Title: Legend

Author: ShrewdOne

Rating: This fic is rated MA for language and graphic violence/sex

Warning: Parts of the fic may be considered violent or cruel. This is a lemon. It is very explicit so be ready for that. I have tried to be as true as possible to the Dragon Ball Z storyline. Some things had to change to fit the story and some things are just wrong because of my ignorance. There are several original characters included. I have never watched anything with Bardock, Gine or Turles in it which means they will definitely be OOC, but I guess everyone is at least a little OOC in this story. No Vegeta/Bulma pairing. This is a love story about Vegeta meeting his Saiyajin mate. English is not my first language. Apologies beforehand for my repetitive sentence structure and my grammatical/spelling errors...

Disclaimer: I do not own Dragon Ball Z or any of the characters used in this fic.

AN 2021: Legend was originally posted in 2009 under the title Odalisque. If there are any old followers still out there, I am making a lot of changes. I will be putting the chapters back up in the coming weeks. Hope you enjoy!

AN 2024: After rereading, I am making huge changes again. I want Trunks to have a bigger part in the story. I also feel like further exploring the Saiyajin culture and how it clashes with Earth's and the dynamics in Vegeta's relationships. I like him to get his 'Saiyajin' on more.

.

.

Chapter 1. My future catching up with me

Goten and I were hovering above a large crater in an uninhabited area North of West City. My best friend had agreed to join me to the battleground where Mecha Frieza and King Cold met their downfall some fourteen years earlier at the hand of my future self. This must be it. There had been a massive explosion here. The earth below looked maimed and the few trees that remained standing gave the only colour to the barren plain. My dad had been right that I would have no trouble locating this place. Like he had told me from behind a mouthful of the birthday cake I brought him, I had carved my signature in Earth's face. I didn't know if it had been the cake or it being my twelfth birthday that had made my dad willing to intermit his exercise and tell me the story again, but while everybody had been back in the house celebrating yesterday, I had spent over an hour inside the tank listening to him detail my future-history for me. My dad did not attend the parties my mom liked throwing. He never celebrated his own birthday, or nameday as he called it, and I had no clue when that even was. He only liked being the centre of attention – and have the Z warriors, that had come out for my birthday party, in his immediate vicinity – during battle. And it had been battle of which he spoke with me on my birthday. The many presents I had received, got me side-tracked from this visit only for the time it took to finish unwrapping the last of them this morning.

"You really did that?" Goten asked, looking at the ruins beneath.

"Future me." I clarified.

Goten scratched the back of his head. "I still don't get that. It was you, but it wasn't you?"

I swallowed the impatient sigh I wanted to let out. I really didn't think it was all that hard to understand and we had been over this already. "It was me from the future. I travelled time to save your dad from a deadly virus and help the Z warriors defeat the androids."

Goten just looked at me, obviously working hard to make sense of it. "So, it was you?"

"Seventeen-year-old me." I shook my head at his puzzled expression and added: "Never mind."

If Goten still wasn't grasping it, I figured that he wasn't going to so I gave up trying to explain it to him. I got that a lot, both in school and at home. There just didn't seem to be many people operating on my level. For me it wasn't hard to wrap my mind around concepts like time-travel, but it was beyond my best friend and any of my classmates or even teachers. I was branded a nerd for being intelligent, or as my dad liked putting it, a brainy gnat, and I guessed that made my mom and my granddad the same because they were the only ones who never got thrown carrying a conversation with me. My best friend always made an effort though and right now Goten looked to be breaking his brain trying to follow me. I liked him for that so I turned to a topic that he had no trouble understanding.

"Future me was even stronger than my dad was back then."

"Really?" Goten frowned, still struggling. "The old you. You're not stronger than your dad."

"Exactly. Anyway, I did that." I pointed down. "When I came here from the future, this Frieza guy showed up. You know, the alien your dad defeated on Old Namek? He came here with his dad, King Cold. They wanted to kill our dads, but I killed them instead."

