Disclaimer: I do not own DBZ.
Radditz told himself he should have long since been inured to disappointment.
The bratling was small. Too small. The skin too pale, the bones too brittle, and the flesh too soft. At an age when he should have been tearing the meat from the bones of his prey to chew for the nutrient-rich blood, he was suckling from a primitive bottle made of a piece of rubber and a stoneware jar, milk dribbling from the corners of his mouth.
But the hair was their father's. Radditz didn't even need to smell him or to see the tail lying limp on the stone floor to know who this naked bratling was.
What an awful thing to have come of the blood of Bardock.
Radditz was indistinctly relieved to have turned the visual on his scouter off. He could not have borne it if Vegeta had seen this.
A swing of his tail sent the bottle flying, to shatter against a wooden wall. There was a stink of milk.
To his credit, the bratling did not cry, but, to his shame, neither did he scream with rage. Instead, he lowered his empty hands and cocked his head back to look up at Radditz, the big, wide, empty eyes almost...curious.
The cloth bandage was large and tightly wrapped, binding the bratling's hair into unaccustomed configurations. Radditz could smell the blood from where he stood, some old and some new, some still pumping red from split flesh. The wound had been recent, and probably still hurt—it looked as if something had tried to cleave the bratling's head in two from above and behind. Despite himself, Radditz was faintly impressed that the boy had survived such a thing.
"Radditz."
Radditz raised his head, lip curling. "What, Nappa."
"Don't give me that. Vegeta wants a report."
Hells above and below. "I found him."
"Yeah?" A pause. "So?"
"Been wounded." Radditz clenched his teeth. "Explains why everything isn't dead."
He did not want to go on, but Nappa said nothing and waited.
"He's alive," Radditz finally said, grudgingly, through a tight jaw, "but...something's not right. The wound was on his head. I think it might have permanently damaged him."
"Give us a visual."
Not if someone offered him promotion to a higher class would Radditz let his brother be seen like this.
"Give me a moment."
The bratling grunted as Radditz lifted him by a handful of his hair. A high tolerance for pain, then—that was something, at least.
Outside of the small, rank dwelling, where the open air of a warm morning on this miserable, backwater planet was wetter but at least breathable, Radditz dropped the bratling into the grass. The bratling made a high-pitched, breathless sort of noise, as if he were enjoying himself, and then Radditz reached down and tore the bandage from the back of his brother's head.
The shriek that followed was rather gratifying in its lack of pain or fear, and even more so in it surplus of temper and shock.
"He's got lungs."
The bratling sat in the grass, clutching tiny handfuls of his own hair as his face turned red. The wound was unspeakable, and would probably have required even a grown man to spend a few hours in a tank. That his brother had not only survived it but seemed well on his way to forgetting about it altogether made Radditz's hopes tick sharply up.
"Here he is," he said, and switched on his scouter's visual transmission.
For several seconds, long, long seconds, neither Nappa nor the prince said anything.
Fuck. Radditz's grip on his scouter tightened.
The bratling seemed to feel his tension, looking up at him silently. Too silently. That calm, open face—the big, empty eyes beneath the fringe of blood-matted hair. What kind of bratling didn't scream or howl with every breath? Didn't demand attention and food with equal ferocity and volume? Didn't come leaping at the first adult to near, teeth bared and tail lashing? Like a proper, healthy baby?
The bratling's tail slowly curled and uncurled behind him.
He's defective. Radditz did not think of his father, or how much of his father's face there was in the bratling's. Instead, he calmly and dispassionately waited for the prince to tell him to kill his brother.
The bratling sneezed.
A small, snotless sneeze, the kind only babies produced. Every hair on the bratling's tail stood out, and then Radditz's brother bared his teeth, his eyes abruptly savage, as if to snarl I didn't like that!
Every single muscle in Radditz's body stilled as he stared.
A Saiyajin baby. A true Saiyajin child, nearly three years after Planet Vegeta had been destroyed. A Saiyajin baby, as damaged as he was, as low-class as he was, with all the genetic memory and heritage of an extinct people. The youngest Saiyajin alive.
The ghost of dead race, in this small, pathetic thing that looked fearlessly—though blankly—up at Radditz, a small hand touching the tip of Radditz's boot.
"Kakarrot," said Radditz, naming his brother without meaning to, and the sudden, weak surge of protective instinct that spread his fingers as he involuntarily began to reach out to his brother was as demeaning as it was displeasing.
He drew back his fist, his lips pulled back in a snarl, humiliated by his own body's reaction, and Radditz lifted that same hand to strike the killing blow.
Then, for the first time since he had stepped out of the pod, Radditz heard the prince's voice.
"Bring him."