Escarot

Earth looked almost exactly like… my earth, but at the same time, it was… immensely different, it was a weird feeling. I guess the closest thing to it was what people call the Mandela Effect.

Same blue, same green, same shape of clouds. But the roads, the land, the… feeling didn't go or look or feel as I expected them to, it was… more quiet than my earth, there were less cities scraping the sky, less cars, less contamination. And yet, a few centuries ahead the Earth I used to know from a life I can barely call mine anymore.

“It’s a nice planet, not worth much in the market, but… I like it,” Bardock commented, snapping me out of my head.

“It is,” I nodded.

Bardock led the way, pointing things out below us, giving the grand tour of things he had seen and liked.

"That's the lake," he said. "There’s fish in there, they taste really good."

Most of them were about food.

Eventually, we came down outside a small house at the end of a valley, and I was still getting my bearings when a small comet of black hair came barreling across the yard toward me at a dead sprint.

"MY KING." Raditz skidded to a stop about two feet away, before kneeling chest heaving, clearly having sprinted the entire distance the second he felt us land. "I've gotten stronger. Want to see? I can show you right now. I've been training to become—"

"Raditz," Bardock said.

"—I can break that mountain in two, watch, I'll break that mountain—"

"Raditz."

"WHAT."

"Not now."

Raditz reluctantly stood down, though he kept flexing his arm like he was hoping I'd notice on my own. He looked like a peacock, showing off, and it was funny, especially considering I wasn’t that much older than him. 

That said, I knew that until I said something he would continue trying to get my attention, so I decided to be kind about it.

"I heard you've been training hard," I said. "I'd like to see it. Later."

That earned me a grin so wide that the Joker himself would file a copyright complaint, before he vanished, presumably, tell every living thing on this planet that the “King” had personally asked to see his training.

Gine came out onto the porch next, wiping her hands on a cloth, and the warmth in her face when she saw me was so immediate and unguarded that it caught me a little off guard. It was my first time meeting her in person, and while I had expected her to be different from other Saiyans, it caught me by surprise, there was absolutely zero battle spirit coming from her.

"My King. You made it." She waved me toward the house like I was an old friend running late for dinner, and that made me smile a little. "Come in, come in, you have to try the tea, it's nothing like what we have at home, oh oh, and there's this fruit the humans grow that Bardock pretends he doesn't like but he eats an entire bowl of every morning—"

"I do not pretend anything," Bardock said, from somewhere behind me.

"And the sweets~ They are soooooo good!"

She kept going. I let her. There was something in the sheer, uncomplicated love she had for this place that I didn't want to interrupt.

“Oh, is this baby Kakarot?” I asked, looking at Bardock. “You cloned yourself with this one.”

“Now that you say it… he does look like me, huh,” Bardock replied, looking at his baby son.

As for Kakarot, he was asleep in a basket by the door, and when Gine scooped him up to show me he blinked awake, looked at me with enormous dark eyes, and immediately reached out both hands for my face.

"He likes you," Gine said, delighted, just as the baby punched me in the face. “Kakarot!”

“Let him, I find it endearing,” I laughed, as baby Kakarot continued to punch my face, laughing maniacally.

I took him for a second as Gine, and he grabbed a fistful of my hair so that I couldn't escape, and I found myself smiling as he continued to attack me.

"He's going to be quite the fearless warrior," I said.

"You have no idea," said a voice from the porch, and I looked up to find an old human with a shell on his back and sunglasses pushed up into white hair, and beside him, a taller old man with a long white beard, both of them very carefully not standing too close.

Roshi and Grandpa Gohan.

I could feel it before either of them said a word — that particular, specific stillness of people trying very hard not to look as afraid as they felt. They were terrified of me… and I couldn’t blame them, I was much stronger than anything they had ever faced, or thought possible.

"Master Roshi," Bardock said. "Gohan. This is Escarot."

"An honor," Roshi said, bowing slightly, and I noticed his hands weren't quite steady. "We've, ah. We've heard a great deal about you."

"All of it good, I hope."

"Mostly," Gohan said, with a strained little laugh. "Mostly good."

Mostly? I wonder what Bardock told them that they didn’t consider as good.

Beyond that, I understood exactly what they were doing, circling around the actual question without asking it outright, the way you approach something that might bite, something you're afraid of.

"You want to know why I'm here," I said, to save everyone the trouble, because if it was up to them, as scared as they were, they would beat around the bush for hours before jumping that threshold.

Roshi's smile got a fraction more honest. "The thought had crossed our minds, yes."

"Purely political." I settled Kakarot back against his mother's shoulder, and he immediately started chewing on her collar. "Bardock's family is here. That makes this planet something I have an interest in keeping safe and keeping good relations with, nothing more complicated than that. I'm not here to look at real estate."

"That's..." Roshi glanced at Gohan. "That's genuinely reassuring, actually."

"You were expecting something worse."

"Well… with how powerful you are, you can understand why we had to ask," Gohan admitted. "I hope we didn’t offend you."

I chuckled. “Not at all, if you hadn’t shown even a… fraction of caution, I would’ve been offended.”

