Somehow Gine and Bardock have taken over my life recently and I just had to write this. It's going to be a romance, and I've got loads of smut written out to come in the next chapters, as well as being very introspective. I'm going to be focusing on their relationship as opposed to the world around them.

This is an idea that firmly lodged itself in my head a couple of weeks ago and has kept me frantically writing ever since. I've got about 60 pages done at the moment but I'm still working and don't want to post them until I'm happy with each part. That being said I'mm desperately looking for a beta reader and people to provide feedback - despite how dull the first chapter is, I'm feeling so inspired by this and I'm spending hours reading and rereading it, tweaking things every time... Sp please, review if you feel like it and stick around for the next chapter!

Disclaimer: DBZ is older than I am so I don't have the pleasure of owning it - all credit goes to the amazing Akira Toriyama.

Amongst the Stars

Chapter 1

Present Time

Gine sat down at the table of her large and too empty kitchen, Raditz tucked against her as he slept, and eyed the folded print out where it lay on the cold, white surface.

She had asked the medic not to inform her of the results but to simply hand her the hard copy instead. Then she had left without looking at it.

That had been over 10 hours ago and still she hadn't looked.

The paper, by now, was crumpled and crushed from where she had handled it several times during the day, gripping it tight, desperate to know and yet too afraid to look.

She already knew what it would say, anyway.

Two weeks ago Bardock had left on yet another mission for the PTO. The target planet itself was low risk-high value and as a result, the purge was expected to take less than a week. But the distance to the planet was estimated to be 2 and a half to three months of travel. Each way.

Her mate was going to be gone for six months.

Despite herself, Gine felt her eyes sting and tears began to well. She looked up at the ceiling, blinking, trying to ignore the paper on the table and control her tears. She wouldn't cry. She wouldn't!

It wasn't as if Bardock wasn't gone most of the time anyway. That was life and she should be more than used to it by now. But this was different: she wouldn't see him at all, in all that time.

And this was really bad timing.

Releasing a shuddering breath she turned her eyes toward her son. The tiny bundle of warmth was fast asleep and she allowed herself to stroke his hair, safe in the knowledge that nothing disturbed her little warrior once he was asleep. She could touch his face and hair, his tiny hands and simply indulge in being a mother all night long without him ever being aware of it.

She certainly couldn't do it during the day.

At nearly 5 years old, Raditz had already grown so much from the tiny baby she'd carried. He was already training with the other children his age and the small but firm muscles that lined his tiny body were testament to that. Already he could fly and gather ki. It would only be a couple more years until he, too, got sent out into the vast expanse of space.

But he was still her baby and in the quiet moments like this, when no one was around to see, she refused to treat him as anything else. Refused to act like the brutal, loveless saiyan she should be.

Gine knew she was strange, different. Other saiyans didn't seem to care about their children once they were born. Some few raised their children themselves, if they had the means and desire to allow them to do so, although that was usually for prestige, but for most saiyans having children was a burden. In many cases the males didn't stick around long enough to know they'd even fathered a child, especially in the lower echelons of society, and, even if they did, most saiyans refused long term relationships out of hand and couldn't afford to not work. Children were born and placed in natal pods, either in the mother's home or, most commonly, at the medical centre. At three years or so the toddlers were removed and the vast majority were given immediately into the care of the Army's training academy.

There were simply too few saiyans left to easily allow for mothers to stop taking missions to raise a child for any longer than was required by the pregnancy. On the other hand, childbearing was encouraged in an effort to increase the population. It was seen as an important responsibility and as such, provisions were made to allow saiyan women to do so without it impacting their ability to return to active duty as soon as they were physically able to do so. For the few who chose not to return to the purge teams, reassignment was typical. Any army needed support personnel after all.

Gine had never imagined being able to keep her child. All her life she had wanted children but as a lower Third Class she wasn't in a position where such luxuries were afforded to her. She was a nobody in saiyan society.

