Chapter 13. Senses

Vegeta located his little concubine in a splendidly green and lush valley enclosed by large mountains. She had picked a nice spot in which to hide from him. After recovering from her surgery the Captain had "just up and left." as Turles described it. He had sounded very casual about it too. Apparently this was just something the Captain did.

It looked more to Vegeta that ignoring him right where he stood wasn't doing it for her anymore, and that she therefore had to remove herself from the bleeding scene altogether. The why was a guess. Vegeta suspected it had to do with him making her his concubine. He reckoned that perhaps she wasn't too happy about that. She didn't start shunning him until after it happened and she had been so very eager for him before that. It was the only explanation he could come up with.

It hadn't taken more than a day for her hidden ki to pop up and give her location away. With that foul temper of hers she wasn't very achieved in masking her battle power. It almost made him laugh. It would, but this was no joke. This had become bitter seriousness. He had worked it out for himself while she recovered from her surgery. Coming so close to losing her made him realise that all this meant more to him. More than simple carnal cravings anyway. How much more, he hadn't the courage to introspect, all this was making him feel unhinged enough as it was, but more. And he needed it to mean more to her as well.

Or at least find out for sure that it didn't as her recent behaviour suggested. It could even turn out to be a relief if it didn't. That meant he could walk away from this intact. But he had to know for sure first. He had to let it play out before he would even consider walking away. Somewhere at an unseeable distance, in the undefined future ahead, there lay an unknowable promise of... well something. Something that could change everything. Something that proved that coincidences did not exist. That some things were simply meant to be. It was a thing only his instincts could begin to pick up on. His mind couldn't comprehend it. Whatever it was, it was what brought him here, giving chase yet again. He wasn't even frustrated about it anymore. It was simply what needed to be done.

Vegeta landed just outside of the small grassy glade inside the woods she had picked for her camp, remaining at the treeline quite taken aback by the site he came upon. There was so much going on that it took him a moment to understand what, and in particular who, he was looking at.

The little Captain was almost unrecognisable now that she no longer wore her battle suit. She was instead clad in a violently green t-shirt that looked much too tight for her and black WTO issued spandex shorts that showed off her tanned, shapely legs. The only thing that hadn't changed were her tattered, once white battle boots. Her wild hair was still drawn up in a messy knot atop her head to keep the stitches from her surgery exposed while the incision healed. He was certain it would have by now. Saiyajin genetics were that awesome.

She was sitting on her haunches with her back turned towards him, the tip of her sleek red tail lolling lazily behind her while she was completely engrossed in handling the carcass of some beast she had slain. Her kill lay on its side with the little Captain in between the four long stiff legs. Judging from the big antlers sticking up from the beast's head, it was an elk.

It felt like a privilege that he was witness to the brutal ritual of her gutting the elk by tracing her energy across the stomach, the tip of her forefinger barely touching the brown hide yet her fierce red energy making it burst open as though she had taken a dagger to the flesh. The insides bulged out and she slipped her bare arms into the cavity to pull them out with the skill of a butcher. The innards spilled onto the grass between her feet with a squelch.

"Stop giving me the bridle-eye, Prince." Akane suddenly said out of nowhere. She gave no further regard to his presence and continued working on the elk carcass with fixed determination.

Now how did she manage that? Vegeta was silent enough without even trying to elude Piccolo with his far superior Namekian hearing, and his scent should be impossible to detect as well with him standing downwind and her with her nose up a bloody carcass. She also couldn't be sensing his ki since he was masking it. So how did she know he was there? By all means she should not be able to detect him right now. Yet she did.

"I don't need to give you the bridle-eye, Captain. I already claimed you." Vegeta matched her as he finally came away from the trees. He crossed her neat camp site, momentarily distracted by the heat coming from an impressively eleborate, stone lined fire pit she had built in the middle of it, and halted arms crossed at her hunkered frame. "How did you know I was here?"

Akane looked up at him with those hellish eyes, her marred face flecked with tiny drops of blood from her kill. "Have you come to fuck me?"

"Answer the bleeding question." Vegeta demanded irritated, refusing to rise to her provocation. He had most definitely, but not just yet. That ability of hers had piqued his interest.

Akane returned to her prey, using her energy like a knife again to start cutting away the thick brown hide from the flesh. "I just know." she muttered, her attention fully bent on her task.

Vegeta nudged her shoulder with his knee to make her look up again. He was about done being ignored by her and fed up with obsessing over what her behaviour might mean. "You don't just know. Tell me how you do it."