Kami arrived a little after midday, I felt him coming from a fair distance, he was one of the strongest energy signatures in the planet, beyond Bardock’s family, besides that, his ki felt… old, and very calm, deliberately so, with the kind of calm you put on to act like armor.

He landed a respectful distance away and after a brief moment, looking at me, he bowed.

"Your Majesty," he said. "Forgive the intrusion. I am Kami, guardian of this world. I felt your arrival and thought it wise to greet you myself, rather than let a King go unwelcomed on a planet under my care."

There was something a little too careful in the way he said it. I've spent enough time around people who are afraid of me to recognize the shape of politeness that's covering for fear, and while he was covering for it better than Gohan and Master Roshi, I understood immediately what was actually happening here: a small, quiet god had felt something enormous by his standards land on his planet, he had done the A to B on what an offended king might do to a defenseless world, and decided that the safest possible move was to show up personally and make absolutely sure I had no reason to be offended, instead of summoning me to the lookout.

There was also option B. He wanted to appease me, and hide the location of his base to avoid giving the already too powerful threat more tools, like the Time Chamber, the Senzu Beans, and more.

I was leaning more towards the B option, but I wasn’t too sure.

"You don't have to be that formal with me, especially as a God," I said. "Besides, as I told Gohan and Roshi, you can relax. I promise this visit isn't going to end with anyone's planet getting hurt."

"I did not mean to suggest—"

"You didn't have to suggest it. I could feel it." I replied with a sigh, because piling reassurance on top of more reassurance usually just sounds like a threat wearing a nice coat, and that wasn't what I wanted here. "I’m not stupid, you'd be a fool not to think about it. I'm not offended that you thought about it, I would’ve been offended if you hadn’t thought about it. I'd just like you to stop worrying about it now."

Kami studied me for a moment, and through the bullets of sweat covering his head, he sighed. "You're trying to change," he said slowly. "What your people are, right."

"I am." I shrugged. "I mean… I didn’t want to be a King, but a certain God decided it would be hilarious to force me into the job, so… Here I am, doing my best."

“A certain God… I see,” Kami muttered, and for a moment I wondered if he knew about Beerus. “Can I ask you a question?”

I nodded.

"Bardock's family… You'd protect them even at cost to yourself?"

"Without a second thought." I replied.

"That is..." Kami paused, and something in his old, careful face eased, just slightly. "That is more than I expected to hear."

"There's actually one more thing," I said, "that I think might put you at ease better than anything I've said so far."

"Oh?"

I've had exactly one lesson in this, from Nail, on a long boring evening months ago when I asked him to teach me something in Namekian and he laughed at me, before relenting.

I said it slowly, and I know for a fact that I butchered the accent, because Nail told me as much at the time and laughed once more at me for a solid minute afterward.

"Ke tobana, Namekku."

Let's be friends, in Namekian.

Kami went very still.

"You—" He stared at me, something unreadable moving across that old green face. "Those words… I.. I know those words… but from where?”

"Oh," I muttered, the sudden realization hitting me like a truck full of trucks. 

‘Oh, shit. Right... he doesn't know.’

How could I forget he didn't actually figure out he was a Namekian until Nappa and Vegeta landed on Earth years from now. To him, he was just a nameless child from outer space who had crawled out of the wilderness, eventually splitting his soul in two to become the Guardian. 

Great… I wanted to make a first good impression, and instead I had just casually dropped a localized existential crisis right onto him.

"You—" Kami stared at me, his eyes wide and completely hollow. Something unreadable, a mixture of profound shock and sorrow, moved across that old green face. "Those words… I.. I know those words… but from where?”

"Uh," I started, rubbing the back of my neck as the silence in the yard grew incredibly heavy. I looked over at Bardock, who just raised an eyebrow at me, offering absolutely zero help. 

"Your Majesty?" Kami pressed, taking a tentative step forward, his staff trembling against the grass. "Please. If you know the language of my thoughts... tell me who I am."

I let out a long sigh, dropping my hands. Well, the cat was already out of the bag, and there was no point in trying to stuff it back in, the cat was unfortunately fat. Besides, Nappa and Vegeta will never come to Earth, so I might as well tell him.

"As you probably know, you're an alien, Kami," I said, deciding the direct approach was probably best, even if it lacked grace. "Specifically, you're a Namekian.."

Kami stumbled back half a step, his breath catching sharply in his throat. "Namekian…"

"Yeah. A long time ago, your homeworld suffered a massive climate catastrophe," I explained, trying to remember as much as I could from his backstory. "Your dad put you in a spaceship and sent you here to save your life. You landed on this planet and well, you know the rest."

The silence that followed was… big. Kami looked down at his own green, four-fingered hands, and in the blink of an eye, the rigid, defensive armor of the guarded Earth deity completely shattered right in front of me. He didn't look like a god anymore; he just looked like a child who had finally learned his family's name.

"Namek..." Kami whispered, a single tear escaping his eye and tracking down his wrinkled cheek. He looked back up at me, and the last lingering trace of fear in his aura vanished, replaced by a profound, overwhelming sense of relief. "You brought me my past, King Escarot. I came here to defend my world from a conqueror... and instead, you gave me a piece of my home I had long forgotten."