When Goku woke up again, this time from what he was sure was the nap that had started in midair following his departure from the cave in which the rat had been killed when he'd grown too tired to be wary of the man who had carried him, he found himself on a bed. He briefly wondered what had awoken him until he smelled the cooked meat and fried...apples? He tried to get up to investigate, but found he couldn't since he still hurt everywhere. It didn't matter though, because the food smell started getting closer.
Soon, he heard the door to the room he was in open and he looked up to see his father enter carrying a tray that was heaped with food. As the scent of the meal that his father was carrying into the room his his nose, his mouth began to water uncontrollably.
Up until that moment, it was as if he didn't realize how hungry he was. When he did, he noticed that he was absolutely starving. As hungry as he'd been following the Tenkaichi Budokai, possibly even moreso if that was even possible. As soon as his father set the tray near him, he started to reach out to devour the food only to discover that it was too painful to do so. Neither of his arms would work properly, and his side hurt badly. Without thinking about it, he started whining like the fox that would sometimes come up to him in search of food before he left his Grandfather's house with Bulma in search of the Dragon Balls two years before. He was hungry, starving in fact, but he couldn't eat!
"Stop that!" his father snapped. "Have you no pride at all?! I thought you might have some since you had gotten yourself taken on as a student, rather than as a pet, but here you are begging like a weak animal!"
"But, I'm starving, and I can't eat!" he said, wondering why his father was going on about pride, and why the man who didn't seem any nicer despite the fact that he hadn't tried to hurt him more and was trying to take care of him thought he was someone's pet.
"Whose fault is that?!" his father snapped.
"Yours!" he said, growling in irritation over the situation that absolutely had not turned out the way he'd thought it would, and the mean man whose tender mercies he was at the mercy of.
His father looked like he was going to argue for a moment, sighed, picked up some of the food, and fed it to him like Grandpa Gohan did when he was little.
His eyes widened in surprise at the first bite. Bulma had let him cook once when they were looking for Dragon Balls, and had yelled at him for putting sugar and that cinnamon stuff in the meat like his father had just done. He didn't understand why, since it was tasty. The salted and spiced fried apples were delicious as well. In fact, the entire meal was the best he'd remembered having in a very long time. The food that he procured in the wild was prepared without the benefit of a kitchen, and the food others fed him, while filling, often tasted a tiny bit off.
All too soon, the food that his father fed him with something of a scowl on his face was gone and he was sleepy again.
Bardock watched his son sleep once more. The child had slept twice the day before, and had slept the entire night after he had set up the house and setting the boy up in one of the sleeping rooms. Something of a good sign, since sleep was needed for recovery. A quick recovery would be a good thing for all concerned, since the brat would be completely dependent on him until he was recovered enough to provide for himself like a proper Saiyan.
Since the broken arm and broken wrist prevented the brat from feeding himself, he would be stuck dealing with that task as well as everything associated with it. He'd gotten up early that morning, and hadn't really felt like hunting, so he had decided to closely examine the food stores and carefully sample everything to make sure that none of it was poisonous. It was fiendishly difficult - and damn near impossible when it came to ingestion - to poison a Saiyan, but sometimes you never could tell. And, with his son in the weakened state that he was in...
Fortunately for him and his son, his mother had taught him how to cook things beyond the standard "Mission Roast" and shown him how to improvise in the kitchen. Otherwise, his stay on this miserable planet could've turned out ten times worse than it already was. The culinary arts technically weren't a proper tool in a male Saiyan's arsenal, but when food is such an important necessity and good food something of a rarity...
After a thorough examination, two of the spices in the cabinet stood out to him, as when they were mixed they tasted pretty damn close to the succulent leaves that were wrapped around balls of meat in a dish that had been one of his favorite breakfast foods back home. The leaves had been something of an expensive import, but most of his species considered them to be worth the cost when paired with the meat of a certain class of six-legged fowl which had been liberated from Truffle Labs and domesticated generations before.
After grabbing a package of ground meat from the freezer, he had quick thawed it with a ki flash and mixed it with the spices he'd found in the cupboard before shaping it into balls. While the meat was cooking, he grabbed all of the sweet, red, fist-sized fruits with white interiors that he'd sampled earlier and began slicing them into rings to make a small side dish. After he fried the slices, he salted them and added some of the more fiery spices to counter their sweet flavor.
Once the small meal was finished cooking, he quickly ate his share and put his son's portion on a tray. When he set the food down beside the child, it quickly became obvious that the boy wasn't able to feed himself, didn't have the pride to cover his weakness with shouting and screaming like a proper Saiyan, and he was forced to feed him.
Kakarot fell asleep almost the instant he was done eating. After watching his son sleep for a few moments, he picked up the now empty tray, and...
A white pod crashed into a field. Someone with his mate's hair, a very tall someone with his mate's hair opened the door, climbed out and swiftly moved away. Almost the instant the person was clear of the pod, it exploded.
The stranger who turned out to be male moved towards him.
"I got your message Father." said the muscular young man who towered over him like his father-in-law used to back before the old third-class bastard had bitten off more than he could chew and not come home.
Strange. He could have sworn that he'd had a vision of his sons fighting and Raditz dying before he himself died when Vegeta was destroyed by Frieza. As for his message...
After the Colds had forbidden using the Scouter Net for personal communication, the Saiyans, like just about every other race who had worked for or become subjects of the Cold Empire, had found a way around this by masking such communications as misdirected supply or information requests, or maintenance orders amongst other things. A general announcement about a pod design flaw he'd once noticed with a carefully hidden message that contained a set of coordinates should get his son's attention and make it less suspicious when his pod blows up on arrival.
Kakarot's pod should be on this planet somewhere, and if the communications equipment was still in working order...
Edited 6-11-15