"It is a skill from my mother's tribe. I am not allowed to speak of it." Akane gruffed, her eyes ever on the beast she was skinning.

So she was from the tribes. She truly was a savage. Vegeta had wondered about that. The light bronze of her skin suggested she had her origin in the South. He didn't know much about the tribes that had lived in the Southern Quarter of Vegetasei. All he could really remember was that his father once told him the clanspeople were impossible to deal with. Well, there you had it, solid proof that she had her roots there. It explained that excellent fire pit as well.

Vegeta wanted to point out that her mother's tribe was gone so there was no one left to hold her to her silence, but he figured being reminded of the utter demise of their race probably wasn't going to make her more compliant. "Is it a skill I could master?" he thus asked.

"You want to know what it is?" Akane snarled, suddenly furious and coming to her feet with a bloody fist clenched in his face. "It's a skill the women of our tribe were taught to keep tabs on men like you who think they can just stick themselves up every cunt they come across."

"That temper." Vegeta said, hardly able to fend off his grin. He couldn't help it. It just charmed the hell out of him. "I don't stick myself up every cunt I come across. I slipped you my cock and I don't recall you raising any objections at the time. Quite the opposite in fact, so why are you acting out?"

Akane hunkered down again and returned to her butchery, muttering very bitterly: "I am less than your Earthling fuckhole now. You made me a disgrace, placing me beneath that lesser bitch. And I bleeding well did not go to hell and back to end up as someone's fucking bed warmer again." She looked up at him with that permanent marred frown viciously, deadly, but suddenly also imploringly. "I won't do it Vegeta, not even for you."

Vegeta felt himself jolt at hearing his name fall from her lips for the first time. He liked the sound of it far more than he should. That she abandoned formal titles at this precise moment spoke volumes. She was testing whether he would accept it of her because if he did, that alone proved she was more to him than a bed warmer. She sought familiarity. It was kind of a relief to find out that she had been worrying about the same things that had plagued him the past days, although perhaps not for the same reasons. For her this was clearly about status. She did still want him though and that eased his mind.

"Is that why you have gone out of your way to dodge me?" he asked, grabbing her under the arm to pull her to her feet so that she finally faced him properly. "I marked you so that you would stop fucking your men. I told you before, I am not sharing you, Akane. As for your position, I would never place you beneath the woman. She doesn't even know."

Akane was clearly put at ease by his words. Even so she retorted savagely: "I am your dirty secret now? A bleeding chamber whore? As your concubine I have rights to your bed and the acknowledgement of your main woman."

Vegeta let out a weary sigh. "Now you're just being obstinate."

She sighed as well, seemingly agreeing with him, and wiped the back of her blood soaked hand across her temple, leaving a red smudge on her skin. It somehow only enhanced her fierce beauty. The drawn up hair wasn't unbecoming to her either, it made her sharp features even more pronounced. She was a freaking warrior goddess.

"Are you going to tell me about your ability?" Vegeta tried again and he wanted to know, but he also wanted to divert his attention away from how very taken he was with her.

Akane indicated the carcass on the ground with her chin. "Give me a hand?"

Vegeta obliged and crouched with her, stripping off his gloves in the process. He followed her lead as she continued separating the hide from the flesh. Getting his hands dirty like this brought back memories of his purging missions with Nappa and Raditz. It weren't exactly fun times, but during these assignments he at least had the illusion of freedom. He had been able to unwind a bit being away from Frieza and his henchmen. And he had liked this, killing for nourishment was very satisfying work. Akane was better company at a camp site to be sure and he also enjoyed seeing how skilled she was at this. It wasn't a surprise. She seemed achieved at everything she did.

While they worked, their actions strangely in sync, she started talking, her rough voice becoming subdued and calm for a change. It wasn't at all unpleasant to his ears.

"It is not an ability I can teach you. The ritual knowledge wasn't passed on to me because I only descend from the tribe on my mother's side and we didn't live with her kinsmen. She somehow convinced them to take me in for training though, and I stayed with them for five years to undergo the trials that are part of the initiation rites for girls in the tribe." Akane threw him a teasing little smile. "And it isn't really for keeping tabs on men."

"What a surprise." Vegeta said sarcastically. Of course it wasn't. She just had need for something to bludgeon him with.

