"Most of our faults are more pardonable than the means we use to conceal them." - François de La Rochefoucauld

Frigid

There's an appalling sort of material vanity implicit in the woman's wardrobe. I understand this cottage to be nothing more than a simple vacation home, a mobile and temporary residence intended for use only during recreational sojourns, and only one of the many in her possession. Nonetheless, the closets and dressers here are filled to bursting with a profusion of outfits and trinkets and all varieties of useless things. In the past, Frost has insisted that this sort of obsession with bedecking one's self with all that is frivolous and gaudy is frequently indicative of a person who is well please by his or her own looks. I cannot believe this. If Bulma was entirely contented with her appearance, then why did she go to such lengths to embellish her form in a manner that effectively obscured so much of it?

No, it's just glitter and gild, signifying nothing meaningful. This business of garb is merely a way for people who are all too alike in their impoverishment of ability to pretend at beginning different – and superior – to others. As with the rest of them, she wears these things to make herself stand out; not for her own gratification, but to communicate her importance to others. Most species are desperately ordinary. They rely on such illusions to signify status in the absence of legitimate power distinctions. It is a silly game.

When he was alive, Furiza had played along with the rules of such games, accommodating himself to the sensibilities of his underlings, at least to the extent that it served his purposes. Always pragmatic, Furiza, flexible even to a fault and willing to tolerate rather a great deal if it would help him reach his goals; consider the ridiculous exhibitions Ginyu was permitted to engage in, simply because he was effective and useful. At the time, what Furiza's actual goals had been had never been clear to me; now, learning what I have about the Dragon Balls, the answer seems more obvious; all the conquests, the expansion of the Empire were to him only entertaining distractions – fringe benefits. His main interest had laid in finding something that could secure his power absolutely and eternally. He couldn't have known exactly what form that something would take, couldn't have even much cared, but he tore through scores of worlds on his meandering quest for it.

Father's methods and motives were a great deal different from Furiza's of course, but he had similar reasons for donning armor. It was a matter of diplomacy for him, of looking like the king his followers expected to have; that meant armor, lavishly adorned. Also, toward the final several decades of his life he began to run toward fat, and the armor was some help in concealing that.

Kooler was an entirely different matter from Furiza and Father. He was always rigidly and completely Icejin, and allowed no concessions, no taint of acculturation to compromise that purity. It was a way for him to give order to his surroundings, and I believe, for him to react against Father without openly disparaging or challenging him. For Kooler, there was only ever one correct way of doing something. He made no exceptions, not for necessity or expediency or for the weaknesses of himself (of which he allowed himself none) or of others. For all that, he was frequently easier to deal with than Furiza; Furiza's behavior was too erratic, too dependent upon his moods, but one could always predict which words or actions would outrage Kooler, and thus avoid them.

Frost, Aiken has told me, sometimes adopts the dress of the people he is studying, when invited to do so. She has witnessed this, during the times I've sent her along to guard him during one of his projects on uncolonized worlds, but I have never seen it myself. In most situations he considers the wearing of clothing or jewelry by Icejin to be a form of clownish imitation, and an embarrassment to everyone involved.

These are not questions that I myself have ever cared to get tangled up in. I've no interest in such things. But now, as I find myself seeking some way to conceal the bruising that damnable boy left at my neck, I wish I had a better instinct for what was appropriate and aesthetically pleasing.

I have been careful not to tear or otherwise damage the possession of our host, yet I fear I've made a mess of things. These fancy scraps of cloth get dirty so easily; even the process of unfolding them, or sitting them on the bed or atop the dresser for a few short hours introduces imperfections; they become wrinkled. Somehow they gather Aiken's short, striped hairs at a shocking rate, though she'd never even entered this room. I am sure that there are means through which these problems might be corrected, but discovering how would require that I ask awkward questions. Matters of such base necessity have always in the past fallen to Uragiru to resolve.

The robe that I have grabbed from its hook in the bathroom immediately after Juunanagou's attack suited me best, though its largeness had been an annoyance and it had restricted my tail. However, having found it in the bathroom as I had, I began almost at once to wonder if it was a garment meant to be worn only in the privacy of that room. I had never seen one of the Saiyajin's people wear such a thing while in the company of others, so there may have been some taboo against doing so. If one of them were to come to the door and see me wearing it, might this be judged as an obscene faux pas? Now that I have consented to play this game I must follow the proper rules, but I am very uncertain as to the finer points of these rules, and so it is very difficult for me to know what is correct.

