Summary: Before Earth, before his change of heart and before his family, there had been a son he'd never wanted, made from Frieza's seed and born from his body. Then he was dead, and Vegeta made sure to forget he had ever been there at all. Only, he isn't dead. He is alive. Tormented and abused, but alive, and now Vegeta will do what he couldn't have done the first time. He will save him.
Warnings: Rated M for language, abuse, sexual violence, depictions of rape, mpreg, etc.
Every Eye Will See
Chapter Twenty-Two: The Promise
The Past:
"I am here to inform you that it is dead."
Vegeta held his breath.
He held it even though he knew Zarbon's eyes were still watching him, were watching the way his body held itself frozen, were watching the way his ribcage did not move even the slightest bit beneath the spandex.
It is dead.
Time passed, but no burning brewed in his lungs. He had trained himself to swim underwater for nearly an hour—these handful of seconds were no trial.
They were nothing compared to the weight of everything else.
It is dead.
He held his breath. He thought of very few things. He thought of the hunger pangs in his stomach, forced to wait impatiently for the food Nappa had left to secure after he had managed to peel himself from the hospital bed. He thought of the stillness in his lungs. He thought of the things he should not ever think of again.
He held his breath until he heard Zarbon (pompous, limp-wristed cunt) turn on his heel, the gold tip of his boot scraping across the floor in a calm, unhurried manner. He held it until the door whizzed to a close. He held it until the footsteps on the other side fade to nothing.
It is dead.
When he finally let the breath out, it tore itself from his chest like a jagged blade. When he sucked the air back in, it was wild, ragged, like he had been underwater for hours instead of minutes. It was like his lungs have spent the past ten months as unused hunks of tissues sitting useless in his chest. It was like it had been a lifetime since he had last had air.
It is dead.
No, not 'it'. The infant had been male. A boy. A son. Denying that did not make it hurt less.
He was dead.
All this air he was taking in, and yet somehow dizziness befell him, distorting his vision until he could hardly see what was front of him.
He supposed he should be grateful they had bothered to inform him. Curiosity was a powerful, ugly thing. He would have always wondered, he knew. Even if he had known the truth in his heart, he would have always wondered. But now, he would not wonder. He would never have to wonder what had happened to the baby.
His baby.
They had killed it.
At least they had not made him watch.
He was not surprised. Really, he wasn't. Why else would Frieza have taken him away in the first place? Infants had no place in Frieza's army. Everyone knew it, and everyone accepted it. Every soldier knew that if they chose to sow their wild oats, then those oats had better stay where they were planted. He knew this, had accepted it as far as a man who had never had any use for children could accept what did not pertain to him.
He was not surprised because while rules could be defied, circumvented, the infant was destined for death regardless. Frieza could not claim a half-breed to be his son, to inherit his fortune and to carry on his name. The magnitude of the dishonor meant mercy was not an option. It could not be left alive, lest word spread that the all-powerful Cold family name had been sullied by filthy saiyan blood.
He knew this, but he still felt pain.
Vegeta had wondered more than once why parents loved their children so fiercely. He understood loving a parent—it had been so long ago, and the king had in retrospect been a weak ruler, but Vegeta had never loved anyone the way he had loved his father.
Why was it that the other way around was even stronger? Why did mother's and father's shield their infants in their arms from those who wished to do them harm? Why were parents ready to lay down their own lives for them—lives so short that the mother and father could not have loved them very long, lives so small that they had not even learned what love was and how to return it?
He knew now. He had never thought he would ever discover that mystery, but he had.
Vaguely, he acknowledged his knees hitting the floor. The weight, the gravity of it all had worn down the strength in his legs, it seemed.
Vegeta should have killed it when he had the chance. Early on when its life was still hardly a life at all. It would have hurt physically, no doubt. It would not have been easy to kill what his own body was protecting, but he was no stranger to that kind of pain. He felt it all the time. He had endured more beatings than he could count, had suffered the sting of mockery until his strength had grown into something worth fearing. He had felt pain and pain and pain until he felt so much of it, it was like feeling none of it at all.
He should have done it then, because despite all the pain he had felt, it seemed he did not know pain at all. He could have handled the crippling blow to his gut, the ache and burn as the life inside of him died away.
