resurrection F.
destroyer
In the beginning there were the Twelve Trees, for twelve distinct universes: from the golden fruit, the Supreme Kais, five in total; from the pit, the Destroyer; from the stem, the Attendants, straight-backed and absurdly patient. In the shade of the Seventh Tree emerged Beerus and Whis, immortal, confused, bored.
"Look at this," Beerus says, playing with stardust and fruit juice and highly concentrated evil, standard games for a newborn god trying out its powers. The heavens still newly forged, life a struggling new concept, a little order in a universe he was supposed to always work to make chaotic - but look at all that stuff coming out of evil souls when scrubbed clean! It's pink in hue, tastes a little sweet and has the consistency of rubber. "Hey, maybe I can make this guy do my job for me, so I can nap whenever I want."
"Ill-advised, my lord," Whis says, smiling brightly. "You should know better than to send someone else to do your job. He is a fine-looking fellow, though. What's his name?"
Beerus pouts. "Boo," he says, and you know how this story ends.
Order is inherently esoteric, creation an abstract art; the Kais retreat to their planet, and Beerus leaves them well alone. They irk him with their soft syllables and their long-winded philosophizing. Whis wakes him for meetings, and generations after the universes emerged from the Void reminds him gently that sealing Kais in their own swords is quite a rude thing to do.
"Whatever," Beerus says. Ill-advised his ass. That old Kai had dared to suggest that taste was an overrated and unnecessary sense in sentient mortals, and had suggested focusing their energies on races that conduct photosynthesis and drink water. Beerus had calmly suggested pointing a meteor towards Planet Namek. "Maybe I'll just skip the next few meetings."
"That may be for the best."
So Beerus sleeps for a couple thousand years, wakes and eats a few stars, takes another nap. Things fall into routine. Whis keeps watch. A troublesome mortal named Bibidi picks up a few tricks, sneaks to the utmost edges of the universe where space is thick as soup, finds Beerus' castaway sleeping there. Whis smiles and watches the carnage. He always did feel a little ambivalent about those Kais.
The Seventh Universe is no stranger to trouble. The Destroyer had emerged a little left of centre - their stomachs are supposed to be made for eating the cores of planets, with a particular taste for iron-nickel alloys, but his instead leaned more towards sweets - and the Supreme Kais had been whittled down to one in an unfortunate incident involving a planet-eater, whose egg spends five million years leaking whimsy and opening portals to Hell on some two-bit planet in the north quadrant of the East Kai's domain. Beerus, still irked after his argument with the Old Kai, tidally locks Namek and throws its climate into a state of chaos; enjoy your photosynthesis now, slugs! Five hundred years later, desperately in need of a nap, he accidentally permits some Arcosian with an attitude problem to blow up Planet Vegeta.
The grand scheme of things, the great somber tale of the seventh universe, spirals down to the Earth-born Saiyan staring down the strongest son of Arcos on Namek. Something very essential has changed about him; he speaks words and makes them into truths. Vegeta spoke of something untamed and Frieza spoke of power unimaginable, but there's more to this than the speed that one's will collides with the enemy: all things are born from manipulating energy, from punches and kicks to thoughts and wishes. Goku touches heads and hears thoughts. He looks up and sees Frieza and hears the whispering of the clockwork universe in motion.
Years later Gohan feels it too, the ways energy moves in circles from one's stomach to one's brain, from one mind to another. He sleeps in the Time Chamber and dreams of things he's never seen.
(Vegeta will never admit it, the way controlling a Super Saiyan means suppressing one's desires: it's much easier to destroy than it is to create. That's entropy, personified. That's why there are supposed to be five Supreme Kais for every Destroyer.)
So the Super Saiyan God dies on some lesser Kai's planet, blown to bits by an android built to destroy him; Bibidi's reincarnation, drawn by a whim and the undying lust for what he considers to be his property, turns its eye towards Earth.
And two hundred million years after Beerus had fashioned Buu out of fruit juice and the stuff that comes out of malcontent, Goku holds the hope of the universe in his hands, standing astride the Sacred Planet of the Kais. Goodness is warm and blue like a star, or the ocean, or the hair of the mortal who has become like a god. Evil is pink and cold and sweet and it stares up at him, finally understanding: death glows gold. In the midst of all this colour Goku smiles wistfully and utters a wish. With his kind of power all things are possible. Death, a crafty old fool with a desk job, listens and obliges.
(Asleep, Beerus has troublesome dreams.)
In the beginning a boy is born to a tiny, impoverished island nation in a world at the end of mythological times. The naming ceremony goes haywire; the Namer has a seizure and whispers the word uub for six days straight until a foreign woman comes floating in on a crystal ball with news from the afterlife. She consults with the Namer in private. They emerge from the hut after some time and the Namer, badly shaken, declares the boy's name Uub.
