"There's a place", Frieza said, "where they cut off the rails of naughty little monkeys if they don't behave.
Vegeta scoffed. "You wish. No self-respecting Saiyan would ever put themselves in that position while they were alive!"
Frieza smiled over his glass of something black and sour-sweet, with flecks of sinister gold twinkling in its depths like an entire universe was sitting pretty in his hands. "Oh?"
"Yes," Vegeta said, crossing his arms. "And everyone knows that no Saiyan defaces another until they have died through means of disgrace by their own weakness. Tails are never taken from true warriors. It would never happen."
Frieza's smile grew wider, and his tail moved like a serpent as Frieza himself glided across the floor. "Is that so?" He circled around Vegeta and raised a ghoulish, white-blue hand into the air. "Then, my prince, what would you call," the sound of his fingers snapping through the room echoed like the call of a lost man in the wilderness, "this?"
The lights over the back wall lit up blood red, and then harsh, unyielding white.
Lines of fur ran down the wall like blood clotted into a deep, putrid brown-black-red, glistening beneath the bright bulbs in memory of when they were freshly torn from their root.
"Saiyan pelts make for poor trophies," Frieza said, leaning his head down to speak into the child Prince's ear. "They dissolve to nothing once the light of the moon stops shining on them. Temperamental, really, but ultimately more portable."
Vegeta's retort was a brush of air scraping past his throat.
Frieza's claws nestled into Vegeta's black hair and twirled it around his fingers. "But you aren't like these filthy nobodies decorating my walls. You're a different breed." His hand reached out for the hair standing on end along Vegeta's tail, and again his claws tickled the chilled skin beneath it. "Isn't that right, Prince Vegeta?"
Vegeta wrapped his tail around his waist and said, his arrogance frozen and roiling in the stew of bile churning in his stomach, "Yes. Yes, Lord Frieza."
