A/N - Just a quick note. This chapter was really difficult for me to write, for quite a few reasons. I wasn't going to talk about it, 'cause I didn't want to rake in the attention, but this chapter is influenced heavily on the very recent loss of my Granddad, who fought a great 3 year battle against cancer. I spent a lot of time at his bed side, watching him deteriorate until he could no longer speak or communicate at all. So this chapter turned out a bit differently than I had originally planned. I really wanted to focus on the effect of someone being as weak as Vegeta is in his current state, and how dreams are the most vivid and controlling visions someone in that state has left to hold onto. I hope this makes sense, ha. Anyway, it's quite a bit shorter than usual, but it's enough for what I wanted to get across. If it was any longer, I don't think it would've had the same effect.

As always, thank you for sticking around to get this far! Not long to go now ;)

Big thanks once again to Adli for sorting this mess out :D

Contending with Darkness

Chapter 19

The expanse of skin on the back of her hand, she noticed after smearing snot all over it, was thinner, sticking to the bones like cellophane, almost sharing similar transparency. The veins were a faded green and blue, probably due to the lack of nutrients she was encumbering into her system. Food was lacking, water was now being rationed to two buckets a day per person, including Vegeta who was certainly not in the right frame of mind to obligingly clean himself without trying to break her neck. It had been two weeks since he'd broken her elbow, leaving her to trundle around the ship donning a tethered sling on her arm. It was difficult keeping tabs on the passing days, but she managed to tick off the hours, the minutes and the seconds, because there was little else to do in the meantime.

Life was starting to feel meaningless.

It had taken a turn, like sour milk in summer heat. There didn't seem to be any other way to retrieve what sustainability there once was. Motives were running low, projects were abolished due to the total indifference they created for her situation. The only thing she had taken to was keeping a diary of the day to day life on the ship; a life of not knowing where she was heading, or when. But wasn't that just life anyway? Did she ever know where she was going? It seemed too suspicious at one time, when Bulma suspected she was being punished for some reason or another, why bad things always dropped into her lap, embellished in glossy wrapping paper for her to tear to pieces. Karma. That was what it was. Back on Earth she would have brushed it off with finely manicured fingers. But now her nails were chipped and cracked, and Karma was sitting heavy on her sore shoulders.

She sniffed as she wiped the snot from her hand onto the bandage holding her broken elbow. Once again, she had tried to make some effort in speaking to Vegeta—at a distance. All the effort was wasted because he was either asleep or lashing verbal abuse at her. Lately he had taken to spitting globs of green phlegm at her, because evidently, his shrinking energy was getting the better of him. No matter what he had said to her over the past few days, she had deflected it with her titanium composure, caging the raw emotions she had stored into her chest. Never had he reduced her to tears like this. This time was different.

As she paced down the winding corridors, an indulging breeze quavering against her flustered skin, Vegeta's latest blast of tyranny rang loudly with every foot step that took her further away from him. The words were branded to her tender brain muscle, burning and sinking deeper into her mind.

'No matter how weak you plan on making me, I'll still be capable of killing you.'

Bulma stopped outside Goku's room, clutching her hand over her mouth. That wasn't what she wanted—to make him weak. That wasn't the plan. No, no, no. Everything was spiralling downwards and she couldn't stop it. Was this it? All that she had worked for? How she had survived, watched her best friend die, shared her body with someone she thought she … The word left a lump in her throat, coercing her to cry and cry until her throat became raw and her chest ached. No, she'd done all that. These tears were a mistake. But the grief was still heavy. Too heavy for her to carry alone in the middle of space without knowing what the hell was going on. The ship was going to be her tomb.

Goku was in the middle of his room, performing another impressive bout of sit ups, each one methodical and perfect in timing. Each rep of three hundred lasted no more than five minutes. She knew this because on a few occasions she had taken to watching Goku train, found the whole thing soothing. He didn't mind, either. When her mind was about to implode with distressing thoughts, she always wound up in Goku's room, sliding down the wall on to the floor, and just watching him. For hours, sometimes.

His room was the least decorative of them all, but he chose it himself. Bulma guessed it belonged to someone of an extremely low ranking, perhaps a servant. Not a slave, though. There were worse places on this ship for slaves. There was a single bed in the centre, a rickety wardrobe in the far corner and a tiny porthole where the never changing view of stars whizzing past filled the room with a lazy wash of light.