"That is sick." Goten said. "Want to take a closer look? This crater is huge."

"Yeah. Their spaceship was in that spot. I used my God Breaker on it." I told him. I was bragging and I knew it. My brains may have come from my mom, I had some of my dad's traits in me as well and no qualms showing those off. Well, not in my best friend's presence anyway. With my mom…

We descended and landed inside the crater together. As we stood scanning our surroundings, something glittering in the sunlight at the base of a big, half-uprooted and charred but valiantly blooming beech tree to my left caught my eye. "What is that?"

Goten followed me as I trotted over to the glittering object. Just as we reached it, the ground under our feet started trembling and the tree slanted further, its base sinking slowly into the earth. We took to the air quickly when, with a rumbling crash, part of the crater collapsed in on itself. Squinting through plumes of dust, I saw that the tree was gone. It had toppled straight into the deep hole that had been left behind by the cave-in.

"There is something down there." Goten said.

"Let's check it out." without waiting for a reply, I levitated down and channelled my energy to scoop some of the rocky debris and the dislodged tree out so that I could enter the space below. It was dark inside, but I could sense that there was some room around me when my feet touched the smooth surface of a floor. Goten joined me and we drew close, back to back, while we waited to let our eyes grow accustomed to the gloom. Up above, at the lip of the cave, the ground gave a shudder and we both thrust our hands out at the same time to send an energy blast up when more loose earth came crashing in. We intercepted the debris midway, pushed it back out before it could come avalanching over us and remained standing at the ready for the ground to give way more. It didn't and after a moment we dropped our hands to our sides. As the dust settled, my eyes confirmed what I had already expected. We were standing inside part of the wrecked spaceship that had brought our dads' enemies to Earth.

"Wicked. This thing is still intact." I said, staring down a rounded corridor that quickly took the lip of the cave from our view as we followed it.

"This is so cool." Goten said. "We could make a hangout here."

I took in the slanted walls on either side of us. The corridor looked to be groaning under the weight of the world above it had carried for the past fourteen years. "We should reinforce the walls first. This place is ready to crumble. We better keep our voices down."

Goten wasn't even listening to me. His attention was drawn by a soft, steady bleeping noise coming from a place ahead and he dashed past me quickly to find out what it was. I watched him disappear up the corridor hissing that he should be careful, but got distracted by what I thought had to be the ship's emergency lights. Two blue lines ran along the edges of the corridor's ceiling and a third was set in the middle of the floor beneath my feet. I crouched for a better look. It were tubes, I saw, and through it flowed a substance that shone with enough intensity to illuminate the corridor. It was liquid light. Amazed, I got back up and went after Goten. My mom hadn't exaggerated when she told me that the space organisation my father had been part of before he settled on Earth, was lightyears ahead of us in their technological advancement.

"Wow, Trunks, come look at this." I heard Goten call from up ahead.

The tubes of liquid light led me into a large room that was bathed in harsh, white glow glaring down from several round spots overhead. This was actual light. There must be a generator still operating somewhere giving it juice. I glanced around curiously. This room looked like a dystopic locker room in any zombie apocalypse movie where the world's populus had been decimated and nature had taken back the land. Gnarly, brown vines came poking through the walls while they continued their stubborn growth and fat tendrils snarled around a row of lockers that stood slanted along the wall at my right.

Goten was bent over a strange rectangular object I assessed to be about eighty inches in length, thirty in breadth and the same again in height. It was part of a much bigger structure that took up most of the mid-section of this room. A ceiling high, thick column of soundlessly rotating silver disks was at the centre and Goten stared at their inverted movement open-mouthed. Some disks were large and moving slowly clockwise, others were wafer thin and turning in the opposite direction. For once, I was as clueless as my best friend was. I had no idea of its purpose. Leafing out from the rotating column, were several more rectangular shapes like the one Goten was stooping over. I counted five in total. The rectangles were glossy white and had a see-through lid above which sat an advanced looking interface full of illuminated buttons. Whatever this thing was, it was still operating. The steady bleep, bleep coming from the contraption, made me think of a heart monitor and I guessed that I wasn't that far off when I joined Goten and found what was inside the rectangle. Through the dirt covered and cloudy surface of the lid, I could distinguish the vague outline of a body. There was someone lying inside. It was a coffin. I moved closer, wiped away some of the dirt and found the scarred, still face of a woman behind the glass. Her eyes were closed.