I've spent much time over the last days reviewing my options, trying new variations of dress to conceal the bruising. Nothing looks right. Nothing pleases me.

Now I was making a new attempt; a jacket – or perhaps a shirt, I couldn't say exactly – long-sleeved and checkered with black and white and grays, made of a fabric that was worn-looking and almost shockingly soft. There was a line of buttons up its center, and a collar that could also be turned upwards and buttoned. When I did so, the collar covered my neck up past the line of my jaw, almost up to my mouth, thus concealing the bruising very effectively. However, I was not at all certain that the collar was meant to be worn like that; if the Saiyajin's people saw me doing so, it might attract more questions than I wanted to answer. I was debating this point while standing in front of one of Bulma's many mirrors (strangely, I have found myself liking the woman, but in some ways she reminds me too much of Uragiru) when Frost knocked softly on the bedroom door. I turned the collar back up to cover my neck, checked the buttons to make certain that they were fastened correctly, then settled silently down on the bed, sitting cross-legged among the pillows as though I had been there for quite some time. Then I said, "Come in."

Frost did so, stooping as he came through the low doorway. He drew the door shut behind him, saying as he did so, "I've just taken Aiken up to the house to speak with Son Gohan about arranging training sessions between her and a pair of the Son family's young men."

"Very good," I said. He sat at the corner of the bed, turning his head at a slight angle to look at me. His big hands hung pooled between his knees. I said, watching him very closely to catch his first reaction before he could quash it, "She believes that she can convince those boys to teach her to 'sense energy' without arousing suspicions, so that we may relocate Uragiru."

He shook his head slowly, but gave nothing else away. "If you consider her plan more closely, you will see why it will never work."

I had not expected this reply, and I looked away from him with a quick jerk of my head, angry. "Have you a better plan, then?" I snapped, challenging him now to find a way to correct his error, to prove that he was completely and forever finished with that woman -

He didn't answer for a long moment. Then – suddenly – I felt the tips of his fingers at my throat. Often, people who've seen nothing about him but his size expect Frost to be clumsy. They expect him to lumber around, to break things by accident when he touches them. He shocks strangers with his grace, with his ability to dial himself back so far that others sometimes forgot about his presence. He didn't tug or pull at the collar; he simply turned it down with a quick movement so light and deft that I barely felt it at all.

It was such an audacious thing for him to do, it was only hours later that I began to suspect that he might have done it to change the subject.

But once he had done it, it was done; the bruising stood revealed, the shape of the hand that had clutched my throat still visible against my skin. I pressed my back against the headboard and glared up at him, my tail lashing against the side of the bed in rage. I did not do myself the indignity of attempting to turn the collar up again.

He stood very quickly, and in his anger he seemed suddenly to fill the entire room. "Who has done this to you?" he demanded. "It was Prince Vegeta, was it not?" There was very little question in his voice.

"Do not aspire to heroics," I said. "It does not suit you.

"Calm yourself," I told him, when he still stood, fuming as he stared down at me.

He did not become any calmer, but my voice inspired him to attempt a calmer facade. "Who did this?" he said again. His voice was not so loud now; now it was more of a hiss. That was little better.

He was badly mistaken in suspecting Vegeta, but, I reflected, it was not so surprising that he would err in this; Frost had not been present when I'd arrived on this planet, and he'd always held the Saiyajin in suspicion. "I have encountered Vegeta once since coming here," I said. "He barely looked at me. He does not consider me worth hurting."

Frosty seemed unwilling to accept the truth of this. He struggled with it, and I remembered again how he had hated the Saiyajin, back when they were still in Furiza's employ. The Saiyajin doubtlessly had a great deal to account for, but Frost blamed them for far more than what they were rightly responsible. He blamed them for things that were well outside the realm of their control – for actions that, had I been the perpetrator, he would have labored to excuse away. But the Saiyajin were good at what Furiza set them to, and they enjoyed their work, and that made all the difference in Frost's eyes; it made them a convenient repository for his hatred. As for myself, I never cared for the Saiyajin, but neither did I consider them very important or particularly responsible for the results of their actions; like myself, they were game pieces, not the players.