What the gods have decided for him the Namer will not say, but she is wary of the boy, who grows up fine-boned and tough as his mother. A little passive, but strong of heart.
Ten years pass. Beerus visits the Earth and Frieza comes back, gold like death and burning for revenge, and there's no food in the village. Uub meditates on the problem for a while and then decides he's going to enter some fighting tournament in the big city to bring home the prize money; he's the strongest in the village, after all. They are worldly enough to know the name Satan, but perhaps with some luck and the well-wishes of his people -
The Namer pulls him aside, the night before he leaves. There is something odd about your soul, she says. When we went to name you, a foreign woman came and told me that a man named Goku made a wish on an evil god, and that god was reborn in your body. If you see this Goku be wary of him.
And Uub says, am I evil?
And the Namer says, no good ever comes from evil dealings, but there is always a choice. If there is some old god's soul in you then you must fight to keep it from consuming you.
And Uub says, I don't understand.
And the Namer smiles softly. Be good, Uub.
Gods frequent the Briefs' for tea and cookies and instant ramen. Bulma's no stranger to lifting her chin and speaking to dangerous beings about lemonade and repairs to gravity manipulators - there are beings out there who speak her name with more fear and reverence then her husband's. On an afternoon in late summer Goku drops by with a boy on the Nimbus.
Bulma has a table laid out in the garden with an absurd variety of pastries. Beerus is helping himself to every single eclair, tearing them open and licking out the filling; Whis is sampling the fruit garnish. The Supreme Kai sips tea and contemplates the futility of believing in fate, when millions of years of sorrow have brought him to a lunch table on Earth seated beside Majin Buu, the spitting image of his old master.
"Hey," Goku says. "Long time no see!"
Bulma puts down the tray in her hands. "Not long enough, if you ask me. Goku, you're terrible at disappearing." She's smiling, though; how did she make it through sixteen years of life before she met him? Everything has been so interesting since he walked into her story. "Oh, you've brought Uub!"
"Sure have. Uub, you've met Bulma, right?"
"Y-yes." "
Well, this is Beerus and Whis, and that over there is Shin, the Supreme Kai. Say hello, Uub."
Uub opens his mouth to speak, but the look of horror on Shin's face shocks him into silence.
"You," the thing called Beerus says, and Uub turns to face him. He's saying come hither with a curled, clawed finger. Something cold shoots up Uub's spine, and he points to himself. Me?
"Yes, you," Beerus says. "Come here."
"Go on," Goku says. "Beerus doesn't bite. Just don't steal his pudding or he might blow up the planet!" And he laughs and laughs and laughs, and Bulma takes him by the arm into a nearby pavilion and Uub is all alone.
Uub sidles up to Beerus, slowly. Goku has taught him a lot of skills, like how to heal small wounds with a touch, and how to sense the life-force of the things around him; Beerus feels hot and cold at the same time, like standing on the surface of a sun. "Sir," he whispers, straight-backed. Goku once told him with a soft little smile to always be polite, especially to gods.
"Can it with the pleasantries," Beerus says. He leans back in his chair and licks cream off his claws. "You've got an old soul in you, you know that?"
"Yes, uh, Goku said so, I mean -"
"Goku, of course." Beerus scrunches his nose. "Troublesome, those Saiyans. Listen, I made that soul of yours, a thousand million years ago. - Give or take. It's hard to keep track of time these days."
"I, uh," Uub swallows hard. "Thanks?"
Behind Beerus, Whis smiles behind an array of citrus fruits. "No need to thank him," he says. "He made you because he was bored."
"Just trying to get out of the more routine parts of the job. Want me to show you?"
"Show me -" And Beerus touches him with a claw on the heart, and he's awake, aware of his arms and legs for the first time, a strange tingly sensation. He blinks a few times and thinks, I must destroy.
"Buu," someone's saying. Is that his name? Yes, it must be. He turns - and then untold millions of years have passed, so long that the universe is a little bit warmer, and he's awake again, devouring worlds - yes, this is good, this is what he must do - and then Bibidi is calling his name - is this his father? No, he has no father - and then he's sleeping, dreaming of the day the universe ends - all things must end in darkness - and then the lilac-sky place, the Kais in his belly - someone has tried to kill the good man - pulled out of his head - this is not the lilac-sky place, it must be eaten - light -
"- That's enough," the Kai says, a hand on his shoulder. Uub blinks several times, thoroughly disturbed. He's back on solid ground again. The grass is green, far greener than he remembers. There's a pleasant wind that tickles his face. He's viscerally aware of how easily he could devour it all it, and how much he'd like to try.
