Nappa sat in the old saiyan barracks. The dust filled room was where always went after one of Frieza's meetings with a member of Prince Vegeta's Squadron, and he was always the only one to come here.

Kakarot would always go off to fight some poor bastard at the bar, Raditz would be doing that damned reading, and Broly … The things he'd seen Broly do, sometimes he wondered if that boy was even a saiyan.

He always thought it was strange how the emperor had never repurposed the saiyan area of his ship after planet Vegeta had gotten wiped out by that meteor over a decade ago. Now there were only six saiyans left, five if Paragus had truly disappeared. Against his better judgment, Nappa always chose to believe it was a pity that their emperor took on them, leaving them a sort of grave for their fallen comrades. It didn't match Frieza's character, but maybe he had a soft spot for his most fearsome warriors.

However, there had always been talk about just how exactly planet Vegeta got wiped out, talk that always made him doubt his emperor's intention. His people had leveled empires, wiped out monarchies, destroyed planets overnight, and yet they got wiped out by some floating rock? How big was the rock? If enough saiyans turned Oozaru and started blasting at it, wouldn't the rock just blow up? There'd be a lot of people who died from the debris, but the entire planet getting blown up just always seemed surreal to him.

It was where he had grown up, where the royal family had adopted him, where he'd made every friend he'd ever had. It was the only place he had ever and would ever call home, and now it was just some pebbles floating in the void.

He'd talk about it to the rest of his squadron, but what would they know? Kakarot and Broly couldn't even walk by the time the planet had been destroyed. Raditz and Vegeta could remember it to an extent, but a five year old's memory of a planet and forty year old's were a lot different, and that's before they even got into the class difference. At least they liked his stories though, classics like The Legend of Culti, The Conquests of Queen Pitch and The Ballad of Vegeta the Vengeful. His prince always hated that last one, but it was the most popular drinking song he and his buddies sang after every mission, how could he not pass it down?

He ran his hands slowly across the sheets on his cot and looked at the hundreds of empty ones around him. It felt like just yesterday that he was laughing in the very spot he sat silently in now, gloating about his conquest with the rest of King Vegeta's Elite Guard. If he let it get quiet enough, he could even hear them talking back to him.

Kollard would always talk about how many restaurants he could eat at before the invasion was through. Speargus would try to tell him that he had wiped out twice as many people as Nappa had, but he was always full of it, lied so bad he'd let you think he was king of the saiyans if you let him. Cumber was so excited about telling his stories he barely even bothered to think them out before he opened his mouth, one second he'd be talking about the mission and the next he'd be on some tangent about his kid's newest lab project. And gods, how could he forget about Bellep, that dingbat was so bored with all the talk he'd always just segue the conversation to the latest arena matches.

And then Prince Vegeta would …

It'd been too long, he must've been sitting in there for at least an hour, and he'd had his fill of the past and how it spoke to him.

He stood and carefully walked back in the same footsteps he'd left when he came in, making sure not to step onto any of the undisturbed and dusty ground. The barracks had to be preserved.

Nappa made his way to the new saiyan barracks on the opposite end of the ship. Nestled in between the janitor's closet and the bathrooms, down a hallway so narrow that Nappa had a quicker time going sideways through it then walking in a straight line, it was where he and the rest of his squadron would live the rest of their days. He remembered when it used to be the janitor's bedroom, but apparently he needed to be relocated to a cushier location and the saiyans needed to be happy with what they could get.

Before he could begin shimmying into the hallway of the barrack, he saw five figures coming out of the room. The five he knew always signaled that somehow, some way, Frieza was angered with them.

He could feel the hairs on his neck rise as he looked at the five of them. Their group had left the corpses of legends in their trail, served as the emperor's favorite mercenaries, and held power levels so high that they made him feel as powerful as an ant in a child's palm.

If Nappa wasn't in awe already of their power and legacy, he now had another thing to add to their list, their flexibility. The group finished shuffling out of the narrow hallway, and even though the five of them now stood nearly chest to chest with each other and Nappa, the group all struck their poses. Thighs were on the walls, butts to the air, heads balanced on the floor, a crotch was planted on a scalp, and necks bent at ninety degree angles on the ceiling as the group shouted in unison, "Ginyu Force, Go!"

