Frieza remembers yesterday fondly. Yesterday was a good day, clear skies, Father's fleet drifting lazily overhead, a party in the works to celebrate the final conquest of a new sector in PTO's books.
Frieza wants, dearly, for yesterday to have never left.
He wants to forget how his father's soldiers-soldiers he teased and snarked at and watched laugh and set up decorations and who snuck him treats and stories of battlefields and glorious conquest-scream as they die.
He wants to go back to the gardens where he dodged General Vinegar's lessons, where he ran and flew through the trees, being chased by Cooler or an annoyed tutor.
But he can't.
He can't, because he's stuck inside, watching from a small window, curled up in his mother's lap, watching the city become more flattened by the hour, hearing the distant screams of the dying or burning, his father somewhere else in the Palace, running damage control, and Cooler looking blank, and exhausted, standing guard, energy flared at the ready for the last twelve hours.
Mother whispers that she's proud of them both, and loves them dearly.
Frieza wants to believe it's to reassure them that Father will handle things.
He knows its because she's not as strong as Father, nor as fast, so if Father falls...
Cooler and Mother flinch in tandem with Frieza when another shockwave of death-scary-runenergy explodes across the city in a ring, flying out in a thin, flat blade that levels any building it hits, cutting through trees and bodies like He ripped through the wrappers on the candy snuck up to him.
Easily, quickly, and without care.
Frieza wishes he could turn back time, and never have to be used to seeing a guard he just can't remember the name of shot out of the air by a stray beam, and vanish down somewhere in the rubble, never to rise again.
He wishes he hasn't memorized the difference between someone cut in half by energy, and someone who split in half on the way down from the hole in their torso.
He is, however, very glad that the Palace has walls-short though they are-because seeing the bodies tumble and vanish behind or into the rubble is bad enough as it is.
The palace rumbles again, and he sees the edges of an explosion flashing off of the window, orange and red and cruel. Not quite in sight, but its light still reached them.
Another ship crashed.
He can't see the fleet anymore, but he remembers counting them in his boredom with General Vinegar.
Five-hundred and twelve.
It's the four-hundred and fifth crash.
He hasn't seen what's tearing through the city, growing closer by the hour, destroying anything that stops its brutal march towards the palace.
He doesn't suggest they leave because that would make him sound like a coward.
He wonders why nobody else has brought the plan up, though.
Then another pulse rips through the air, and a hotel named after Father explodes, and he suddenly is very glad that they're tucked away here, where it's safer than the warzone outside.
If only they could fly off without being shot out of the air like every soldier he's seen, then they could slip away with the night.
But night has already fallen near the edge of the city, and the chaos is still just as loud, so he doubts whatever it is, it is bothered by the darkness.
Cooler, Mother, and the spattering of Elites in the room with them fire blasts without question when the door slams open, and Father bats them aside without blinking, head twitching left to avoid the Death Beams that would have speared his cranium, courtesy of Cooler's finger, and Mothers eyes.
Frieza Doesn't cry in relief when Father says he's going to handle things personally.
Albino, he hears his Father whisper to mother.
That's what's been tearing the city to shreds, an Albino Arcosian.
Frieza feels his Mother's heart stutter, pressed as close to her chest as he is.
He remembers that lesson. Albino's are the rarest kind of Arcosian, and un...une...unequiv...GAH! Supposed to be the strongest kind, too, without question.
Frieza can imagine him, now, because everyone knows what they look like.
Black skin, Green eyes, Yellow Bio-Gems, and energy so wild and vast they cannot control themselves, so rare they're considered a once-in-a-thousand-generations level of bad luck.
The last one died five years before his Grandfather did.
Frieza was born common. In color, at least. White skin and Purple Gems are about as standard as an Arcosian can be, and his people adore him for it, so Frieza is proud of it.
He's more proud, now, seeing as he's the exact opposite of the monster tearing down his home.
He loses every semblance of pride when he watches a soldier's energy blast get reflected off of something just out of sight, and crash into a half-standing building.
He sees the outline of a person in the light just before the beam hits.
The building crumbles under the explosion.
Frieza is out of his Mothers lap, ducking Cooler's arm, and shooting out that window before he can stop himself, arcing around the Palace, and towards the noise, ignoring the screams behind him to come back.
He will not cower for a second more.
He is FRIEZA! Prince of the Arcosians, son of Cold, and bearing a power level in the millions!
Besides, he's five, and if the Filthy Monkeys can send their children off to conquer planets as a right-of-way by this age, then he can fight for his home!
He zips between two of the Palace spires, grinning like Father did when talking to a cowering diplomat and...
And...
