The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;

-The Destruction of Sennacherib, Lord Byron

A/N: Mature language.

O

The afternoon suns made strange shapes of the shadows. They darkened the ground so much that the blood was nearly impossible to see.

But he could smell it; adrift on the wind, musky and metallic, like a decanter of aged wine. The scent of it made him antsy, made his pulse quicken and his breath short—

Beep.

He lowered his head, blinking over the numbers on the scouter screen. Shit. He'd missed one. He could have sworn… Dark eyes roved the area, frowning, following the flashing arrow in his scope. Distance 239.3, it read.

It might have been amusing, had circumstances been different; trailing the lone native, giving them that one pittance of hope, only to snatch it away at the last possible second. But not here, he thought scowling. Not today. The planet was wholly unsuited for any sort of leisure activities. Or anything at all, really.

It was hot.

He could survive in practically any environment with minimal resources, but this was pushing it. The suns – twin red giants which, in his opinion were too damned close to the planet – made the air painfully thin. The atmosphere, according to his pod, had exactly the bare minimum of what he needed to breathe. Moreover, the surface of the planet was a fucking furnace. Early on, he'd found flying an impossibility; at least as long as the suns were out. And too much of his efforts were going into breathing anyway. He'd been gasping since he left his pod over a day ago, and chasing after wayward natives who refused to stay still and die wasn't helping...

Too hot. It was too fucking hot here, and he didn't see how the natives could stand it, much less why anyone would want to buy the place. But apparently someone had.

"I have a mission for you, Raditz."

If he were a lesser warrior, he'd probably have suffocated the moment he left his pod. That he'd been sent to the planet at all was telling. Probably that's what He had expected. What everyone expected. Raditz grit his teeth, swallowed down the rising bile, forcing himself to focus on the sounds around him. The tumpf tumpf as his boots hit the ground. The whistle of wind around him. The hiss of sand rolling against itself.

Oh hell, he thought suddenly. He would never get the shit out of his hair—

He stopped.

He hadn't paid much, if any, attention to the architecture. The natives here were primitive, their cities made of little more than baked mud. But this…

Limestone, he guessed, running a finger along a crumbling column. Or something like it. But if they had the tools to build something so precise, why the hell were they still living in dirt houses? He released a breath, flicking the sweat from his forehead and squinting up at the building. Even in its eroded condition it shone white in the sunlight, and he could imagine it once to have been something great. A shrine? It couldn't have been a palace. Those were usually in the heart of the city, and this was kilos away from the last settlement. Maybe some kind of temple? The outside was inconspicuous, the etchings in the columns long since worn away by blowing sand. But it explained (in a sort of nonsensical way) why the fleeing native would choose to come here rather than the next village.

Feh. He turned and spat on the sand before marching inside.

It was cool and dark.

…and it made him pause.

'Dark' he had been expecting, but the temperature was…puzzling. The climate here felt almost…controlled? Manufactured? He narrowed his eyes, head tilted back as he took a wary sniff of the air. There was a definite frosted quality...filtered. Nothing that could have been natural on a planet like this, and he thought he heard the faint hum of machinery somewhere. Clearly this planet had been visited at some point.

Whatever. He wasn't getting paid to figure that shit out, and beyond a passing thought didn't really care. He leaned against a stone wall and shut his eyes. The heat was doing things to him, and he could only be glad that neither Vegeta nor Nappa was here to see.

Tsh. Not like they'd fare any better.

To make matters worse, he had yet to find any source of water…even though both his scouter and pod had brought up readings. That probably meant it was underground; a spring or something. It wasn't likely the natives here had learned the art of irrigation. His lips curled in both amusement and disgust. They were so fucking primitive they were probably still evolving-

His scouter beeped again, and he opened his eyes. Distance, 13.6. An improvement, he thought scowling. Maybe he should just blast away the whole damned building. It would save him the trouble of searching. His fist was already glowing before he'd fully finished the thought, before he realized that if he destroyed the structure he'd be back in the suns. Back to trudging through hot sand and wind. Back to tracking down natives, who, though easily weaker than himself, were surprisingly adept at scattering and hiding themselves away—

His eyes traced the room. Alight with the flickering glow of his ki, he got a near clear view of it: a square shaped chamber, completely bare, supported by rounded columns throughout. Away from the elements, the inside was in comparably better condition than the exterior. There were— his eyes narrowed – shapes etched along the column bodies. Pictures, he corrected. Weird spherical images of what were probably supposed to be suns blaring down from the skies, of thin stick like figures kneeling, or reaching reverently up towards it.

"You've gotta be kidding me..."

It had to be, literally, the most undeveloped planet he'd ever been too. He had stepped into the dark ages.

And yet…

And yet.

There were whispers in his head, murmurings of faint recognition at the drawings. He was a soldier; moreover, a grunt. He had never given any great amount of thought to his history. There was a cold sort of remorse, an anger, but moreover a sense of relief, of self preservation. He had not perished on the planet Vegeta. He had survived, for whatever reason. It was he, along with the other two, who would carry along the traditions and power of their race. That he, the son of a Third Class, himself a First, should survive among elites…

In his distraction he had approached the far wall of the chamber, staring with black eyes at the crude scene.

The Saiyans had been a tribal people once. There must have been a time when they were drawing on cave walls and worshipping flaming balls of gas in the sky. But that had been long before he was born, before the advent of stolen technology, when his people were still wearing skins and rutting with animals—

A noise had him spinning sharply to the right, hands still aglow with ki. At the same time his scouter began to beep, and flashing yellow characters obscured the vision in his left eye.

The girl stood frozen in his gaze.

Her features were synonymous with the other natives he'd seen; thin, dark skinned, with rounded ears. She had hair the color of slow burning embers, cropped short around a pinched, narrow face. There was blood on her hands, blood smeared across the front of the shift she wore.

