Kaeyea stood against the wall, looking down on the two medical beds that lay side by side. Brother and sister both lay unconscious, and neither was faring well. Vegeta's wounds had been reopened, leaving him once again in a near death state and with tubes leading from his chest, and Takyra…

Everything had been so wrong. When she had fired the blast, she had intended to divert it at the last second. The child would get singed, but would have otherwise been fine. What she had not counted on was the loyalty of Roma. The redheaded girl had attacked with fervor, launching herself full bore at Kaeyea while trying to knock the blast away with her own energy. The girl had not been nearly powerful enough to stop the blast, though, and had only succeeded in distracting Kaeyea too long for the warrior to correct her trajectory. The end result was Takyra taking the shot hard to the left half of her ribcage as Roma's arm snapped.

On instinct, Kaeyea had responded to Roma's attack in kind, and when Roma went down, Ronai got involved. The fiery princess rushed the guardian, desperate to aide her fallen friends. Barely able to register what was going on, Kaeyea had tried to bat Ronai away with minimal damage. And with two persistent redheads attacking her, the guardian was ill prepared to deal with the rest of the chaos.

When the blast had been fired, Vegeta had dropped the blade and shoved Jaikan away, jumping for his sister. Jaikan collapsed to the floor as the Saiyan boy lunged, and Vegeta might have made it if not for Jeice tackling him. Vegeta landed hard on the ground, and the beating started immediately. With the enormous strength difference between them, the Saiyan would not have stood a chance even if he had been at full power. As he was, the small prince was incapacitated in seconds, but that had not stopped the red skinned boy from pummeling him on.

It had taken far too long for the other guardians to come to her aide, and by the time Kaeyea had made order from the chaos, the damage was done.

Roma was crouched on the floor with two broken legs, a broken arm, a fractured tail, and a split lip. Ronai, at Roma's side, had several small fractures to her ribs and her wrist and an open wound over her left eyebrow. Jaikan lay with a thin slit in his throat, not deep enough to be life threatening but still pouring out blood and making breathing difficult. Jeice had been restrained violently, and ended up with more than a few cracks and bruises as the guardians hauled him off of the Saiyan boy.

But Vegeta and Takyra were clearly in need of immediate help. Neither one was conscious. Both were hemorrhaging blood. Neither was breathing. And when the guardians had finally gotten close enough to check on them, it was almost too late. Much of Takyra's chest was gone, and Vegeta's, while mostly closed, was decimated inside. They had been the first ones removed, and had been rushed to the emergency care room.

So there Kaeyea stood, several hours later, looking down at her two young charges. She had never intended it to get so far. It was supposed to teach them to be strong, to not rely on one another. And as she looked down at their broken bodies, the true repercussions of her lesson were starting to sink in. The damage done to their bodies was severe. They would be down from those for a long time. But the damage done to their minds and their psyche was what worried her most.

They did not trust the others any longer, and the others did not trust them. The entire purpose of their operation was to bind the remaining empires together, to form a unified front against the ever growing power of the Kolds. And with one lesson, she had damn near destroyed any hope they might have held in making that goal come true.

What had he been thinking? How did Vegeta think that move was going to end for either of them? There was no way that he could have believed that he would be allowed to walk away. And in his fragile state, he obviously was more vulnerable. Vegeta was more than intelligent enough to have figured out how dire the consequences to his actions would have been. He had to have known what would happen. Was he truly that desperate? Over something so trivial?

Out of the corner of her eye, Kaeyea noticed to door opening. "You should be in your quarters," she sternly lectured.

The words flew passed Roma completely. The little redhead had both of her legs firmly braced, and her movement was more of a waddle than a walk, but she refused to slow down. One of her arms was in a sling, and there were a few stitches on her young face, but Roma did not seem to care.

"You are going to aggravate your wounds," Kaeyea scolded.

Again, the little redhead refused to so much as acknowledge the warrior woman. Staggering to the side of the room, Roma grabbed a chair with her one good appendage and limped her way in between Vegeta and Takyra's cots. It took a little wiggling, but the girl managed to get herself seated between her two friends.

Kaeyea frowned. "Return to your quarters," she commanded.

"Drop dead."

The soldier glared at the child before her. "How dare you question my authority?"

"How dare you think that you have the authority to mess with our lives like this?" Roma shot back.

Kaeyea growled. "You are out of line…"

"You know what?" Roma fought back in an instant. "I don't care where your 'line' is. I don't care what you think is appropriate or right or what we should or should not do. I don't care what you say is the way to stop the Kold Empire. Because you know what? You clearly don't actually give a damn about any of us, so I don't give a damn what you think about anything. Okay?"