Frieza feels frozen, at the sights. And it is plural because there's so much...
His eyes find the pure, flat destruction first, the leveled buildings and crumbling architecture, the craters and burning ships, the scars that wouldn't leave the crust of the planet for centuries at the least.
The second thing he notices-and looks away from almost immediately-is the bodies. There are many, and he looks away before he notices anything more than the fact that they are.
The third thing he notices is her.
The Albino, black skin smooth, yellow gems glinting in the fading light.
She is...crying.
There's regret in her eyes like Cooler's when he accidentally burned Frieza's hand while showing off a trick with his energy.
Sad, hurt, and oh so very sorry.
He watches as one of the soldiers still standing darts at her and is slapped aside by an almost careless twitch of her tail. Frieza tenses, preparing to...do something to help but...there's no follow up.
No second hit, no blast cutting him open and burningburningburning him, nothing.
Now that he's paying attention, almost every soldier is alive! They're bleeding, or holding their stomachs, or just breathing deeply, out cold.
The few dead are surrounded by ashes, or steaming, charred rubble.
A blast cannons into sight, fired by a soldier half-buried inside a wall.
It hit her skin and exploded.
She was unmoved.
But there was panic-regret-mentally-saying-bad-words flashing through her eyes when her Bio Gems glowed, and another pulse that would haunt his dreams came on out, exploding from the gem in her back, and the small one just above her chest, meeting in the gems on her shoulders and detonating, pulsing out in its stark-white glory, cutting through any architecture still standing nearby.
An equally white blast came out of the gem on her back, the exact shape of the one he shot, and crashed into the soldier.
The explosion flowed with the momentum of its shot and scorched the rubble behind him, and Frieza was going to stop paying attention to that area now before the smoke cleared, this explained why some weren't alive.
The second-to-last thing Frieza noticed was his father, bloody, on his back, with the Albino choking him with her foot.
"GET AWAY FROM HIM!"
Frieza blinked. 'Who was stupid enough to scream that?'
Her green eyes trailed up to Frieza.
Slowly. Calmly. Like she wasn't bothered about much of anything despite the burning sadness now hidden by a blank mask.
'Oh. It was me.'
Frieza didn't even have time to blink before his back was owpainhurtshurtshurts pressed up to the palace behind him, one hand wrapped around his neck tight enough that it stung a bit to breathe.
He stared, for a moment in fear, at the calm, blank mask that was the Albino, her Yellow Gems were calmer, dimmer, less intimidating.
Then, just as the sun vanished over the horizon, did the light catch them and Frieza's world stopped.
"Pretty..."
It was out of his mouth before he could stop himself, and the surprise on the Albino's face was only adding to the image, light filling and glowing in her Gems, illuminating her face in an aura of light.
She looked, Frieza thought, like an angel.
And then it clicked.
She was pretty, she was strong enough to beat father...
But she was young.
Maybe only a year or so older than Cooler, so perhaps fourteen or fifteen.
And she had no idea what she was doing.
There was no other explanation for her leaving all those soldiers alive.
Then, suddenly, the light disappeared, and he was left with her slightly-flustered green eyes to stare at.
"How many, do you think?" She asked, and yeah, young, her voice was a dead giveaway.
It was also quite pretty.
"H-How many?" He rasped, wiggling in her grasp, geez she has a good grip.
"How many lives do you think I could save if I killed you right now." Frieza's heart stopped, then sped up faster than before.
"I...I don't know..." He admitted, honest as he could be. "How many could have been saved if you didn't attack the city?" He snarked, only slightly vindictive.
Her green eyes narrowed, and the snark died like grass in winter.
"I didn't attack. I got attacked." She hissed.
"By who?!" Frieza exclaimed.
"Some old lady shot me with an energy blast when she caught a flash of my skin!"
"And the energy thing happened?"
"Y-Yeah..."
"So you can't control that?"
"Ah, no, I can't, it happens if a blast that doesn't pierce my skin hits me."
"Your body has so much energy that it retaliates?"
"Explosively."
"Cool." She snorted, eyes flicking closed, head tilting down a bit.
"Was...Was that an ice pun?" Frieza balked and pouted his best when she cackled in laughter.
The hand on his throat was gentle now, barely touching him, more there as a formality, or forgotten.
He blinked.
"Wait, so the explosion went off, and the soldiers just...attacked you?"
She flushed.
"Well...I wasn't in the best mood, so when a city guard threatened to fire if I didn't come quiet, asked if he was really gonna shoot me after what just happened."
"Did he?"
"In the face."
"Yikes. So that...?"