Akane laughed. "Well it was originally meant for it, but the women from my mother's tribe didn't need it for that anymore. From what Turles told me about his clan, the women would just be dragged out from under their furs whenever some alpha cock swinger had an itch. Not so for the women in my mother's tribe. Because their initiation rites gifted them with abilities to spot something like that coming from miles off, any bleeder brave enough to try was never sticking anything anywhere ever again. The men had given that up for a bad job eons ago and this allowed the women to elevate themselves and achieve equality within the tribe.

The rites had become more of a ceremonial thing to celebrate the women's position, I guess. And it was only given to those that wanted it. It doesn't make the abilities gained from it any less useful though. Or awesome. That's why my mother insisted I undergo my rites. 'Ram me to rights' she called it. Anyroad, I was five when my rites began. For every turn around the suns, one of my senses was taken away from me. The first year they sewed my eyes shut so that I would develope my hearing and tactual abilities."

She turned her fierce face to him, indicating the tiny dots beneath her eyes which Vegeta had passed off as freckles when spotting them before and when she closed her eyes, he could see similar dark dots running along the bottom of her eyelids, just above the long dark lashes. That was just brutal, and the pride she seemed to take in it was even more disturbing.

"The second year they performed a ritual that took away my hearing to advance my eyesight and the third year they took both my hearing and my eyesight and had me blundering around like that. The fourth they gave me my eyes and ears back and performed another ritual to shut down my tactile system. That one was the hardest to loose. It's very difficult to be when you can't feel anything. And life in the tribe just went on, I had to put in my work same as the other girls. I burned my bleeding hands on that cooking fire every fucking day for moons. Even burned my whole arse cheek on it once. Hadn't a sad hair left on my tail either. That had the whole tribe kacking themselves with laughter."

Akane snickered, evidently amused by the recollection herself.

Vegeta looked down to her small hands realising he hadn't often seen them bared before. Never outside of their carnal doings and during those times he had been far too occupied with claiming her to pay much attention to her hands. It was strangely provocative to see them without gloves and it made him reach out to grasp one. He brushed away the trails of blood with an equally bloody thumb of himself to see several blotches that indicated old burns on her skin. She had very feminine hands with the same soft skin that he had discovered when touching her previously and it amazed him again that this was so. Her finger nails were neither short nor too long and tipped with very neat white half moons that were now stained with blood. Little claws on little hands. He had felt those tearing into his back in her passion. Engrossed and wondering almost vexedly whether there was no end to her perfection, he only let go of that little hand when she made him by snatching it away roughly and returning it to the task of flaying her prey.

"So the last year," Akane resumed, explicitly avoiding his gaze. "When I had adapted to carrying myself without being able to feel, they took all three functions at the same time and left me behind in the wild to fend for myself, which I obviously managed. Many girls don't come through that last stage and they bleeding well hadn't expected me to succeed, half blood that I was."

She was recounting everything without a trace of the awe and protest Vegeta felt. She was merely stating facts. Now he wasn't fainthearted, he had no problem with carnage and he had been on the receiving end of violence as a boy under Frieza's rule more times than he cared to remember, but the rites she described sounded extremely harrowing for a little girl to undergo. He couldn't imagine putting his own daughter through anything like that. Hell, he wouldn't put himself through it without raising some serious objections, even if he understood that her trials had gifted her with a sensory system that far surpassed his own.

"You knew I was there." Vegeta realised suddenly, his eyes again drawn to those swift and deadly little hands cutting away slabs of meat from her kill. "All those things you said that day, you said them not about me, but to me."

Akane did look at him this time and the expression on her marred face was so malicious, so knowing, so full of cunning and ill-intent that he actually felt his gut clench. "Did I ever."

Vegeta had known she was manipulating him, provoking him, challenging him, drawing him out, he had even liked it in some masochistic way, yet he hadn't known the full extent of it. It had all been one big mind-fuck from the beginning. He had called her dangerous once, but this infernal creature was something else entirely. And if he had any bleeding sense at all, he would be getting the fuck away from her while he could still find it in him to do so.

She nudged his shoulder with her own, rough in her usual way but also uncharacteristically playful and then she gave him a smile like she had not done before. It wasn't a sneer or a smirk, no challenge or insult, but a full blown, genuine smile that showed off her white teeth and was nothing but a declaration of the fondness she felt towards him in return. It made her whole face light up and smooth out, revealing how stunningly beautiful she truly was behind that fierce facade. It knocked the breath right out of him.

And he knew then that he was surely doomed. No introspection was needed to define how much more all this meant to him. What he felt at that one smile said it all.