"I she alive, you think?" Goten asked as he leaned closer to have a better look at the woman's face.

A shrill bleep cut the silence and to my horror, the transparent top slid aside with a loud swoosh, oddly pleasant smelling steam billowing up out of the interior as it did.

"Did you touch something?" I demanded exasperatedly and, finding Goten's hand planted on the interface, I hissed: "Goten, you idiot."

Goten watched his own hand lying on the panel and pulled it away with a guilty look. He grinned sheepishly, uttering a silly: "Oops?"

I dismissed him with an impatient look, then turned back to the woman lying inside her futuristic coffin. I held my breath and waited tensely to see if she would stir, but she remained completely motionless and her eyes stayed closed.

"Oh my Dende, she is naked." Goten squeaked, seemingly unable to decide whether he wanted to divert his eyes or have a closer look.

I wasn't having that problem and let my gaze up and down the woman's naked form. She had committed herself to her slumber – or was she dead? – and this strange coffin with her hands covering her girly bits. One arm lay across her chest to hide her breasts and the other was outstretched, her small hand shielding the place I had only ever seen in the naughty magazines Goten and I had stolen from old Roshe's Kame House. My confidence stopped there and I was starting to understand Goten's hesitance. I was growing hot and iffy from the sight of all that bare flesh. It was a relief that I wasn't getting a real-life view of those parts that set girls apart from boys. I felt overwhelmed enough as it was being confronted with the rises and falls of this body. It made me dizzy, and a little nauseous and itchy too.

Goten pointed out the sleek length that was coiled around the woman's waist. "Is that a tail?"

"Think so." I mumbled only half engaged as my eyes got stuck on the woman's breasts in spite of my daunt, that unknown thing now stirring in me like it did whenever Goten and I sneakily pored over Roshe's magazines. I turned away from that and aimed my attention at the countless scars that covered her dusky skin. Those reminded me of the scars my dad had all over his body, injuries received in the countless battles he had fought. He did not have any on his face, save the rill that followed the shelf of his jaw and was invisible unless I caught him at a certain angle. This was not so for the woman lying in her coffin. She had multiple scars marring her features. A long one ran across the right side of her face from her temple up to her forehead a pink streak that cut into a neat dark eyebrow and gave her a permanent frown. The second was a smaller, faded scar that curved up from the right corner of her mouth so that she almost looked to be smirking up at me. The last was a tiny, whitish-pink burn mark shaped like a flame underneath her left eye. It was no bigger than the tip of a finger, yet it stood out in her still face. That one must have been put there deliberately, with an implement perhaps, to mark her. As what? And why? Maybe it was a fashion statement, like tattoos were for some people on Earth. It could be that getting images burnt into your flesh was common practice wherever she was from.

"I think she is dead." I decided after a careful touch to the side of her neck where I could not locate a pulse. To make sure, I licked the back of my hand and held the wet spot under her nose, but I could feel no breath coming from her. I wondered whether I should be feeling guilty about that in my future self's stead. The me that had travelled time was the one who attempted to destroy this spaceship. Had I killed this woman? It struck me suddenly that this was a person. A real, dead person.

Goten's curiosity had won him over in the end and he was seemingly not yet comprehending that we were standing over a dead body in the way we would when checking out road kill by poking sticks at it. He prodded a well-developed, lean bicep with his finger, then placed his palm against her skin. "She feels warm."