This though...
This pain he could not handle.
It stemmed from his heart, but he felt it everywhere. He felt it in the palms of his hands where his nails were digging too deeply into the skin. He could feel it in his abdomen, where the incision, still red in its newness, ached with every move he made. He could feel it in his ears, where those three damning words still rang over and over again.
He felt the pain and he felt the sickening guilt. Was not the role of the parent to protect their offspring? To keep them healthy, well, and safe?
Vegeta had not done that.
Vegeta had let his child die.
What a powerful thing love was. Born from instinct, not only choice or prolonged proximity, it seemed. What an utterly useless thing it was. What purpose did the love he felt for the baby have if it had not been enough to save him?
Or perhaps it was Vegeta who was the problem. Perhaps it was his love that was deficient, abnormal, wrong. Would he not have fought harder for his baby's life if it wasn't? He would have found the strength, like the women who moved grand obstacles with their bare hands to free their trapped children, like the men who ran straight into the jaws of death all to buy those precious to them just even a little more time in life.
Vegeta had done nothing.
Why? Why? Why?
He did not possess the amount of love necessary to protect, but he had just enough of it to feel the sting when it was torn away. That was the only explanation for the tears he felt running hot, foreign trails down his cheeks. Why else did he feel like he could not breathe, like even his lungs wanted it all to stop?
The pain needed to stop.
Vegeta climbed to his feet. He put one foot out, then put the other in front of that one. He did it again, and again, and again. Each move felt like it belonged to someone else and himself all at once. Step. Step. Step.
He walked until he was at the other side of the room and standing in front of the wall of cabinets. He opened one of the little doors and reached inside. There would not be anything preferred—this was not a surgery room, after all—but he did not need the job to be pretty. He just needed it done.
Eventually his hands found a pile of exactly what he needed. He wrapped his hands around as many of the unused syringes as he could. The needles were capped, and with his other hand he tore them off in one pull. Some of the needles got bent in the process but they were intact enough to do what needed to be done.
In his mind he could see it, how all the pain would end. The pain was so deep in him that it had burrowed within his very blood, and the only way to dispose of it was to let it out. It would squeeze through the space between his punctured skin and the needles. It would drip down until the dust grey floors were a vibrant, vicious red.
On the other side, there may be darkness, or there may be the fires of Hell. Perhaps his child's blood was defiled enough that he would see him there waiting for him.
He was dead.
He heard someone shout his name, but his hand was already flying towards his throat.
A grip around his wrist jerked him to a stop just before the needles pierced his skin. He looked up and saw Nappa staring down at him, his expression one of abject terror, the likes of which Vegeta had never seen on his companion before. Behind the man, Vegeta could see the remains of their meals desecrated on the floor near the doorway.
He took in a breath.
Then he let it go.
He let everything go.
"We are leaving," he told Nappa. "We will meet up with Raditz and his brother and make a plan from there."
And kill Frieza, was left unsaid, but heard well enough.
He would kill Frieza for vengeance for his father's death. He would kill Frieza for enslaving him into a lifetime of servitude. He would kill Frieza because Vegeta will become the most powerful in the universe and no one would stand in his way.
He would kill him for no other reason than those ones. There was no other reason.
(But there was. Deep down in his heart, so deep he barely even remembered it was there, he knew there was.)
The Present:
Vegeta had never seen a person look so young and so old at the same time.
His face was naturally that of a child's—soft where age lines would be, his features small in a way that could only be from his youth. There was something so distinctly aged about him though. He read it in the hard, malnourished lines of his face, in the way his shoulders hunched up around him like castle walls, in the way he held eye contact for hardly a second before he glanced away. He saw it in the skin where the blindfold had been, slightly paler than the rest of his face and tight with wrinkles.
Vegeta had noticed before, but had not wanted to accept what it meant, had not wanted to realize that the boy must have been wearing blindfolds for a very long time—probably his whole life.
The rage boiled, but simmered on its own. A person could only feel so much of it in one day, he supposed.
He took in the boy, his hard lines and grimy clothes. He took in the curtain of hair that shadowed his eyes. The lot of it was so knotted and matted that Vegeta wondered if he ever even bothered to run his fingers through it. He wondered if they would have to cut it. He wondered if his mother's hair had actually been styled that way, or if he just wanted to believe it had been.