"Who, then?" he said softly, struggling still to master his anger. Feeling helpless, I've begun to remember since coming here, is not something to which one easily becomes accustomed, though without a doubt Frost has had more practice at it than I. I paused to consider what I should say to that; there a great deal of shame involved in admitting what Juunanagou had been about to do to me, and I was not certain how much I wished to tell him – how much I could bring myself to admit, how much he deserved to know. Before I was prepared to speak again Frost rushed on. "We will go to Son Goku," he said, as though this matter was already decided. "He will put an end to this directly."

No, Frost had never liked the Saiyajin, but he liked these Saiyajin here. He liked them rather too much, I thought, and it seemed he trusted them as well, trusted them even enough to expect that they would defend me, and that when he'd only known them for a few days. That made me deeply uneasy.

"No, I don't think so," I said. "It seems to me that I have been looking to the Saiyajin to resolve entirely too many of my problems as of late." Then, before I could think better of it, I heard myself add, "In any case, if I can avoid interference from the Saiyajin's people, Juunanagou might yet end all my troubles for me."

He did not fix on the name, as I'd hoped he would as soon as I'd spoken. Instead, his eyes narrowed, and he said, "Precisely what is that intended to mean?"

"Don't play at ignorance – I told you before, when we were dead." When we were dead... I feel more than slightly mad, still, to even give voice to those words; I should like to know why my life has become so absurdly surreal. "I am only being objective. I am only considering my long-term prospects. Last time I only escaped the worse Hell to which the rest of my family was sent on a technicality. As I don't see many more opportunities to be murdered in my future, the boy night have been exactly what I needed, had he done me the favor of following through. My own poor luck he did not. Only..." I fell quiet, hoping that Frost would interject something, turn the discussion in some other – any other – direction, but he kept his silence.

"Only, I did not wish to be strangled again. It hurt so very much. When he finally released me, I felt so absurdly grateful; I feel sick at myself now, just remembering it." There was too much truth loose in the room now. If one of us said the wrong thing, it might take years to repair the damage. Still, I could not seem to stop. "I can't see any way out of this. If Juunanagou does not return to kill me – and he is so erratic, who can say what he will do? - then I am damned, but I do not want to die again so soon."

"I think," Frost began carefully, "that you are... mistaken to view what Lord Enma said to you last time you met him as his final word on the matter. He did not strike me as unjust." I had to fight not to make a face at that; doubtlessly, Enma would have been well pleased by Frost. He would not understand what it was like to have Enma sneer down at him from the other side of that great desk, to be judged and found wanting. "Perhaps, if you are very careful to do nothing more that would displease him, he will see that you -"

I cut him off; I will speak against myself before I hear him voice criticism of me that I've increasingly begun to realize the must have been keeping to himself for decades. "That I've what? That I've reformed? That I'm sorry now? Were it even true, I can not believe that that could matter."

"It must count -" he began, but I cut him off again.

"Consider," I said, "the matter of Uragiru. Should all the work she did with you – all the lives she must certainly have saved – erase the harm she did to you and I? Will it cancel out murders, like weights balancing a scale? I tell you, it will not. She will not go unpunished for that. Yes, and I'll see to it myself still that she is punished for it, but I will not expect Enma to hold me to a different standard than I hold her."

"It won't work," Frost said again, his voice as dull and exhausted as it had been when he was still sick.

He left a short time after that, back up the hill to return to the company of the Saiyajin's people, whose companionship he seemed to prefer over my own. Through the window, I watched him walk toward the Saiyajin's house, to the bustle of scores of family and friends crammed happily into too small a space; as he drew closer to the crowd, which had spilled out into the front yard, I saw that he was as one who had just dropped a heavily load from his shoulders. With them, he smiled and laughed and chattered as easily as they did. If they were still put off by his foreignness, they did not show it from where I was standing; already, the Saiyajin's people seem to consider him to be one of theirs.

I could lose Frost very easily here. It seems possible that I already have.

It was only after he'd ducked inside the house, following the rest of the mob, that I began to wonder his words. "It won't work," he'd said, but surely he'd only been referring to Aiken's plan...