His breathing was quick, sharp, and mesmerising. There were so many technicalities to his training. She saw that now. When it came to science, Bulma knew a lot, and perhaps she'd looked at Goku and labelled him an airhead once upon a time. Now she knew otherwise.

While watching, a singular tear dribbled down her cheek, and she was quick to catch it with her sleeve, grazing her delicate skin with the harsh material of the Saiyan training uniform. Goku's breathing stopped, and Bulma looked up questioningly, before catching his eye.

He was mid sit up, swivelled in her direction, his taut muscles twisting with little effort, to allow him to look at her.

"You alright, Bulma?"

He asked her this every time, and every time she answered 'yes', but this time she set her pride aside, looked straight at Goku and shrugged. The ghostly action beckoned the pain in her chest to surface, pressuring her to reel off what's been running through her mind, because the look in Goku's eyes signalled that he was allowing her to do that. This wasn't about her, though, was it? It was about someone else.

"He's not going to change, is he? He was right. There's nothing I can do about it, and eventually he is going to kill me. And you nor I will stop him because both of us share the same morals. We won't kill him. It's either him or us now, Goku. If it's today, or tomorrow, or whatever, it doesn't matter, but we're going to have to make that decision before it's too late," she said, gasping afterwards.

For a while, Goku stared at her, his brown eyes narrowing as his brows knitting together. She could tell he was trying to figure out the right way to respond, digging into his words of wisdom for something that might sedate her for a while, keep her satisfied for another day. Give her some false hope until tomorrow, when she would wake up and sink slowly into more depression, piling and piling the questions and the denial and the grief and the guilt, until her mind would no longer be able to carry it all. And snap. She'd lose it.

In the end, Goku said nothing, turning back around and continuing his exercise.

The rough texture of his dry tongue pressing into the roof of his mouth was becoming agonising. No matter how many times he smacked his lips together with the false hope of dampening his palate, it would be absorbed by his desiccated tongue. His hands were numb, locked with iron bracelets, pinning him to a chair. In fact, he couldn't feel anything. Concentrating on his shallow breathing was the only way he could clarify his ever dissipating mortality. How had this become of him? A Prince of an entire civilisation—a planet!

A chime of cutlery brought his dazed mind to a standstill, and he listened. Where was he? Some sort of dining hall? A ballroom? The light was too blinding to look up.

"Do you … remember … when I first took you in?" Frieza said, occupied with chewing his food.

Vegeta lifted his head, cracking his neck in the process, and peered out of one eye at his captor, who was licking a rivulet of blood clean from his chin. Vegeta's eyes dropped to the glistening chunk of steak left on the plate before Frieza, his mouth somehow working up a pool of saliva. The more formal approach to dining was evidently not on Frieza's agenda anymore, as he picked the steak up with his claws and squeezed it, releasing a downpour of juices against his wrists.

"I nurtured you, treated you as my own. And you, you were surprisingly submissive. I said kill—and you killed. What was it, I wonder, that made it so easy for you?" He grinned, ripping through the meat as he talked. "That monkey heritage of yours could be accountable, but I think you're forgetting who I am to you, how long I've watched you grow—change into what you are now."

Frieza dropped the meat back into the dish, splashing blood onto Vegeta's chest and face. The fresh smell of raw meat was unbearable. If he just poked his tongue out onto his chin, the flavours would wrap themselves around his taste buds, setting them alight with satisfaction. Just a morsel. But his concentration was broken with Frieza's leaden words, clattering down on him. Vegeta winced, shook his head while setting his jaw tight.

"No, no. It must be deeper than that," Frieza continued, "because you chose to act that way. Otherwise … that woman would be dead by now, by your hands." He sighed. "Yet, she still lives, left to run rampant across my planet, tearing my plans to shreds."

Who was he talking about? Why, every time he mentioned this person, did an absurd ache dwell deep in the bottom of his stomach? And why did his energy relight? He could feel it, dancing on the tips of his fingers, yearning to be released and directed at his torturer. The skin on his arms prickled and he watched intensely as the hairs stood tall, wavering like reeds before an imminent storm. He wrapped his fingers around the arms of the chair and bolted up and down, shaking side to side, any direction that would grant him freedom, enough freedom to get his hands on Frieza.

He heard it before he felt it. The solid crack of something against a yielding surface. Then the warm blood trickled from his nose and the corner of his mouth, meeting the intensifying pain. He thought he was numb all over, yet every time he was proven wrong.