He wondered why he was wondering about such irrelevant things.
When his eyes dropped to the boy's lips, he realized, not so irrelevantly, that they were so chapped they were white and splitting down the center.
"Water," he gracefully blurted out. The boy jumped.
"I—" Vegeta coughed, wondering if he had ever felt so awkward in his life. "I'll get you water."
He turned and went to the kitchen. Once there, he took a large cup from the cupboard. He turned the tap for the cold water and held the cup under the stream. Once it was full, he returned and held it out to the boy.
The boy hesitated, but only for half a second. He snatched the cup so quickly that liquid tipped over the side and onto his hand. He didn't seem to care, nor did he care about the water that dripped from the corners of his lips as he gulped it down. In what couldn't have been more than three seconds, the cup was emptied.
"I'll get you more," Vegeta said, and after a moment, the boy handed the cup back.
When Vegeta returned for the second time, he held out the newly filled cup. "Slowly, this time," he cautioned.
The boy hesitated again, but did as told, slurping down the water with more care. When he was done, the boy held the cup out expectantly.
"No more for now," Vegeta said as he took it, "too much will make you sick."
If the boy was disappointed at that, he did not let on, and silence fell once more. Vegeta thought desperately on how he could fill it, but his mind came up uselessly blank.
He did not think he had ever experienced a silence so uncomfortable in his life. For a silence to be awkward, that would imply that you cared for the second person's opinion. You cared if they thought you were boring, or so strange you could not manage to hold a single conversation. Vegeta had never cared about such trivial things. If he had something to say, then he would say it. If he did not, he would not waste his time trying to influence a person's inner thoughts of him.
He would not delude himself by denying that the boy's perception of him was important, and so far, the boy only seemed afraid. Vegeta supposed it was understandable, but that did not make it any easier to witness.
His own child was afraid of him. Once, such an outcome had satisfied him. He remembered the savage satisfaction he had felt every time teenage Trunks had glanced away from him, every second he had spent holding his tongue so as not to incur Vegeta's wrath. There was no such enjoyment here. There was a difference between his future son—nearly a man and strong in his own right—and the one before him. There was a difference between the man he had been then and the one he was now.
He did not want the boy to cower from him. He did not want the boy to look at him like he was just another enemy.
The silence had gone on too long. He saw the moment when nerves overtook the boy. The hard lines started to shake; the hunched shoulders started to tremble. Vegeta cursed himself, wondering just how many times he would misstep before the day was over.
The boy does not know you, he reminded himself. You are a stranger to him. How could he know that his lifetime of fear is over? How could he see he was free now, back finally where he was always meant to be?
How can he know these things if you don't tell him?
He cleared his throat. The boy tensed, but otherwise did not move. The boy was not looking him in the eye as he wanted, but he also was not hiding, so Vegeta supposed he would just have to take his wins where he could get them.
Despite his resolve, he still found himself at a loss for words. If he ever had a carefully planned speech to give, it was gone now, beaten down to nothing by the pounding of his own heart.
What should he say? There were certainly words that would be correct. Words that were made solely for moments like this, perhaps even this one moment here. Words that would explain what needed to be explained. Words that could amend what needed to be amended.
Whatever those words were, he did not know them. The more he pondered it, the more he doubted that such words existed at all. Even so, he must say something. Anything would be better than standing over the boy like the silent executioner he must seem to be. But how should he start? An apology? How would he phrase such a statement to encompass all that he must apologize for? What apology could he give that would make forgiveness worth it? How could he dare start with asking for something he did not deserve?
In the end, Vegeta decided to start with the truth. "I thought you were dead."
The boy said nothing, and Vegeta had not expected him to. Regardless, the twitch of his little ear told him he had his attention.
"He took you from me not long after you were born," he told him. "I had only held you once before you were gone. They told me you were dead, and I believed them. I believed them because I had no other option too."
It hurt too much to believe otherwise, he did not say. Then he wondered why he wasn't saying it.
"It hurt too much to believe otherwise," he admitted. The words crawled out his throat, leaving a distinctly humiliated taste in his mouth. Again, he wondered why. They were just words. They were the truth.