That didn't mean she wasn't dead. I looked at the rotating column of disks again. It must be what was keeping her coffin operational. The contraption had held her underground for all these years, generated heat to keep her temperature up, likely directed her vital processes and preserved her body, but it had failed to properly sustain her. If she wasn't breathing, then she wasn't alive. I, wide awake to what we were doing and feeling a whole different kind of queasy now, took a step back from the coffin and pulled Goten with me.

"Dude, we shouldn't mess around. Let's find something to cover her up and go tell our parents what we found down here."

Just as I cast a look around for something to place over the dead woman's body, her chest suddenly heaved and she took a great, deep breath. Both Goten and I sucked ours in and held it as we backed up more. Then we made a run for it and jostled against each other in our haste to get away. I dove behind part of a collapsed wall near the entrance of the room with Goten skidding to his knees beside me looking as shaken as I felt. Whatever had been stirred in me, my curiosity for this place and the woman in her coffin, the regret and guilt by proxy, the shock of being confronted with what I had believed to be a dead body, none if it stood a chance against the sense of danger that mustered in me now. These had been our dads' enemies and they had travelled across the universe to come put an end to them.

"Man, that was close. Think she saw us?"

Goten chanced a peek from behind the wall. "No. She hasn't moved."

I crawled to his side gingerly to peep around as well. Nothing was moving except for that rotating column. I started wondering if the woman was dead after all. That breath we saw her take could have merely been a last spasm of her lifeless body getting exposed to the air after years of being sealed inside the coffin. But then she silently and supply sat up into view. Now that it had come alive, her scarred face was a frightening, menacing mask that further tightened the knot in the pit of my stomach. The lethal way in which she started testing her limbs, left no doubt about what she was.

"She is a warrior." I whispered.

Goten reached out with his ki at that. "Her power level is rising fast."

It was and it was impressive, more than twice as high as that of the strongest humans around, save Uub who could match himself with the Saiyajins on Earth. My muscles were flexing in readiness for a melee should it be needed, and I could sense Goten beside me gear up as well, though we both kept our ki low to avoid detection. I watched with bated breath how the woman rose to her feet inside the coffin and stretched her back with a discontented snarl, the popping sound of her backbone righting itself audible all the way where we were hiding. The tail that had been wrapped around her waist, now uncurled and shot up behind her, lashing from side to side in slow consideration while she took her bearings. Her daunting presence filled the room as if all the air was being sucked out and into her being. There was little contrast to her appearance. Everything on her, from the wild mane of long, light-brown hair tumbling down across her chest to cover up her breasts, to the tail that bore the exact same shade and the bronze tone of her skin, all of it melted into glowing smoulder that the curves of her body only added to. She looked like how I imagined the goddesses of ancient Greece would. A vengeful Athena, come down from Mount Olympus to wage war and smite her enemies.

The woman made a spry dash to the floor and walked around the otherworldly structure with its rotating disks and four more of those futuristic coffins fanning out from its centre. It suddenly dawned on me what that meant. Those additional rectangles.

"Oh shit." Goten hissed, the curse escaping him. He had come to the same conclusion. "This doesn't look good."

Would there be more warriors lying inside those other coffins? More female warriors perhaps? Naked, female warriors that looked like Greek goddesses? My gaze unwillingly fell on the intimidating curves of the woman's behind and I got that itch I had no name for again. Considering that it was centred in the area around my groin, I figured that I wasn't going to be theorizing about it with my mom over milk and cookies later. This was a topic I wanted my dad for. If I could pluck up the courage to broach it with him. He wasn't the type to mince words and I suspected that I would have a hard time handling whatever he may have to say about this topic.

Goten seemed far more concerned with their number and the possible threat these strangers posed and he whispered a pressing: "We should get our dads before she wakes those others up."

But my dad had taught me to never back down from a challenge and so I allowed my own apprehension no room. "We can take them on ourselves if it comes to that."

