Bardock

The planet was smaller than I expected, much more smaller, it also had more water than I expected too. It was mostly blue from outer space.

“The gravity is too soft,” I muttered, looking around as I ran a sweep for power signatures, mostly out of habit, I suppose old habits die hard. The strongest thing on the planet, outside Gine and Raditz, read at a few hundred, which was a bit above the estimated threat level for this world, but still low.

Looking around, I was glad I had picked this planet no one would ever deem this place worth the trouble it would take to conquer it, even conquering it would be easy to do, the place would not sell as it was, and the amount of terraforming it would require to do so would defeat the purpose of the business.

Then again… that’s not our business anymore, isn’t it?

Though that makes me wonder, what is our business now?

I suppose that’s something our new King will have to discover, I just hoped it involved some sort of fighting, otherwise life in Planet Vegeta would be boring.

But I suppose a bit of boredom wouldn’t be bad.

Taking flight, I crossed half of the planet, before I found my eldest son on a dirt road, running.

He had a wooden yoke across his shoulders with two metal canisters hanging off it, and he was hauling the whole arrangement up a hill at a dead sprint, snarling under his breath in a steady stream of language his mother would have smacked him for, but one that made me proud of him.

Behind him, walking at a rather comfortable pace, came a very old native of this world, wearing a… shell of some kind on his back, and some sunglasses.

"Faster!" the old man called. "The Kobayashis take their milk at six! You want it warm? Nobody wants warm milk, boy!"

"IT'S ALL WARM," Raditz roared back. "IT'S BEEN ON MY BACK FOR AN HOUR! YOU STUPID OLD FART!"

"Then you should have run faster an hour ago!"

“YOU TOLD ME TO RUN AT THIS SPEED! MAKE UP YOUR DAMN MIND YOU SENILE FUCK!”

I snorted, and stood at the top of the hill, watching my son deliver… milk, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about it. I suppose I was mostly surprised the old man was still alive considering Raditz’ temper.

He did have his mother’s temper after all.

Is… the old man watching me?

I see, they can sense energy as well, like Okara and the King.

"Boy," I said, deciding to make my presence known.

Raditz turned his head up, and saw me.

He stopped dead in the middle of the road, and the canisters swung and nearly took him off his feet as he stood there staring at me, mouth open.

"...Dad?!"

"No, I’m your cousin, Turles," I grinned. "Now come and face me!."

"DAD!"

He dumped the load in the dirt, and I heard the old man behind him yell something about something, as my boy crossed two hundred meters of road in about a second and a half, and then he stopped short in front of me, because he'd rather die than run into his father's arms like a little cub.

So I grabbed the back of his head and pulled him into my chest, and he made a sound like all the air going out of him as he grabbed two fistfuls of my armor and did not let go for a while.

"You took forever!" he said into my chest, clearly furious.

"I know."

"I thought you were dead."

Can’t blame him for thinking that.

"I know."

"Everyone said Frieza was going to win…"

We all had our doubts, but Escarot proved us wrong in more than one way.

"Don’t worry, it’s all over."

Raditz looked at me. "Really over? Not… like 'for now' over, not 'until they come back' over?"

"Frieza is dead," I said, slapping the back of his head. "I watched it happen." 

I never thought the legends were true, but they were… and they had come back to us when we needed them most to kill the one who held our leash. The Super Saiyan.

"Ah, you scared me," he said, scratching the back of his head. "You must be the father."

Sure, let’s pretend you didn’t sense me.

"Bardock."

"Master Roshi." He stroked his beard. "You've got a good boy there. Terrible attitude, even worse mouth…. But! Excellent work ethic underneath it, once you get past everything else."

"That's his mother's side."

"I WILL TELL MOM," Raditz growled.

That might be fun, it’s been a while since Gine tried to kill me.

"So… you hired my son to deliver milk?" I asked, pushing those thoughts aside for the moment.

"Well, not really, I've been training him here and here to become a better fighter," Roshi said. "He’s strong, but… doesn’t have much of a base overall."

So that’s training… huh. Well, I liked that.

The King and Okara reached heights no other Saiyan ever did by training with others, some of them weaker than them, if that was the case here, my boy might have a better future.

"Hm." I put my hand on Raditz's head. "Finish your route."

"WHAT?"

"You took a job. Finish it. Then come home and eat." I looked at the abandoned yoke in the road. "And don't let those drop again, you'll bruise the cans."

"I can't BELIEVE this!"

"Six o'clock," Roshi said helpfully.

My son picked up the milk and ran.

Gine was on the porch of a small house at the end of the valley, drinking something out of a chipped cup, laughing at whatever the man across from her had just said.