Then, one day, she had been assigned to Bardock's team. It was a joke and they all knew it. Like all saiyans she was expected to carry out 5 years of mandatory service on the purge teams before she could ask for reassignment. Most saiyans would, of course, never even consider asking for that reassignment, spending their entire lives travelling from planet to planet, destroying as they went. For Gine though, it had taken less than a year for it to become clear that surviving those 5 years would take a miracle. And she'd hated every minute of the purges, hated having to take lives on the whim of a leader she didn't know.

Gine simply wasn't a warrior. It didn't matter that she was saiyan. It didn't matter that she had been trained from the day she was removed from her pod and given into the custody of the trainers. She simply couldn't function well enough on a battlefield. She lacked the strength, the fighting sense and, more than anything, the will to harm another being. She didn't belong amongst a warrior species and was shunned by her teammates as a result.

More than once she'd taken life threatening injuries and barely survived, and being left behind on a planet by her team wasn't an unfamiliar experience either. Fortunately nobody had ever thought to send her empty pod back to Vegetasei without her, and she had managed each time to somehow make her way back; bruised, bloody but somehow still alive.

Being assigned to Bardock's team had simply been the next failure waiting to happen, or so she'd thought. She'd never expected anything different to what she'd experienced before.

Instead of her expectations however, the angry, sharp eyed man had somehow, inexplicably, turned her life upside down and made her reevaluate all of the expectations she'd ever had of her future.

Not that that meant that their first encounter had ever been anything short of painful in its awkwardness. He had clearly had no desire to have a new teammate and neither had his team - just as she'd had no desire to be assigned to them. But orders were orders. Even from a distance his sheer, imposing appearance had been enough to make her balk and with every step closer she had begun to tremble more and more.

It seemed that he had noticed her presence too, for, even through the crowd, his eyes had locked onto her and he'd broken off his conversation with his team to turn in her direction.

Upon reaching him she had had to fight all of her instincts to make eye contact with him. Or at least to attempt to. Gine was shy, an unusual trait in a saiyan, and the man in front of her had exuded enough dominance that she had practically been able to feel it on her skin.

Finally, as the awkwardness grew, she had managed to drag her eyes up to meet his and…

… everything stopped.

Perhaps for a second, perhaps for an hour.

She still didn't know, but at that moment when they had first made eye contact Gine had been struck dumb. Her mouth had been slightly open, the introduction she'd been about to give dead on the tip of her tongue and her hands, which had been balled into tight fists at her sides, had gone slack.

At the time Bardock had seemed unaffected, but she knew from conversations they'd had in the intervening years that he'd felt it too. That lightning bolt.

A sneered greeting from one of the others had snapped them both out of it and, eyes fixed firmly back on the ground, Gine had managed to grit out an introduction. Bardock had simply scoffed at her and, as she hunched in on herself, he had turned and led the way to the space pods. He hadn't said his first words to her until months later when they had arrived on that first planet.

Not one of them had been kind.

But what had become clear to Gine in the following missions, was that though Bardock was neither kind nor friendly towards her, he wasn't going to leave her behind as some of her previous captains had done, and he also wasn't going to send her out alone knowing she wouldn't survive. She was a burden to him but he was a decent person, if ruthless.

More than half a dozen missions and a year later, Gine had finally plucked up the courage to hunt Bardock down while he was at home. It had terrified her more than meeting him the first time and as she stood outside his door, hands clasped nervously before her, she had wondered if she might vomit. But she hadn't been willing to back down. She was a burden and it was time to change that. She had been sure her captain wouldn't say no.

Bardock had opened his door at last, and she found herself staring at his bare chest. She sometimes forgot just how much taller than her he was but standing there at eye level with his bare sternum made her want to cower at the power difference between them.

She'd taken in the small gadget clutched in his hand, the well defined muscles of his chest and the deep, displeased scowl on his face. Licking her lips in an effort to free her voice, she couldn't help but notice how his eyes trailed the nervous movement.

