Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

— Stereophonics, Maybe Tomorrow

The air tasted of dust and steel. From the upper terrace, the city stretched flat and colourless, a mesh of roads and light. Clouds loitered low. Rain was waiting for permission.

Vegeta stood with his arms folded, unmoving. Four days here. Four dinners he had eaten in silence, four nights he had slept in a room that smelled faintly of lavender and ozone. The capsule compound was too clean, too quiet. Even its silence had structure.

He told himself he was here to train. The gravity chamber was functional. The food was incredible. The atmosphere helped. All measurable, all justifiable. Still, the facts did nothing to settle the restlessness behind his ribs.

When the wind shifted, he could smell the ocean. Autumn on this planet was a quiet thing. He’d never seen trees redden before.

A planet like this had no business surviving. It was soft. Lush. Ill equipped for war. And yet, it had outlived empires. Even now, the trees clung to the edges of the city. Ferns grew through cracks in the pavement. Humans laughed in the streets. The weak endured.

It unnerved him.

He had trained to the edge of collapse this morning. Muscles still twitched with the memory. No transformation came.

He adjusted his stance. His calves ached from the morning’s strain, but the burn steadied him. A soldier’s ache. Honest pain.

The form continued to elude him.

He had imagined Frieza’s end for years. But not like this. Not at someone else’s hands.

He had heard the stories. On Namek, Kakarot had transformed in his golden glory and boundless energy, the legend made flesh. A Super Saiyan. And it had been him, not the prince of a fallen race, not the one born to lead, forged in fire, tempered in blood.

But that third class fool. The one who smiled too much and never took anything seriously.

Kakarot had killed Frieza.

Vegeta’s hands curled into fists at his sides.

That dream had been taken from him. Stolen. Along with his planet, his birthright, his father, his people. There had been no retribution. Only a ghost story told on the journey home.

Frieza was dead. The prince had avenged nothing.

And Kakarot had not even returned to bask in his triumph. He was gone, somewhere in the stars, unreachable, untouchable, and impossibly ahead.

Vegeta trained harder with each passing day, blood seething with the insult of it all with questions he would never ask aloud. What did it feel like? What had triggered it? And why why why had it chosen someone like Kakarot instead of him?

The form would be his. He would surpass Kakarot. He would make the universe remember who he was. He had to.

He remembered none of his mother’s face. The names of their moons. The scent of their homeworld. But he remembered the silence after its end. The long, empty years of becoming what Frieza required. And then the noise, of loss without ceremony, of rage without end.

There was no rite for the last of a people.

He pressed his palms into the railing, cold metal grounding his thoughts. He didn’t notice Bulma until she was beside him.

“I thought you might want some tea,” she said. No preamble. No smile.

She placed the cup on the ledge, not too close, and waited. He didn’t take it. She didn’t insist.

He had broken stronger people with fewer words. Bulma, untrained, unarmoured, did not flinch. She wore no fear. Just a kind of effortless certainty. He hated it and admired it equally.

“Why are you helping me?” he asked.

She shrugged. “You looked like you needed it.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“I didn’t offer terms.”

He glanced at her. Her eyes were tired. Her spine, straight. She looked at the clouds, not at him. The tea cooled between them.

“You don’t know what I am,” he said, voice low.

“No,” she replied, “but you do. And that seems worse.”

She left him with the cup.

Inside, the world continued. The hum of machines. Her father’s distant monologue. The scent of something frying in a pan. It was all maddeningly intact. And yet, part of him remained on the edge of that domestic rhythm, not within it but no longer wholly outside it either.

At times, he imagined what it might be like to stop running. To allow the silence to reach him. To sit, to eat, to speak.

He imagined swimming in that ocean, not fighting it, not conquering it. He would let it hold him. It reminded him, distantly, of the regeneration tanks, suspended in silence, cradled by something colder than comfort. Like a memory of safety he’d never actually had. Like being unborn.

Once, when he returned late from training, he saw her asleep on the sofa, a notebook on her chest, the light still on. He stood in the doorway and listened to the sound of her breath, soft and untroubled. She stirred and said his name. Just once. He left before she opened her eyes.

Detachment was supposed to be clarity. But it was starting to feel like weight.

He wasn’t done yet. He knew that much. Not with rage. Not with the need to prove that he had survived for something. Not with the lie that he could force meaning into his life through sheer force of will.

He would go back to chasing the form, the legend, the thing that had chosen Kakarot instead. That was inevitable.

The night had deepened around him now. Bulma’s voice echoed distantly inside. Laughter, then the clink of cutlery. Warmth he hadn’t earned.

He stared out into the dark. The sky didn’t answer.

He had dreamt of killing Frieza. Of avenging his people with his own hands. Instead, the tyrant died on another planet, at the hands of a third-class warrior who hadn’t even stayed to claim the victory. The universe had moved on, and Vegeta remained, unfulfilled, unseen, second.

He would never be granted that moment. There would be no justice. No closure. Only power, if he could still grasp it. If it hadn’t already chosen someone else.

He knew even then, on some unconscious level, that this path wasn’t straight. That the relentless and worthy man she saw in him wasn’t someone he could simply become. He would have to suffer for it. Would have to choose it, one day, after falling into everything he had tried to rise above.

He would have to descend first, into pride, into rage, into the man he thought he had left behind. Majin was not a word he knew yet. But its shadow was already forming. A crucible. A return to the worst of himself, so that he could finally choose what came after.

He could not reach her light without passing through fire.

Maybe tomorrow he’d find his way home.