Frieza grimaced, shaking the blood from his tail. "That was not part of the plan, you monkey brat. I tell you and you do. Hear me?"

Vegeta quivered as the electric pain zapped his temples, and he slumped forward in the chair, hanging his head. This was no life. This was not what his mother promised. He was to be great, feared but respected all at once. Not spat upon, treated like a test subject to please whoever. Frieza wasn't anyone, though. Frieza was an overlord who ruled the galaxy. Frieza was the strongest being in the universe, able to crush anyone who tread in his path. Perhaps the destiny he once assumed was his was unfitting. Perhaps this was the beaten path he was to take before he ultimately died. Perhaps … Frieza was right.

"Now tell me, once I release you, what are you going to do to that Earthling?"

Vegeta squeezed his eyes shut, trying to dispel the grip of every single syllable that climbed out of Frieza's mouth. He gulped a large glob of coppery blood and bile, almost gagging as it slowly slipped down his throat.

Frieza slammed his fists on the table, shaking all the cutlery. "What are you going to do to BULMA BRIEFS?"

At first he wanted to hunch forward until his bones cracked, but the magnetising thirst for blood drew him back to the surface, lifting his head and forcing him to lock eyes with his maker.

"I'm going to make her scream as each bone in her body snaps and every drop of oxygen leaves her lungs." He exhaled heavily. "But I will crush her bones to dust before I give her the satisfaction of dying …"

The heaviness in his eyelids subsided, allowing him to slowly open his eyes again, his blurry vision greeted by the flickering white pattern of passing starlight. Still imprisoned. Still shackled by his wrists, his ankles. Ah, but now he was connected to some sort of life monitoring device. The supressing weakness he had felt before sleeping was narrowing, and he could feel the Saiyan strength building once more, albeit only slightly. Nowhere near what he had been able to achieve before any of this shit had happened.

Someone yawning made him flinch.

In his subconscious or his conscious, it didn't matter. He was never alone.

Goku stretched his sore muscles out and yawned, trying to kick back on the worst chair he'd ever sat on in his life. It was so uncomfortable. Training on this ship was doing his body no good. He needed to be outside with free reign of his own energy. In here, he was holding back too much, too scared of breaking something. Plus, there was nowhere to go, really. Everywhere was out of bounds, because Bulma was worried about how dated the ship's technology was, so touching anything unusual was forbidden. Not that he would've done that anyway, but—

He glanced to the side. Vegeta was staring at him. "Oh. You're awake. Guess I was too restless," he said, sinking back onto the chair.

How long, exactly, had Vegeta been staring at him?

Vegeta narrowed his eyes. "Has the lapdog come to bite on his mistress's behalf?" His voice was barely a whisper, trapped in his throat by exhaustion.

He couldn't even keep his eyes open.

Goku shook his head. "No. I've come to talk."

"I've nothing to say to the likes of you."

"The likes of me?"

He frowned, swivelling to face Vegeta, a fellow Saiyan. It could be true that they were the only beings of the Saiyan race left alive. It was something Goku continually marvelled upon. So keeping Vegeta alive was something not only beneficial for Bulma, but for him also. There was so much to learn.

"Third class scum," Vegeta muttered.

Goku sniffed. "Oh … I've never been called that before," he said, pinching his chin while looking to the ceiling.

Vegeta's eyes narrowed further, making Goku feel anxious to spill what he had truly needed to say. The real reason he was here in the first place.

"Bulma told me everything." He paused, waiting for a response, but Vegeta merely blinked. "About Raditz being my brother—"

A flash of alarm spread across Vegeta's sunken features. "You. That's why I recognise your face. Bardock's child."

So many names were being thrown at him he didn't know which ones to hold onto, so he sighed, cupped his chin and leaned forward. The information washed over him like cold water, drifting off with any conversation between the two Saiyans. He was suddenly marooned by silence.

The ticking of the life support machine was irritating, so Goku sat up again. Bulma was right about Vegeta—he wasn't a talker. He guessed he would have to play this one out his own way.

"You're the Prince of Saiyans, huh? I'd love to have seen the planet I was born on, met my birth mother and father … What was his name again?"

Vegeta lashed forward, straining against his shackles. Goku flinched backwards, but was confident about having to supress the other Saiyan once again. After all, he had been training non-stop for two weeks now. It was only natural for him to surpass Vegeta's strength entirely.