Goten seemed ready to object, yet refrained from it at the sound of another glass top sliding aside. Not long after that, a very tall and rangy man sat up inside the coffin situated on the left side of the one the woman had emerged from. His black hair stood up in a mohawk so high it defied gravity and his sinewy frame, paler skinned than that of his female companion, was thoroughly covered in scars like hers, proving that he too spent much of his time on the battlefield. I reached out with my senses to measure him, finding the man's ki building now that he had awakened, and discovered that this second warrior had a fair base power, though it was points behind on the woman's.

"Captain." the man acknowledged his companion. In an odd, almost affectatious manner, he stretched his long arms above his head and yawned widely while he carefully scanned his surroundings. Then he asked with ill-masked unease: "Where is everyone?"

His captain was already on her way to the coffin that was two places over from his, at the upper right corner of the structure. That she skipped the previous two, made Trunks think that maybe those were empty.

"It looks like the fucking ship crashed or something." she said in a grating, very rough voice. "I haven't seen that sadistic cunt or any of his benders yet."

The man jumped out of his coffin alertly, a hint of fear in his expression now. The brown-furred tail that was twitching behind his back, bristled like that of an aggravated cat. "My power is unbound."

"Mine as well." his captain showed nothing of the ware he displayed. She seemed cold and calculating as she pushed the release button on the coffin. "I have no idea what any of this means, but we are bleeding well not waiting to find out."

"Want to try legging it again?" the man sounded really scared now.

"This is our chance. There is no one here." the captain gave him a hard look, as if daring him to disagree. When he made no comment, she focused back on the coffin she had just opened and ordered: "Get your arse up, Turles. I am not waiting for that sadistic cunt to return. We are getting the fuck out of here. Ringo, fetch our gear."

The tall man with the insane mohawk sprang into action immediately by making his way over to the row of lockers standing along the right wall of the room. He wasted no time clearing away the vines and simply yanked open the door on the first locker. This made the wall behind it groan ominously. I braced myself for another cave-in that luckily did not come. The man showed some more care in opening the next two lockers and retrieved blue garments and battered looking, white boots from all three.

Goten exchanged a knowing look with me and whispered: "Those are like the suits your dad wears."

"I bet they are Saiyajins." I returned as softly.

The similarity became uncanny now that the two donned their battle suits and our suspicion was confirmed definitively when the third stranger shot out of his coffin a bolt of energy and appeared from around the back of the structure to join the others at the lockers.

Goten and I let out shocked, stifled gasps at the sight of him.

"Unreal." Goten breathed his marvel. "He looks like dad."

He did. The third man could have been Goku's twin. There was no more question that these warriors were of the same race as our dads and I could hardly contain my excitement. I had always been curious about that part of my heritage, but all my dad ever focussed on was teaching me how the genetics he had passed on to me made me martially superior to humans. He never talked about his people. Not about their culture, their home, what his life there had been like or even that he had been a prince. And all my mom had to supply to the last was the cynical remark that, yeah, my dad was a genuine prince charming. It made me feel bad when she talked down on him like that, and it had angered him once, driven him to another one of his training sprees that had him disappearing for months at a time and made me fear he would never come back, but he always did and he always made up with my mom. I had accepted that this was just the way their relationship worked and even if it wasn't a very loving one, it wasn't all that different from how Goten's mom was always bashing his dad, literally, with pots and pans and anything else she could get her hands on to smack him upside the head. My mom had never done anything like that to my dad. She used her words only to bash him. Our friend Marron was like that as well. She was always trying to boss me and Goten around. She had a pretty face though, and she was fun to hang with, so we usually forgave her for bitching, as Goten called it. I figured girls were just mean like that.

The Saiyajin captain my eyes were drawn to, was by far the meanest girl I had ever met, or so that menacing, scarred face suggested. She was putting on her armour now, but suddenly she whipped around, her gaze pinned on our hide-out as if she had felt my eyes on her. It was almost like she stared right through the wall behind which we were crouching. "You can come out now, kid. And your little friend too."