Nappa had grown used to seeing the four of them rattle off their names, but was taken aback that they would bother doing the whole routine in a space so narrow that they could only move a few centimeters instead of their usual stomping, jumping, and dancing about. The only one he wasn't used to was their captain, Ginyu. The last time he had seen him, he was a seven-foot tall wooly monster with fur as black as coal and tusks sharpened for goring. Now the captain seemed to have switched bodies with some orange anaconda-like humanoid, his head and neck now accounting for half of his body.

"So, Nappa," Ginyu said as the group finished their performance, "did you enjoy your little visit with the Prince? We went to give him a visit before we came here and were hoping to run into you, but you must've been off moping somewhere else."

Nappa scowled at them, but knew it was better to hold his tongue. What would he do? Start a fight with them and then end up a corpse outside of his own barrack, thrown out by the janitor on his next rotation, and only be remembered by his squadron?

There was saiyan pride, and then there was absolute suicide. Real pride would come from biding his time, until the moment where he could overpower them, where he could shut their damn mouths once and for all, but that would require a lot of steps. They'd need to all have their scouters broken so that they weren't streaming any audio or video and, well, he'd have to be able to beat them. RIght now his power level barely even held a candle to their weakest member, Guldo.

Gods, is this what Raditz felt like?

"I checked on him after the meeting and put him in the rejuvenation chamber, he debriefed me on our next assignment already so I'm all caught up," Nappa said.

Guldo let out a snicker. "So you haven't checked on the chamber since then, right?"

Something was wrong, had they done something to the prince? He knew that saiyans weren't popular, but to injure him while he was down, possibly even assassinate him?! This was unspeakable, it was a an act of war, it was -

"Move it baldie," Ginyu said as he bumped into Nappa. With how narrow the hallway was, they couldn't move past each other, so Ginyu and his group backed Nappa away with each step.

Each step back, Nappa thought to himself, "This is the only way it can be." Even if he powered up, even if he unleashed his oozaru, the five of them could kill him in an instant. The soldiers onboard could group upon them and kill him. He was nothing but a tool to the empire and one that could be discarded without a second thought at that.

The fact that death was possible around any corner used to be what gave him his strength, what made his brash and reckless fighting style so much fun for him, filling his enemies with that fear. It wasn't so fun on the other end.

Once the Ginyu Force had finished pushing him out of their way, they went their own way, their own guffaws and cackles ringing throughout the ship.

Nappa sprinted back to Vegeta's rejuvenation chamber. He shouldn't have left him so vulnerable, he should've made sure to have one of them keep watch over the prince. He should've kept watch over the prince. It was his one job, the one thing King Vegeta had asked of him, and he had failed him.

He barreled down the halls, shoving low ranking soldiers out of his way until he got to the medical area. The room was filled with hundreds of rejuvenation chambers, but he was able to find Vegeta's instantly. He had remembered where it was, and now it was glowing red.

Crude red marker drawings had been made all over the glass of his chamber, as well as mocking names for Vegeta written on the glass in large letters; Little Prince, Galaxy's Favorite Monkey, Strongest Baby.

Vegeta wasn't conscious anymore, he'd fallen into a deep sleep to recover from the nearly broken spine Frieza had given him. Nappa would at least get the mercy of knowing his prince didn't have to watch what the Ginyus did to him.

Nappa grabbed a nearby rag off of a medical table, and began wiping his prince's glass clean.

They would go to Planet Throhbaq, and Nappa would make sure they would level it faster than ever before. They would kill every single being on the planet and make it look like no one had ever even lived there. But they wouldn't do it for Frieza or the empire, they would do it for the Saiyan race.

They would do it to as many planets as they needed for as long as they needed until Prince Vegeta had killed enough enemies and achieved his true destiny as a super saiyan. It may have only been a legend, but all legends had an origin, and all stories could be retold. Even though Nappa knew he would never be the main character of the legend, he knew he would be the one to pass it down, spreading it to their conquered people and from a podium built on the corpses of the Cold Empire.