"I'm sorry, Captain. I need your help." she'd stammered. The tall male had simply continued to stare at her. He was never talkative with her, not like he was with their team mates. But he didn't dismiss her, so she swallowed her nerves and continued.

"I… I need to train, Captain, and… I can't do it alone. Please sir, will you train me?" the last words were barely more than a whisper but she knew he heard them.

His knuckles turned white where they gripped the doorframe and he looked her up and down, assessing her. He already knew her weaknesses but in that moment he had been considering them far more carefully.

"5 a.m. tomorrow. Training ground 6." Without another word he had shut the door on her.

Gine had slumped with relief as his presence, so overbearing and powerful, moved away and she felt a small smile creep onto her face.

Her captain was scary and cold but he was a good man. She'd never had enough trust in any of her former teammates or commanders to ask for help in any way, but she had known that Bardock would agree, if only for the wellbeing of his team.

Gine had barely slept that night and as the first sun had crept over the horizon she had made her way to the training ground. She had just finished her stretches when her very sleep ruffled captain landed before her. His eyes were slightly bleary and the faint flush on his cheeks had made him seem a little softer than usual. Until he started putting her through drills, that was.

He growled and barked orders at her, making her work until her limbs trembled from the exertion and her eyes stung with sweat.

He had corrected her stance throughout, attentive and pushy, leaving her no room for mistakes and making her repeat everything until she got it right.

It had only lasted two hours, though it felt like days, and by the end of it Gine had barely been able to drag herself to the mess for breakfast.

From that day on, that had become a routine. Whenever they were on-world they had met at the same time and the same place, without fail. When they were off-world things were considerably harder but Bardock insisted on making her continue their training whenever the opportunity presented itself.

Sometimes he put her through drills, sometimes they sparred, but she never left in anything less than agony.

With time it had started to pay off.

Though Gine knew she would never match the other saiyans, the sparring she had done with her captain had honed her reflexes, the drills had built up muscle and her own sheer determination not to fail her captain who was investing so much time and effort into her, had given her the drive she needed to bite down on her own soft-heartedness.

More than that though, Bardock had begun coaching her in other ways. Though he rarely called her on it in public, the second they were on that training ground he would snap at her to school her expressions, point out the soft hearted things she said and tell her how to act, how to speak to make herself seem more like the others.

And she understood in those moments that he wasn't telling her to stop being herself but he was trying to teach her to shield herself from the cruelty and ostracisation she had suffered all of her life.

She knew because, on their few rest days, he began to not simply disappear after sessions. He began to sit with her as she gulped down water or caught her breath and allowed her to simply talk. She had been hesitant at first but after months and months of training she had become more relaxed around him, at least when it was just the two of them. In those stolen moments he had never commented on her expressions, on her speech, on the tears that would occasionally gather in her eyes. She might have thought he had been ignoring her, but he wouldn't have stayed if that had been the case.

When their training was done, she had been able to simply be herself.

Somewhere along the line, those training sessions and the fleeting moments after had become as essential to her as breathing. They gave her the tools she needed to form tentative bonds with her teammates and even others outside of her team. They gave her the skills to survive amongst the heartless race she called her own.

They gave her a release, while they were sparring, for the pounding ache that had formed under her skin that nothing else seemed to ease.

She'd been able to ignore the feelings growing inside her for her spiky haired captain and the way her blood heated if he ever accidentally brushed against her. She'd convinced herself that it was nothing but loneliness and hormones - even low class saiyans weren't interested in someone like her after all, and she'd never been with a man, never had those urges fed. That's all it was. It couldn't be any more when her senior saw her as barely more than a nuisance.

Then that mission had happened.

Please check in soon for the next chapter - where things actually start happening!

And again, I'm looking for a beta reader/inspirational assistant so please review or PM me!

T.A