He wondered abruptly why he let himself become this way. He was sure that at one point, he would have known the answer to that question without even having to think. He could only guess now that most likely somewhere in his subconscious he had thought it made him stronger to be so guarded with his thoughts.
All he saw now was a coward who found being honest with his own child a struggle.
"I was not strong enough," he said, and each word was the slow drag of a knife and he hated it, but he said them. "My body was weak, then. Frieza took you from me and I couldn't even put up a fight. And my mind..."
He took in a breath. He held it deep within his lungs. He let it go.
"My mind was even weaker."
The boy was confused, Vegeta could see. He supposed he couldn't blame him.
"Saiyans by nature are warriors," he explained. "It is not a learned desire. Our lust for battle is built into our DNA. We are a passionate race, but we do not waste energy on small feelings. That is why the things we do care for, mean everything to us."
Through the gaps between the boy's strands of hair, Vegeta could see the way his little brows furrowed. He still did not seem to understand what Vegeta was trying to say.
"I cared for power and I cared for strength. I cared for nothing else. I didn't care for my comrades. I didn't care for avenging my race. I cared for nothing except my own goals."
Vegeta stared at him intently then. The boy did not look up, but he knew he could feel the weight of his gaze.
"But I cared for you."
The boy did not react at first. Vegeta watched as he dissected the words, watched as his eyes widened where they were still directed at his knees, when their meanings become clear.
"I cared for you so much, but I hadn't even realized it until after you were already gone. At the time, I had never cared about anything else as much as I cared about you. Training, getting stronger, seeking vengeance... nothing compared to you, and that feeling... terrified me."
He swallowed, trying very hard not to think about how he had just used such a word to describe himself. He pushed through. "I was terrified of what I felt. I was terrified because I already knew I would never be able to keep you."
Still, the boy said nothing. He held his body almost impossibly rigid. Vegeta thought he might be laying too much on him at once. If it was hard to say, then surely it must also be hard to hear. Vegeta could not stop, though. If he stopped, he might not ever start again, and these words were far overdue.
"He took you from me before I even had a chance to know you, and yet it still hurt. I was a warrior. I had trained under soldiers twice my strength. I had lost my home and my father, and I lived each day under a tyrant's control. I had felt a lot of pain in my life, but nothing compared to losing you."
Quickly, before the weight of his own words could slow him, he says, "So, I had to forget you. I couldn't live every day of my life with that kind of pain festering inside of me. It was like everything that drove me—my ambitions, my passions, my goals—no longer mattered. Nothing mattered anymore except for the pain I was feeling."
Vegeta paused to take a breath. He could not stop. He could not stop. He could not stop.
"I had no reason to think he would let you live." He reigned in the desperation that bleeds into his tone at that. He wanted the boy to hear the truth, not be swayed by his excuses. "And even if you were alive, you would always be out of my reach. The moment his hands touched you, you became his and that meant you could never be mine again. That thought, the pain of it, it was too much. it took something from me. I don't know how to explain it. It was..."
After a moment, it clicked like a puzzle piece. "Whatever it is that gives life meaning... that's what it took from me."
Outside, the impact of lightning against stone cracked in the air. Inside, it was quiet once more.
The boy understood, Vegeta knew. He did not move still, did not look up, but Vegeta knew he understood what his words meant. He could see the thoughts that run across the boy's face. There was a calculative nature to his expression as he took in each word. Then there was disbelief, but not from awe. It was incredulous, maybe even a little angry.
Liar, he read in the flash of the boy's eyes when he peeked at the very alive and well body before him. You did not destroy yourself in your grief. What do you gain from lying other than the satisfaction of hurting me? Does it please you to see me suffer?
The words were too cruel to come from such a fragile boy, Vegeta thought. They sounded more like thoughts he would have, but he did not doubt that the sentiment was still the same.
"I lived in spite of myself, as you can see. I kept moving forward but that was not without consequence. I couldn't live with that kind of... grief every day, or at least, I thought I couldn't. I couldn't do what I needed to do if all I would ever think about was you. I needed to be able to move on, to refocus on my goals, and I couldn't do that if you were constantly weighing on my heart."
One breath, then another. Then, "So, I let you go."