"You are treading on dangerously thin ice," the guardian angrily bit out to the child.

"Like I care," Roma shot back. "You want to beat me down? Go nuts. It's not like there's anything that's going to stop you from doing it anyway."

Though the Saiyan woman moved forward slightly, she managed to retrain her urge to punish the child. While she certainly did not approve of the tone being used, Kaeyea knew damn well that if it had been one of her friends in that scenario, she would have done the same thing. "Do not stay too long," she spoke with a low tone, turning to leave the room.

Roma let out an angry sigh. "Why?" she asked.

"Your wounds need proper time to heal…"

"No," the child interrupted. "Why did you do this?"

Kaeyea growled at the redhead. "They would not be in this state if you had not gotten in the way."

"I wouldn't have gotten in your way if you hadn't been so eager to attack my best friend!" Roma snapped.

Again, Kaeyea studied the girl before her. There was no fear in her eyes. No worry at all at any consequences that would befall her. Roma seemed more than ready to be physically assaulted for her words, and yet that small girl refused to care at all for her own welfare. All she seemed to care about was the state that her two comrades lay in.

While she was sorely tempted to teach the girl a lesson, Kaeyea chose to let the issue slide for the moment. The damage done was already far greater than she had ever anticipated. Continuing to hurt an already injured child for speaking her mind was not going to accomplish anything. Letting out an angry sigh, the Saiyan simply pushed off the wall and left the room. If she stayed any longer, she was going to do something that would be counterproductive to their cause.

Once alone, Roma leaned back against her chair, wincing as her sore muscles hit the stiff chair. "Bitch," she grumbled, trying to get comfortable. Her tail fracture in particular was hurting her greatly.

For several hours, the demi-Saiyan simply sat in silence, waiting for any sign from either of the purebloods that they were coming around. It greatly disturbed her to see them lying there, broken, pale, and practically dead on their cots. Their breathing was so shallow that it almost seemed like they were not doing it at all.

After some time had passed, Ronai entered the room. "Hey," she greeted. "How are you holding up?"

"Pissed off," the redhead grumbled.

Ronai gave her friend a small smirk. "I was mostly asking about your injuries, but that's good to know, too." The pink skinned girl pulled up another chair, placing it beside the demi-Saiyan. "You're still worked up, huh?"

"You're not?"

Ronai shrugged. "I guess I'm just so confused about everything that I can't really let the anger come in. I'm sure there's a lot to be angry about, but I'm so frickin' far out of the loop that I have no idea what it is. Right now, all I want to do is figure out what the hell happened and why it ended up this way." Stretching out slightly, she gave her friend a glance. "Why? How much do you know about it?"

The redheaded girl snorted. "You know how Kaeyea punished Takyra for that one stupid thing she said?"

"Yeah?"

"Well, Vegeta didn't take it well."

Ronai cringed. "Yeah, I noticed. Both times."

Roma nodded. "Well, the last time he was stuck in here, I came in to talk to him, and he missed my point completely."

Running her fingers through her own maroon hair, Ronai shot her friend a quizzical look. "What did you tell him?"

"Nothing!" Roma quickly defended. "I mean, nothing that should have caused this!"

Ronai frowned. "That's not what you believe," she told the other girl. "Your nostrils flare when you're covering your own butt, and they're flaring big time right now."

"They are not!" When Ronai sent the other girl another look, Roma rolled her eyes. "Okay, maybe a little, but he wasn't supposed to go ballistic over it! How was I supposed to know that he was going to go completely crazy and pull a crazy stunt like this?"

"What the hell did you tell him?" demanded Ronai.

Guilt quickly spread across Roma's face, and she found that she had to look away. "I told him that they were treating him differently than the rest of us," she softly admitted. "What they did to him and Takyra wasn't fair, and I thought that he needed to know. I thought, worst case scenario, he would up his smart ass nature and maybe ask someone why they were doing that."

"Are you freaking nuts?" the princess shouted. "Have you never met either of them? Of course Vegeta would go ballistic over something like that! Any of us would! And Vegeta? He's the worst one of us about something like this, and you know it! He's always been borderline paranoid! You shoved him over the edge!"

"Well it's not like I was trying to!" Roma defended. "I just wanted him to be aware of what was going on! He's always followed what Kaeyea has said without questioning it at all, and if he's going to be a ruler, he needs to be able to question her. Especially when it comes to the safety of his sister!"