Something stirred within him at the sight. Something visceral that had his breath quickening, his skin flushing, which had nothing at all to do with the thin oxygen. The sudden thought of having that lithe body struggling beneath him brought a slow smile to his face. It had been too long, and this strange alien girl would work as well as any-

He took a step forward, hands already working at the faulds of his armor, dark gaze fixed on the girl.

And then he stopped.

Her gaze was wide and wild and frightened but he wasn't looking at that. His eyes had locked onto something behind her. Something…moving. Something that whipped at the edges of the simple linen shift. Something long and thin and waving—

She had a tail.

It thrashed behind her, agitated and nearly feline. Shit, he thought. The figure before him heaved a trembling breath, and he caught the scent of her; the salt of sweat and tears, the metallic tang of blood, and something muted and underlying that must have been uniquely her—

Female, something in him whispered.

Female Saiyan. Female. Those words did not belong together; had not belonged together now for nearly 20 years. He stared, uncharacteristically silent, and she stared back.

And then she spun on sandaled heels and fled.

The echoes of those footsteps tore him from his daze, and his mind flooded with questions: Was she the only one? Were there others that he'd possibly killed…?

Shit, I don't know! It wasn't like he'd been checking for tails before he'd—

But there had been no power-levels above 30 here, he reasoned. The girl was only registering at 18 on his scouter. No Saiyan would ever have a power-level that…that pathetic—

But you don't know that she's Saiyan.

She didn't look Saiyan. And Saiyan's weren't the only tailed species in the universe, after all. It wouldn't be improbable to assume that there were other races out there with similar characteristics...would it?

Fuck he wasn't some scientist. How was he supposed to—?

He pushed the thought away, tapping furiously at the buttons of his scouter. …which hadn't even beeped until she'd been less than five steps away-! Piece of junk. He could never get the hang of the things—

Distance, 31.1, he read.

Quick little thing, considering her power-level.

He considered letting her run - just to see how far she got before she collapsed- but quickly axed the thought. She was too valuable. He— his breath came fast and shallow. It was…a sobering thought. A near foreign concept. He drew a tongue over sandy lips.

It was ridiculously easy, catching her. He appeared in front of her - much too fast for her eyes to follow - and she skidded to a halt, falling backwards to the ground and spraying sand. She was shaking, panting in short, hiccupping gasps that made him want to squeeze the air from her lungs. A moment later he realized those breathless gasps were words. She was speaking, over and over, the sounds deliberate and sharp. A prayer?

Curse, more likely, he mused, and not in any language he could understand. His eyes glinted in cold amusement.

"My," he said smirking, "we've only just met and you're already leaving!"

She could not have understood him. But perhaps she recognized the expression on his face, the mocking tone in his voice, because her tail went rigid behind her. He found himself following the movement, lids drooping in lazy contemplation. It was palpable, her fury, and he was unsurprised- pleased even- when she attacked him, clutching a small bone dagger he barely spared a glance at.

It took no effort at all to disarm her. A quick flick of his fingers, a little pressure, and the dagger fell from her grip.

Untrained, he dismissed, frowning.

She spat in his face.

And stupid, he added with a snarl, backhanding her into the sand. She landed face first, coughing blood, and when she went to scramble to her knees, he dropped one of his own into her back, forcing her back down. She screamed a protest, and his fingers found the hem of her dress and yanked it up.

The waning light of the sunset turned it an impossible shade, but he ignored the color for the moment as he grasped the flailing appendage. Softer than his own, he noted, and in his hand impossibly thin. His pulse quickened. Was this the way the tail of a Saiyan female was supposed to look? To feel?

He did not remember; there was nothing for him to compare it to.

Beneath him, the girl had gone suddenly still, gasping out hoarse, half sobs. He had half a mind to knock her out just to shut her the fuck up. He couldn't concentrate, couldn't think. He was just a soldier: seek and destroy. It had never been necessary to think-!

Instinctively, his hand clenched around her tail. She stiffened beneath him, and the movement, or lack thereof, made him pause. He squeezed again, this time harder, and the scream that tore from her throat had him grinning madly, wildly, triumphantly. There could be no doubts about her heritage. Not now.

Somehow he, Raditz, had found a female Saiyan.

O

A/N: This story was originally written in May of 2002. By 2004 I'd only gotten up to chapter five. As some of you know through PMs, chapter six, which was supposed to have been published sometime in '04, was lost when my computer crashed. The result is that I haven't touched this story since, but I'd always planned to continue. The original plan was to simply do a run-through edit of chapters 1-5, but as I began re-reading said chapters in the summer of 2010, it became obvious that a complete re-write was in order. The resulting story will be the same, but definitely grittier and more mature. I still have the original 5 chapters saved, incase someone really, really wants to read it.

Concerning the Saiyans: I don't believe they were nice people. Period. I believe they were a society built on power and respected nothing less. And when a Saiyan emerged who was more powerful than they thought should be possible, they saw them as a risk and killed them. Case in point? Raditz was prepared to kill his nephew because he thought him, 'too powerful'. Vegeta did not hesitate to kill Nappa once he became a liability. For those of you who count the movies as relevant, King Vegeta was willing to have Brolly killed because he threatened to become more powerful than the royal family. Even Bardock, the so called 'sensitive' Saiyan, did not change until shortly before his death. And this had more to do with his 'curse' than any natural remorse on his part. I believe eventually, given the time, the Saiyans would have destroyed themselves without the help of Frieza.

Mostly my concern is with Raditz. We know so little about him, and he is always written off so easily. And yet he must have shared the same endurance we see in Goku; he was born to a Third class, but managed himself to be classed as First. There must be a story behind him, right?

Anyways, please tell me what you think so far. ^^