He did not want to say this, but he had too. To not say it would be like a lie, and how many of those had the boy been fed in his life? Lies about his purpose. Lies about his destiny. Lies about his worth. Lies. Lies. Lies. Vegeta would not be another chain in the string of liars.
"I forgot what your face looked like," he admit bitterly, shame twisting like a knife in his gut. "I forgot the feel of your skin and the style of your hair. I forgot the sound of your crying and the way that you clung to me. I forced myself to forget you until I could no longer tell if you had ever even been real in the first place."
Here, he nearly did stop. It would be too much, he thought. To speak this truth would only hurt the boy, he thought. These words would blow any chance of forgiveness to the wind, he thought.
No more lies, he thought. No more lies.
He closed his eyes, and said, "Even when Frieza was defeated for good, I did not spare a thought for you."
And there it was, a truth almost as ugly as its predecessors.
"At that time, I was in space, searching for Kakarot—a man I wished to defeat—and it never dawned on me to search for answers about you. I had heard about the collapse of the Frieza Force, about how many of his supporters were being imprisoned or executed, but I didn't think of you once. I had forgotten you so well that I didn't even remember there was something I had forgotten."
Bile tickled at the back of his throat, and he paused long enough to fight it back. What must he sound like to the boy with the bruised face and skinny limbs and haunted eyes? What must he sound like when faced with the price of his own foolishness?
"But part of me remembered something of that pain, I think," he says, and the man he had once been would have denied it vehemently, but he was that man no longer. "I didn't let myself care about anything or anyone else for so long after you. I didn't care about my wife or my new son, because I couldn't let myself. I told myself that I would have always been that way, cold and distant even from my own blood, but it wasn't true. I felt that way towards them because of how I felt for you. I could not bear the pain of losing them like I lost you."
Something changed in the boy's face. It took a moment for Vegeta to place it, but eventually he read it as something like dejection, something like resignation, something like the pain that came from a lack of understanding. He tried to imagine what the boy might be thinking. Perhaps he wondered why Vegeta would ever want to remember something that had hurt him so. Perhaps he could not understand why Vegeta would ever feel such a way at all for someone like him.
Why are you here now, the boy's dull eyes said where his lips did not, if all I did was cause you pain?
Vegeta responded with nothing less than the truth. "I made myself forget you, and I regret that."
The boy's chest, which had been rising and falling with his breaths, stopped. The shock was not enough to make his eyes snap up in incredulity, but it was a near thing.
"Caring for you brought me a lot of pain, I can't deny that. But the feeling itself..." he paused to gather his words. "I had seen the way people bonded with their children, and the way they treasured their lives over their own. I never understood that. I never understood the drive that led people to hold their children so highly in their hearts. I never understood how they could sacrifice everything for their children."
Vegeta leaned over the cradle and stuck his hands in. He fit them around its tiny body and lifted it out of the cradle. It was so light he nearly could not feel it.
"Then I held you, and I understood. I understood and that is why it hurt to lose you, but I hadn't understood that every second I had spent with you was worth that pain."
Vegeta leaned in closer, but the boy's eyes closed, like the loss of sight could hide him from the words that passed through his ears.
Vegeta told him anyway, "I regret burying you away because you deserved to be remembered. I let myself forget that."
Liar, he heard, like the word was spoken right into his ear. The boy's body was wound tense, and his hands clenched in fists around his pant legs. He looked like he was scarcely holding himself together.
Perhaps, if Vegeta was a better man, he would leave the boy be. He would close his mouth and let the silence take over. He would let the boy stew over what he had been told, let him process all the words that had been forced upon him thus far.
He was not a better man. He was a man who needed his son to understand.
"It was your eyes," he told him. "It was your eyes that reminded me of the baby I had held in my arms so long ago. Because you looked at me, I remembered everything I had tried so foolishly to bury away. Because you were brave enough to show me those eyes I will never forget, and I remembered just how much I love you."
There was only one more ball left.
He was gaining on it like a hound on its prey, his speed so great that the radar's calibrations could not keep up. Just this last one and he could head back to the ship. Vegeta was there now, he knew. It was hard to tell with all the chaotic energy muddling his senses, but he was quite certain that that was him. His energy had arrived there not too long ago, alongside another lifeform so small it was nearly dwarfed by Vegeta's own.