"You're a moron."

The two girls snapped their heads to the side, looking down at Takyra's bed. "Oh, honey, are you waking up?" Ronai asked.

The heavily wounded princess groaned, and her eyebrows knitted together in pain. "No, I'm just in the liveliest coma in the universe."

A half smirk crossed Roma's face. "Oh no!" she teased. "Vegeta and Takyra must have switched bodies!"

"Shut it," Takyra growled, cracking an eye open. Her face was so swollen that only one of them was able to open at all, and not by all that much. "How is he?"

Without saying a word, both Roma and Ronai slid back, allowing their friend to see her brother. "He's still out," Ronai softly said. "He's been like that the whole time. He should be okay, though. The medics said that they got him fast enough. He's probably going to be out for a while, though."

"But how about you?" Roma asked. "How are you doing?"

With an exhausted sight, Takyra closed her eye. "I'm thinking about what I'm going to have to pack up before they ship us home."

Ronai frowned. "They're not going to ship you home…are they?"

"Of course they will," Takyra grimly answered. "Even if the guardians weren't mad as hell at us, there's no way the others are ever going to trust us again. If they can't trust us, there's no point in us being here. When we're deemed fit to travel, they'll be shipping us home."

"But that's not fair!" Roma shouted. "It's one mistake! They're not going to ruin all of this for that!"

But Takyra was already drifting off yet again, and the little princess seemed more than resigned to her fate. She really did believe that as soon as they were given the all clear to travel by a medic, they would be sent away and never return again.

As they watched their friend return to her near comatose state, Roma and Ronai exchanged a frown. "They wouldn't really send them away, would they?" Roma softly asked her friend.

"Probably," Ronai sadly informed the girl. "Takyra's right. The others are never going to trust the two of them again. Did you even see Jaikan?"

Roma looked away again. "Yeah," she quietly admitted. "If Vegeta had gone just a little deeper…" She shook her head again, using her thick red hair to block her face from her friend. "All I wanted to do was make sure that my friends weren't being taken advantage of. You know as well as I do that Vegeta and Takyra were being treated differently. You know what? I don't agree with how he got his views across, but Vegeta made a damn good point. If anyone else had teamed up against the two of them, and Vegeta had tried to save his sister, he still would have had his tail handed to him."

"Probably," Ronai said again. "But it must be for a reason."

Her face was still hidden by her hair, but it was clear that Roma was looking further away. "That's what Vegeta told me," she miserably confided. "He was so sure that Kaeyea had a plan, that there was a reason for all of it."

Ronai leaned forward, looking at the mortally wounded boy. Vegeta truly did look like a corpse. If not for the machines hooked up to him and giving off gentle beeps of assurance, she would have sworn that the Prince of Saiyans was, in fact, dead. "If he believed in her having a plan," the girl asked, "then why would he react that way? Why would he have blown up so completely?"

That was it. The final straw had been drawn, and Roma felt the tears rolling down her cheek. The normally bright and effervescent girl cried miserably, doing what she could to keep the other girl from seeing her. "He did it because I told him," she softly sobbed. "I kept pushing and pushing and pushing. He kept telling me that there was a reason, and I refused to let him believe it. I'm the one that drove him to this! I'm the one that ruined his life! I'm the one…"

The slap resounded soundly through the room. Roma's head snapped to the side, and with the crystals of her tears still hovering at the base of her bright blue eyes, she stared at the princess beside her. "What…"

"Would you knock it the hell off?" Ronai snapped. "Yeah, maybe you shouldn't have pushed him as hard as you did, and yeah, maybe you should have just left well enough alone, but you are not the one who jacked Kaeyea's boot knife, you are not the one who put Jaikan in a death grip, you are not the one who pulled a blaster on Jeice, you are not the one who took a shot at Takyra, and you are not the one who beat Vegeta to within an inch of his life! Now stop the damn pity party!"

Her lip split open once again, Roma wiped the blood from her mouth. A part of her wanted to take a swing back at her comrade, but she managed to reign in the urge. Wiping another handful of blood from her mouth, she opted to simply sit back against her chair, wincing once more as her fractured tale rubbed uncomfortably against the seat. "I feel like I owe them," she mumbled.

"You do," Ronai quickly agreed. "But sitting there feeling sorry for yourself isn't going to help them at all."

"Yeah," Roma muttered, her eyes locked on Vegeta's battered form. "I'll make sure that it's spectacular…"