"Your father was a coward and a traitor to Frieza! That weakling deserved the shameful death he received. They all did!"

Goku put his hands up, sinking further into the chair, captured by the sight of bursting capillaries in Vegeta's eyes.

"You may be of Saiyan blood, but you'll never be a true Saiyan. You'll perish just as they did, at the hands of Frieza. That's if I don't do it first, you third class piece of shit," he spat, slowly reeling back onto the bed.

Goku shuffled uncomfortably on his bum, trying to replay Vegeta's rant in his mind before settling with the best answer. "You're right."

Vegeta's eyes widened. "What?"

Goku shrugged. "I may be of Saiyan blood, but I've lived on Earth for so long, I'm practically human," he said, laughing and throwing his arm behind his head. "By nature, I'm human. And if Saiyans are anything like you," he continued, his composure morphing into something firmer, "then I'm glad to call myself an Earthling."

Vegeta stared for a few moments, before turning away towards the wall.

Resisting the urge to plea with the other Saiyan, Goku rested back, stretching his long legs out against the swish carpet. Was it worth giving in yet? That wasn't what he intended to do, but Bulma might have been right about this one. Well, she usually was about everything else. Something wouldn't let him give in, though. He wasn't a quitter. Never had been. For another Saiyan to be alive and in the same room … that was something else. No, he couldn't leave Vegeta like this. Bulma needed him. They both needed him.

"Is this amusing to you?" Vegeta's rough voice questioned. "Seeing me chained up like some kind of animal?"

The muscles in Vegeta's back were slim, exposing his shoulder blades, like two panels of metal poking from underneath a film of rubber.

"Did she send you in here? Did she? Too frightened to see the truth?"

Goku's brows furrowed. If Vegeta didn't care about Bulma, why would he openly expose concern like this? A spark of hope lit up inside Goku's mind. "Bulma doesn't know. She's sleeping."

"You can't keep me here forever. And when I escape, you'll have to watch her … every second."

"I'm sorry," Goku said.

Vegeta eventually turned onto his back, frowning at the ceiling, his eyes focused on nothing.

It was cruel seeing him like this. Goku wished he could have seen Vegeta at full strength, watched in awe at his power as he defeated his enemies. Now he was sitting beside him, looking on at the shell of who he used to be. Goku may not have seen Vegeta before all of this, but Bulma had expressed so much detail in her story that he felt like he knew the Saiyan. Felt like he had fought alongside him, instead of waking up without a trace of memory in his brain. In effect, they were both victims of Frieza, though Goku couldn't quite justify to what extent he himself had been victimised. One thing he could take back with him was the slim knowledge of his own heritage.

"You shouldn't be here," Goku said. "You're a warrior. The need to fight is in your blood. Frieza has taken advantage of that. Bulma hasn't chained you down, Frieza has. You need to fight, Vegeta. If you're as strong as Bulma believes, you can overcome this."

He wanted to lean over and shake some sense into Vegeta, but feared touching him at all could damage him. Goku's chest tightened when he saw Vegeta squeezing his eyes shut, only allowing a single tear to slip through his crumbling bravado.

"There is nothing to overcome," he whispered.

Goku balled his fists. "No. This is who Frieza has controlled—"

Vegeta glared at Goku. "Who the fuck are you? You know nothing!" Spittle flew out of his mouth, landing just under Goku's eye. "You think you can act chummy with me? As if it's going to make a scrap of difference? Just get out."

It must have taken a lot of energy to shout like that, because Vegeta collapsed onto his elbows, shuddering until his face planted the mattress.

Goku was taken aback, struck by words that could easily be deflected on so many accounts. No, Vegeta was right, but he was also wrong. Very wrong.

He tapped his chin, watching the rise and fall of Vegeta's rib cage. "I don't know anything …" he mumbled, before blinking and scrutinising his open palms resting in his lap. "My wife is dead. My son … I've lost everything, everything except Bulma. I've accepted enough information to know that Frieza has to be stopped."

Vegeta lifted his head, a string of drool clinging to the mattress.

"And if you're not going to help, I'll do it alone," Goku finished, getting up.

Vegeta frowned, before laughing. "And how do you plan on doing that, clown?"

"You're a Saiyan, too. You should already know."

Vegeta snapped his mouth shut, glaring at Goku. "Impossible," he whispered.

Goku shook his head, smiling a gentle smile. "Nothing is impossible. Giving up isn't an option anymore."