Perhaps the one redeeming quality, the one consolation in wake of the Majin I helped Babidi to unleash, is that the creature is mindless. It obeys orders not because it believes them to be right, but because it can see nothing wrong with its own fleeting whims that, for now, happen to align with the wizard's. This much has become clear to me – that it cannot be slave to him because it has no rotting moral compass to seize upon.
Blissfully unaware in its destruction.
Babidi, meanwhile, is a furious pebble of conniptions. His odium for the Earthlings who so dared slight him has brought us back to the city, where he lets the creature rampage. I am not sure which of the two is more like a tantruming child.
Krillin had escaped with the others. He, Piccolo, Goten, my son – absconded somewhere safe and shielded themselves from me. Even now I sense nothing of their presence. Neither has there been any sign of Gohan, or Kakarot from where I left him. And because I don't know where any of them have gone, I cannot give the wizard their location, and so he seethes.
"Someone knows where they are!" his small figure screeches impressively, stamping his foot on the concrete. Another human scream echoes nearby in wake of Buu's destruction. Babidi whirls on me again.
"You must know. This is your damn planet! I didn't just choose you because you were power-hungry enough to manipulate! If you're so useless, maybe I should just let Buu consume you!" Then he pauses in thought.
"Oh," he sounds. "But why didn't I think of it? I don't need you to tell me what you don't know – I just need you to seek them out yourself. You're more than capable of killing them while Buu and I focus on more important things, aren't you?"
I say nothing.
"Yes, Vegeta. Find me the wretches who dared to interfere with my plans – and don't forget that little brat who almost shot me! Go, my servant! Seek and destroy!"
I turn my back on him and levitate into the sky, wrapped in the scent of smoke.
"And don't bother coming back unless you're bringing a body with you!" he calls after me.
It doesn't matter whether he is compelling me anymore.
I find myself at Capsule Corp. I can already sense that no one is home, and this is confirmed when I enter the threshold of my own house and am greeted with nothing but still air. Even Bulma's parents are absent. I release my Super Saiyan transformation.
The door had not been locked. The security system has long since been programmed to recognize my presence. The only thing that responds to my entrance is the slight creak of the hinges. Out of habit, I shut the door behind me and scuff my boots on the entryway mat.
Capsule Corp is a sprawling complex. However, the family living space is somewhat discrete from the rest, offering the privacy we have always favoured.
I take the route down the hall into our kitchen. Afternoon light streams through the windows, alighting upon the very places we were just this morning.
A few photos of us adorn our pair of refrigerators. For the sheer amount we consume, Bulma had bought a second, when Trunks had first started school. His backpack hangs on a chair corner at the kitchen table, where his mother consistently tells him not to leave it.
Nothing about the place is disturbed, nor upturned. The coffee Bulma had had earlier still sits on the edge of the kitchen table, partially unfinished. Ice cold. We had grown into the habit of having coffee together in the morning, taking time simply to be in one other's presence before the day sprang upon us. Excited as he'd been for the tournament, Trunks had woken early, slugging into the kitchen still half-asleep. Bulma had taken him onto her lap, though he was far to old for it, and he'd dozed for a few more minutes in her arms.
They had looked beautiful. Like something from a fairy tale, a magnetic and yet untouchable dream that had come to life, somehow. For me. For a man who was born to burn such things to dust.
The last Prince of Saiyans. Cast off the chains of sentiment for the chains of slavery. Proud lord of ashes, ruler of none. Killer of his kin.
I look to the window. An image of me reflects back, ghost-like in the glass, mirroring my dark gaze underneath the alien insignia on my forehead.
I hurl the cup at the reflection and everything shatters.
I do not bother to go to Kakarot's house to search. There is another place where they might try to keep themselves safe, under the watchful eyes of god. Not a creator, not a Kai, but a divinity we ourselves had placed on the tower. He would surely buckle under my strength, if not protected himself. To be the killer of two gods –
The clouds mist particles on my skin as I fly through them. Everything is bright up here and I narrow my eyes against the sun to focus on the approaching platform.
Its occupants must feel me approaching because their own auras churn in response. I cannot sense Kakarot among them. But – the others. Those who had escaped me mere hours ago, and those who had been present at the tournament. Piccolo's energy is raised the highest, as if trying to conceal the others, trying to warn me back. Nonetheless, I know he knows what the outcome of a battle between us would be.
When I draw close enough to land, the only two people to greet me are the Namekians. One stands tall and tensed, the other pensive beneath his faltering calm exterior. Some ways back, near the building itself, I see Krillin standing as a final blockade.
"Vegeta," Dende begins as my boots touch the gleaming tiles. He's several arm lengths away, but that distance is nowhere near enough to keep him safe, even with Piccolo by his side.
"You are a fool, meeting me out in the open like this," I say. Indeed, the power of the Dragon Balls is tied to his very life. I have no mandate to kill him, but my own control is tenuous.
"Please. I might be able to help you, if you let me try," he replies.
A chuckle rumbles its way through my chest. "You're all-seeing from your perch here, are you not? You know what I've done. Why, then, would you think anyone could help me?"
"Because I've been watching over this planet for years now. I know what kind of man you are. That destroyer you were before—it was what you were shaped to be by a tyrant! Please... please let me at least try to purify your soul, or we will have no choice but to resort to violence. I cannot allow you to hurt the people that have taken shelter here."