Vegeta had done his job, and it was only Goku now who held them back.
When he finally reached the area the radar had directed him too, he dropped out of the sky and onto the ground. The first thing his green eyes saw were the crumpled remains of buildings and houses that looked like shacks.
Then he saw the corpses.
In all the places he had looked, this one was the most decimated, the most decorated with lost lives. The dragon ball here must not have flown very far, it seemed. Whatever this place was, whatever it used to be, it must have had the honor of housing the dragon balls as they were activated and taken the full force of the explosion.
He stepped around several bodies and tried his best not to think about them. He tried not to think about how all these people died because their thieving leaders had tried to play with powers they didn't understand.
Easy for you to say, with your home filled with your friends and your wife and your sons and no threats to their livelihoods that could not be handled.
Yes, he supposed it was easy for him to say.
Goku clicked the notch on the radar several times, but the energy radiating in this Division was so great that the radar was now all but useless. He knew the ball was not very far, at least. He decided to go towards the right, lifting off the ground whenever the path became unwalkable. He rounded the corner of a barely intact building with brass doors and came face to face with the five-star ball—
—in the hands of a child.
He remembered Vegeta explaining that not all races aged the same way, so 'small' did not necessarily mean 'young'. Even so, he was pretty sure that this one was a child.
The child looked so small kneeling before him in the dirt. Even now he sometimes could not tell the difference between males and females, but the bald head made Goku think it might be a boy. Though the red, pinhole wounds covering his scalp told him that it had not always been bare, nor had it been a choice.
No child should ever be covered in so much blood, he thought with a queasy feeling in his stomach. Blood oozed thickly from a gash on his head. His pale skin was cracked and peeling around the sharp pink of burned flesh. One shoulder was dislocated, and both of his legs were broken, the white bones of his shins nauseatingly jutting out for all to see.
His head was bowed so Goku couldn't see his eyes. All he could see was the way his tiny body swayed in the windless air, the tattered remains of his clothing, and the bright gleam of the dragon ball painted red from his bloody hands. There were no bodies lying directly near him—if he had had parents or guardians, they were long gone.
He is going to die, Goku thought.
"Um—" he started, even though he didn't know what he wanted to say. The boy's head lifted up at the sound, slowly, like his muscles could scarcely bear the weight. His lashes were long, and his eyes were the color of soft violet, the whites streaked with angry vessels.
Despite gaining his attention, the boy hardly seemed to see him, his eyes near milky in their daze. Even so, something inside the boy must have known that Goku was there, that there was a person before him, seeing and acknowledging him. Perhaps just that thought was enough to give a nearly dead boy the last semblance of hope.
Dimly, with vacant eyes and a mouthful of blood he muttered, "He—lp me... please... don't—don't wanna die."
The boy was still mumbling, his soft words becoming increasingly intelligible the more he spoke. Goku wondered what kind of man could ever bring a child so low. He wondered what kind of man could ever stand to let a child know the horrors of death, especially one so gruesome.
(He wondered what kind of man could be so hypocritical, as if he hadn't sent his own son off to get his neck snapped, hadn't watched the both of them moments before their deaths and did nothing to save them—)
He supposed that in reality, he did not entirely know what kind of man he was. He knew that he was not the kind to blatantly turn his back when someone needed him, though, and he would not be now.
He sped over, so fast that he barely had a chance to finish a blink before he was already at the boy's side. He forgot to be gentle when he lifted him, but the boy did not seem to notice, his lips still muttering their pleas for help.
Goku's hand, when it braced against his back, was immediately coated with blood. When he looked, he saw twin gashes, long and thick and undoubtedly deep—as if some body parts that had once been connected to him had been ripped out.
His stomach turned at the thought, just as panic started to set in. The boy had stopped mumbling, seeming to have fallen unconscious. At least, Goku hoped that was all. There was a very real possibility that he might be too late. This little life, despite how hard it held on, might be lost to this world after all.
No, he told himself. He would not give up, not yet, not while there were still breathing lungs and a beating heart.
He couldn't fail this child. He refused to fail.
He held the boy tighter, and flew as fast as he could back to the ship.