"Got just about everyone involved, yeah, I've been trying to convince big and transforming down there to make them stand-" Her eyes widened, and she turned from Frieza, arms crossed in front of her to block a punch that shattered the stone around them, and sent Frieza through the wall by sheer force.
Ah. Father had another form.
What.
Frieza blinked. Then a few more times for good measure. It was father, clearly, he still had the same face and general colors, but...he was different. A few centimeters shorter, his tail and arms were uniform in coloration and depth, and his horns had gone away.
Father could transform?!
Frieza thought that was done to contain unruly power. Why would Father need to do that? He was a King!
...It was because the horns looked cool, wasn't it? Frieza would bet all the Candy in the world that's why.
Frieza would have been focused on the fight instead of the reasonings for why Father was normally transformed but he...well he couldn't see the fight.
Father and The Girl were simply gone, and the only sign of their still being around was the occasional crash of sound, and near-visible shockwave of force when they clashed, moving so fast he could hardly believe it.
Frieza pulled himself out of the trashed room and flew out of the now rubble wall he had been forced through by accident, trying to catch a glimpse of them.
He floated for almost a minute, chasing shockwaves and blurs until finally, he caught sight of them.
They were stood in the main courtyard, on the ground surprisingly, arms still missing, and shockwaves of air washing over him from what had to be a near-endless chain of punches meeting each other.
The Girl's face was screwed up in concentration, and Father...was smiling? No, actually.
He was laughing.
Creepily.
The Girl was also thrown off, clearly, but was still fighting her heart out, incorporating kicks to their fight when the ground under them slowly fell away, shattered and compressed from the force of their trading blows.
Right up until Father buried a fist in her stomach, and their movement came to a halt for just a moment, before she was skipping back across the ground, somehow managing to turn the second bounce into a graceful flip that saw her landing perfectly atop the remains of a statue, alighted like a bird upon a stylized carving of some ancestors Death Beam.
Frieza wasn't sure, since it was more ash then statue, but wasn't that the one of the Queen who had invented the Death Beam?
Father laughed again, quieter this time, before suddenly, he threw his hands up, looking like Frieza Day-he was still getting over the fact his father had replaced Christmas with a day to celebrate him-had come early.
"Yes! YES!" He exclaimed, hands coming down again, grinning wide and smug. "You're perfect!"
The Girl blinked, and Frieza was tempted to repeat the confused, not-quite-a-shake of her head, disbelief written on her face like a beautiful, though confused, book.
"Pardon?"
"You're powerful, young, and Arcosian!"
She shifted back a bit.
"This better not be going where I think it's going."
"Tell me your name." Her brow arched up and wow he didn't know you could put that much sass into a facial expression-
"Albino bitch seems to be the crowd favorite," She snarked, gesturing to the many downed soldiers in the surrounding carnage, her posture loose and almost as snarky as her words.
"Forget the riff-raff," Father said with a snort, "You...You're special."
"Not special enough to take more than a single punch," She winced, rubbing gently at her stomach. Father chuckled lightly.
"You made me crack a sweat in my Fourth form, made my army look like a joke, and are barely a teenager." He chuckled again, louder now. "Which is why I'm recruiting you."
"You...what."
Yeah, Frieza was feeling much the same.
"You only have room to grow, and I intend to use that power, that potential growth..."
"If you so much as Whisper the words marriage proposal, Cold, I swear..."
"No, no. Not to me, and both my boys are too young, yet. No, I want to make you a member of my army." Her second brow joined the first in trying to meld with her head-gem.
"Me?"
"Yes, my dear. I'm thinking...general of Arcos. Leader of the defense forces." She blinked about the same time Frieza's heart raced a bit.
"Don't you...have one of those?"
"He is the logistician, the tactician, and general paperwork master-" Yeah, that described General Vinegar pretty well, "But there is no soldier General. No head to the policing forces, no power to guide and command outside of legalities and Threats from middling soldiers. You can fix that."
"I...but why?"
"Because I am King, and I say so."
She slowly, hesitantly, floated down from the statue, landing delicately in front of him, her eyes flicking to Frieza-badump-and then the soldiers still standing/conscious. "Say I accept..."
Cold was a businessman above all else, and stepped closer to her with a wide grin, hand extended for her to shake, "A room at the palace, food, clothes, anything you could as for, the status of a General, and the Honor of being Captain of the Palace guard."
A moment of silence, before she flinched.
"I accidentally'ed your previous Guard Captain, didn't I?"
"Quite viciously, yes."
"I...I see..."
She slowly, almost torturously slow, reached out, and clasped his hand.
Frieza faintly felt like a dream was coming true.
A/N: Merde, I've done it again, two stories in so short a time frame, what is happening ., .