"If you're truly framing this as a choice," I say, drawing one foot back behind me, "then I demand you show me the violence you promise."
The still-silent Piccolo leaps forward in an attempt to attack with the element of surprise, but I realize I've misread him when he simply remains shielding Dende.
"Vegeta," the larger Namekian growls, "your wife and son are here. Goku's wife and son are here. You're really willing to put all of them in danger by trying to fight me? You risk the Lookout being destroyed!"
"Why do you think I came here?"
Piccolo bares his fangs. "You can't really mean that."
I don't answer him.
"Vegeta… I've made my own share of mistakes. I was born from a demon, a being of pure evil. I was born to fulfil his vengeance. But I chose to make my own way and to accept the compassion I was shown, just like you had the choice. You have a family and friends that would die for you. And you would just throw that away to return to the empty hubris of your former life? So you defeat Kakarot—and then what happens? You watch your only home burn because you enslaved yourself to its destroyer?" His gaze burns through me as he speaks.
"You are a good man, Piccolo. I am not."
"No! Don't you dare try to eschew responsibility for your actions! You act as if the monster you were before has left you no other path in this life. But you chose to give yourself up! It's your fault that Buu was released in the first place—that monster ate Gohan! And I'll be damned if I let any more children be hurt by your mistakes today!"
I raise a pointed finger on an outstretched arm and fire a beam of ki, aiming between his eyes. Not quite fast enough—he evades with a quick twist, but the attack lances through the air beyond him and cracks into the Lookout's rooftop some distance behind.
"Get inside, Dende!" Piccolo cries before leaping at me.
His first two punches are simple enough to dodge, but his third one following a feint necessitates a parry and I absorb the force when I catch his fist. His other hand swipes and I seize his wrist before driving my heel into his sternum. I feel something in his chest crack before he's sent soaring into the building behind him, striking a pillar with an audible shatter of concrete beneath him.
That's when some of the other energies nearby awaken, much closer than before.
"Get away from Mr. Piccolo!" Goten's voice cries as he bursts out from hiding.
"Goten, no!" Piccolo's warning seem to fall on deaf ears as the boy launches himself forward.
As easily as swatting an irritant fly, I bat Goten aside the moment he comes within reach in his feeble attempt to strike me. He hits the ground with a distinct thud and lets out a cry.
While my back is turned, Piccolo drives his elbow into the back of my head. I stumble forward as another flare of pain hits me in the ribs a moment later, and my momentum doesn't stop until I hit the building, fragments of tile and marble washing over me.
My hands are up before he can catch me off-guard again. I let out a blast of energy directly into the oncoming Piccolo and am rewarded with a grunt of pain and the sight of him dropped to one knee as the light clears.
I get up and advance towards him. It does not occur to me that any of the others might emerge to help. I can sense them there, cowering within the bowels of the Lookout, but I do not anticipate hearing a familiar voice calling my name. A voice that kindled something within me.
I stop where I am. Turn my head.
Near Dende, the both of them wracked with despair, stands my wife. Bulma.
"Vegeta," she says in what is damn-near a sob. She is dishevelled—her hair and clothes are mussed, her makeup has run down her face. The skin around her eyes is slightly swollen, the way it looks when she has been crying.
She takes a step towards me. "What have you done, Vegeta?" It sounds less like a question than it does an accusation.
"Bulma, it's no use," says Dende. She ignores him and stares straight through me.
"How could you?" She takes another step. Then another. "How could you? You hurt our boy, our little boy. You—all those people—"
"Go back inside," I say. I don't know what I mean by it. As soon as I had finished with the ones outside, I had intended to go inside and kill the rest. I hadn't thought of her in particular upon deciding that. I had refused to think of her at all.
"I thought we were happy, being a family," she continues. Fresh tears crawl down her face. "I thought you were happy. Happy loving me, and Trunks. Have I just been delusional all this time?"
She wasn't wrong. I had been happy. I'd been sick with it. The revulsion at my own audacity, to think someone like myself could ever have a piece of contentment. I have the strikingly ordinary, strikingly vivid recollection of falling asleep in bed next to her, and the soft kiss on my cheek she'd give me before we drifted off. The memory seems itself a dream, now. A memory from the mind of some other Vegeta who was less selfish than I.
She's only a few feet away. "Did you ever love us? Was I lying to myself all these years, or was I loved by the same kind of man capable of trying to kill our son?"
I raise my hand. I can see that it trembles, just a little. Everything inside me hurts. I can't bear to look at her.
She reaches out towards me, brazen and foolish as always. Her eyes are sky-blue, the same as my son's. But instead of the icy fear I had last seen in his, beyond the thick grief that clouds Bulma I see a spark of something. The razor edge of her intelligence, her mind that deconstructs and reshaps existence as she sees it into impossible ideas, impossible solutions. Tirelessly working, never failing her even when the world is falling apart around her.
My clever, beautiful Bulma. I realize my error too late as I watch her drop to the ground and I feel an indescribable heat blast through my chest.
A/N: Hey guys! Although this story is discontinued, after going through some old files I decided to clean up and upload what I had finished writing of chapter four. I had originally intended it to be longer, but figured there was enough material here to put out, for anyone curious.