The boy stared at him.
He did not drop his eyes or avert his gaze. He stared at Vegeta with wide eyes, like it had not even dawned on him to be ashamed for it. He breathed like his heart was pounding too hard in his chest.
And yet he kept on staring. He stared like a deaf man hearing his first word.
And perhaps he was deaf, for all he had ever heard it. Just how foreign was that particular word to him? Not entirely foreign, at least; the look in his eyes clearly showed he knew the meaning.
Where had he heard that word before? Immediately, Vegeta realized how stupid that question was. The boy was blinded, but he could still hear. He could hear the way people around him spoke to one another. He could hear what lovers said to each other at the start of the day. He could hear what siblings admitted to one another in the moments when rivalries were set aside. He could hear what mothers whispered to their children at night.
Had anyone ever said that to him before?
Vegeta watched his breath become staggered and tears start to well, and he thought the answer might be 'no'.
Vegeta kneeled before him. The boy's eyes followed him all the down.
"I was not strong enough to protect you, then. But I am strong enough now," he promised. "I've missed thirteen years of your life. I missed watching you become the person you are today."
The boy was crying even before the words were out. His eyes squeezed shut, but it did nothing to slow the deluge of tears.
"I'll never get those years back, but I won't miss anymore. I'm taking you home with me, and this time, I'll hold on. I won't let go. I will never let anyone take you from me again."
Sobs ripped from his little throat, hiccupping gasps surging in his chest, so powerful it was a wonder how his frail body could withstand it.
When Vegeta grabbed him and maneuvered him onto his lap, the boy did not pull away. He dropped his head onto Vegeta's chest, went so far as to fist his tiny hands in the spandex. Vegeta wrapped his arms tight around him.
"I'm sorry," Vegeta said, "I'm so sorry."
And what about that? Was that another word the boy knew but had always been denied, had heard spoken to others but never to him, who deserved it the most?
The boy shouldn't accept it. he should be angry. He should spit at those words that had come far too late. He should rage at even being offered words so meaningless, words that could never be enough to erase what had been done. That was what Vegeta would do.
But Vegeta did not know this boy, did not know if the boy ever had been or ever would be anything like him. He saw it now in the way the boy just sobbed harder and Vegeta felt his own tears begin to fall.
How could he not? How could a man see his child in so much pain and not weep with him?
Vegeta tightened his arms around him even more, vaguely remembering to remain mindful of his injuries. He cried with him and felt no shame for it. He cried so hard his body shook. He let the trembles overtake him, let them loosen the shrapnel that pierced all around his heart. It was hard, like ripping open the aged scars of wounds that had long since healed. But they had healed wrong, a falsehood of health, and he had no use for lies any longer.
He held him and he cried, until the pain in his chest eased into an ache, until the weight started to lighten. When the boy stopped crying, he did not pull away, just laid there slumped against his chest. Vegeta wiped his own face with one hand and just held him.
Then the ship rumbled beneath them.
The trembling did not stop, and Vegeta had to bolt to his feet to keep from toppling over when the ship tilted. When he looked down, the boy was already looking back at him. For a flash of a moment he saw terrified, bloodshot eyes before a loud crash had him squeezing them shut in fear.
Vegeta dashed from the room and up the stairs. He jerked to a halt, then swerved to the side when the portion of the ceiling above his head caved in. when it settled, he flew up through the newly created hole.
Lightning attacked the world around him with such intensity that he nearly could not see from the brightness. In the short time since he had last left the ship, the world had become nearly new. Mountains that once stood tall in the distance were nowhere to be seen. What were once cliffsides were now little more than piles of rubble. The energy pulling the planet apart was so thick now he could taste it on his tongue.
He would not die today, not amongst the wreckage of this planet, nor in the cold vacuum of space. He would live this day and the next. He would live and so would the boy in his arms. There was so much life they had yet to experience, so many things to learn about each other, so many memories to make, and by the gods Vegeta would live to see it.
In the distance, amongst the burning white, he saw a glimmer of gold and he knew it was Kakarot. He flew to meet him. When he was nearly there, he held out one hand, and when their palms collided, they were gone with only seconds to spare, leaving behind the smoldering remains of what had once been Tene'mareen.
TBC