I stopped at the bottom of the steps.

I'd had a lot of time to think about this moment. Months of it, alone in a pod with nothing but the stars and the hum. I'd worked out several things I was going to say, and every one of them went straight out of my head the second she turned around.

She was as beautiful as the day I defeated her in the mating ritual, proving myself worthy of being her mate.

The cup hit the porch and broke.

"Bardock!"

She was down the steps before I'd got my arms up, and she hit me hard enough to move me a step back, and then she was just kissing me, over and over again.

"You're late!" she finally managed.

Well to be fair I never said how long this would take.

"I know that face mister, and you're LATE!"

Crap, she can read my mind.

Then as if to save me from this situation, a shriek came from the porch, and I looked up, and my youngest son was being held out toward me by a white-haired old human with kind eyes.

Kakarot had gotten big, his hair looking exactly like mine, waving both fists in the air and laughing at absolutely nothing.

I took him, he grabbed my face with both hands and pulled shrieking with joy.

"Hey," I said. "You got heavy."

He bit my thumb, in fact the little bastard was trying to tear my finger off.

"Yeah," I snorted. "You're mine, alright."

"He's an angel," the old man said warmly. "Truly. No trouble at all."

Something in the way he said made me look at him, there was something off, he was smiling, sure, and it was a perfectly pleasant smile, but something in the region of his left eye was twitching.

"...Right," I said.

We ate on the porch as the sun went down.

I don't know how to describe the evening except to say that nothing happened, this was new for me as a Saiyan in a different world. Nobody attacked. Nothing was on fire. Nothing at all.

There was a table, and a decent amount of food, that the human said it was too much food, while my mate was arguing with my eldest about whether he'd actually run the whole route this time or cut through the ocean, and the old human Gohan laughing at everything and refilling cups, all while the other old human, Roshi, was telling a story about a fishing trip that I'm fairly sure was a lie.

After that, I told them what happened on Planet Vegeta.

"The Super Saiyan," Gine said quietly. "It was real. It was actually real."

"I saw it with my own eyes, it had more power than I thought it was fuckign possible."

"And the King is…?"

"He’s okay." I turned my cup. "He gave the recall order himself after my suggestions to recover every cub we scattered. He told me he wanted our future under our own sky." I shrugged. "Then he let me come get you three personally instead of sending a unit."

"He did?"

"He didn't even hesitate."

Gine looked down at her cup for a moment. "He's a strange king," she said.

"He's a good one." I replied without a hint of hesitation. “I'd follow him into anything, he seems to really care about us as a whole." It was Okara who worried me, she was one scary warrior.

"Even so." Gine sighed. "Bardock, can I ask you something? And can you not answer it like a soldier?"

I didn’t like where this was going.

"...All right."

She set the cup down and looked out at the valley.

"Look at it," she said.

I did.

The sun was going down over a lake, there were trees for kilometers in every direction, and the little lights of a village down the valley.

"Raditz has a teacher," Gine said. "He complains constantly, but he still gets up at four in the morning to train with Roshi, in fact, last week he carried a woman's groceries up the hill and didn't tell anyone, and when I found out he got so angry at me for knowing." She smiled a little.

"And Kakarot?"

"Kakarot is..." Gine’s smile faltered. "Kakarot is fine… Kakarot is a delight. Everyone says so."

Behind us, old man Gohan made a small strangled noise into his tea.

"The point," Gine said, "is that they're happy here. Both of them. And I've been happy here, and I didn't expect that, but this place is… weirdly awesome,." She turned to face me. "So I want to ask you something and I want you to actually think about it before you answer."

I had a feeling this would happen. I'd known since I saw her laughing on that porch with a cup in her hand.

"Go on," I said.

"Can we stay?"

The valley was quiet.

"Not forever, maybe," she said, faster now, the way she does when she's afraid of the answer. "I'm not saying never go home, I'm not saying abandon our people, of course not, Vegeta's our world and the King's your King, our king, and I know that. But Bardock, I'm not a warrior, I never was. I tried and almost died like… twenty times, so I became a butcher, and back there that's all I'll ever be." She reached over and put her hand on my wrist. "Here I'm just Gine, and they seem to like me for it. Nobody here knows what I failed at. My sons wake up in a house instead of a barracks. Nobody is coming to kill us."

She squeezed my wrist.

"So can we?" she said. "Can we make this home?"

And I sat there on a porch on a worthless little planet I'd picked because nobody in the universe would ever want it, with my youngest asleep in a basket and my eldest arguing with a human about milk routes, and I did not have an answer for her.