"Should have stuck you in that same sword with the old guy," Beerus says, to the Kai. He shrugs. "Too bad the half-breed broke it."
"Enough, Beerus," Whis calls. "Come try the jelly-filled ones. It's like a red dwarf in your mouth!"
Food is the easiest way to save a planet. Dinner is served, a feast beyond anything Uub has ever seen before: a hundred thousand delicacies, fruits from planets he's never heard of. Goku's son, visiting from the city nearby, insists that this is normal for the Briefs when entertaining guests. Trying to ignore the feeling in his fingers Uub stuffs himself until he feels sick, earns thunderous applause when he keeps it all down, and after a while, finds himself ready once again to laugh at jokes he almost understands.
"There's no such thing as good or evil," Beerus says hours later, over a dessert of candied pigeon blood. "That's baloney. The Kais made it up because it's their job. 'Course they would call me the bad guy for doing mine." He picks his teeth with a claw. "Whaddaya think, brat?"
"What do I -"
"- Does doing bad things make you evil?"
"Well, I -"
"- Trick question! There's no such thing."
"You'd think there was," Vegeta grumbles, between bites of meat. He's lost his taste for blood in his time on Earth. "You spend your whole life under someone's thumb, and you end up punished for it. At least Frieza's rotting in hell."
And what he won't say, but what Beerus and the Kai hear loud as dawn, is a small boy's voice thinking it's not fair.
"Please, call me Shin," the Supreme Kai says. He's taken Uub into the inner gardens in Capsule Corp, where the Briefs have grown a hundred thousand alien flowers in vacuum-sealed, atmosphere-controlled glass vases. Vegeta had once travelled to all ends of the galaxy; Bulma brought his domains to her hearth. "Those Kais you saw in your heart, one of them was me."
"I'm, um, I'm sorry."
Shin stops, and turns to regard him. He's floating a few inches above the ground. When he steps on the earth it is compelled to respond, and he's polite enough to let it sleep. "What you saw there was not your fault."
Is it, though? He'd wanted to destroy; he remembers that clearly, that need beyond needs. If someone makes you do something, are you still responsible for doing it?
"All things have choices." The Supreme Kai is peering deeply at him, so small, but so warm, his gaze deep but fleeting - there's all of life in him. "When we make life, we give it the choice to create or destroy. Both of these are good and necessary things, but to destroy for one's own pleasure, that is evil. You, though - you were never given a choice, and that is why we permitted you to be reborn. To try again."
Uub wants to say, is this a game?
The Kai grins. "It is, I think. Life was, after all, our biggest gamble. Two Kais once made a bet on whether strength compels one to do evil. Beerus tried it but once - when he made you."
I was once good and evil separate, the Nameless Namekian thinks. Now I am good and evil the same. The old guardian was a fool. Only from having both within you can you derive wisdom. Uub, still badly shaken, says little as he and Goku fly back to his island. Night has fallen in its entirety, the stars familiar in their brightness once outside the city limits.
"You're quieter than usual," Goku says, as they cross miles of ocean. "What's up?"
Uub considers saying nothing, but Goku had always been so emphatic about being honest with his emotions. Goku had once said, your emotions are what make you powerful. "Everyone kept telling me about good and evil, and now I don't even know what I am." But if he was meant only to destroy, what good is it having emotions?
"Good and evil? Gosh, that's pretty weighty stuff for a dinner table." Uub turns to look at Goku, whose eyes are turned up, as if thinking. "I've met plenty of evil creatures in my life. Some of them put up a really terrific fight, too. But there's this moment - you know, when Vegeta first came to Earth he wanted to destroy us all. Gohan defeated him, and when Krillin was about to end his life, and I begged him to stop,"
"Really?"
"Everyone evil I've ever met has made up an excuse in their heart as to why they have to keep killing. In the moment of defeat, their heart is laid bare, and that's when a moment of compassion is the most powerful. Fights are won by more than fists, you know."
"So on the Kais' planet -"
"- You're not Buu, Uub. But yes, on the Kais' planet, as Buu was falling before the spirit bomb, I asked if he would try again."
"And they gave me a chance. To try again."
"That's right. - So what do you think, Uub?"
What does he think? Beneath him is the Nimbus; beneath that, there is miles and miles and miles of blue. Earth is a good planet. Maybe it was always about having the power to destroy, and choosing not to: it's harder to protect something than it is to destroy it, but nothing easy was ever worth doing. "Well, as long as you try your hardest, and you use your power to protect people, maybe that's good enough?"
"Sounds good enough to me."
In the beginning the son of a two-bit spaceman is born with nothing, no power to speak of. In the final hours of his people he is sent to Earth and wakes in the belly of Mount Paozu.
In a ship of a different sort, with all the power in the universe and no reason to use it, Buu is there, waiting.