Chapter Text
i. prologue in the abyss
It should have been easy enough. The mission was practically textbook levels of simple. Chronoa had dispatched Goku and Vegeta to stop an instance that was sure to throw the balance of time into disarray—a group of scientists on a far off planet were planning to make a machine that would weld every timeline together, and they needed to stop it for obvious reasons. Goku still remembers the complete, concise rundown she had given the two of them with the portal’s open mouth still whirring at their backs: Engage with violence only as deemed necessary. Do not kill these scientists by any means—I need them alive for questioning. Destroy their inventions and bring them back to me. I’ll be the one who deals with them.
That was it. Trash a few hunks of junk and kidnap some poor fuckers who had dared to test the literal god of time, and then they’d be on their merry way. Goku had even already flared up to his Super Saiyan Four threshold in preparation, just to get the job done quick and easy. There’s just one teensy, tiny problem, though: he has no idea where the hell Vegeta went. He’d stepped out of the portal and found himself alone. Well, that and—he’s pretty sure he’s not in the right place at all, if the fact that he’d respawned in the midst of a literal battlefield, still littered with fresh corpses, is any indicator.
“Gods, Vegeta is going to give me so much shit about this later,” Goku grumbles, crouched behind a rock as the endless shooting continues adjacent to him. He ducks his head half out from behind his shoddy cover and squints, trying to make out his surroundings or anything else that might give him a context clue or two about just where he is—and make it out he does. Immediately, actually.
Sort of.
He looks skywards and thinks his jaw drops to his feet when he sees just what these people are desperately blasting at, what has trampled on their brothers and sisters and sons and daughters: a Great Ape. A Saiyan. Goku watches with wide eyes as it stomps through the now-barren land, beady crimson eyes appraising its targets as though it is a grim reaper searching for the souls it must take to the land of the dead; destroyer of planets, a titan from a forgotten age. Goku is transfixed as the beast unhinges its savage jaw and generates a colossal, supernova-bright ball of energy between its drool-slobbered teeth, letting out a mighty roar before it unleashes its effortless and endless stream of havoc.
The destruction is instantaneous. Goku knows he should be trying to stop it. Every piece of his moral compass is telling him to spring forwards and take the ape down, save these people from their slaughter at its hands—but he’s powerless to change the events of the past. Tampering with what has already happened is taboo, even more so among members of the Time Patrol, so he stays invisible as the tragedy plays out. He isn’t supposed to be here, and he knows how this ends, how the very soil he’s standing on will grow drenched with the blood of the people it nourished.
(At least—that’s what he tells himself. There’s some other part of him, some instinct that makes his red tail twitch, that has him frozen and awestruck as he witnesses this monster of his ancestors’ origins at its vulgar work, telling him not to interfere. That it’s not his place, even if he could slay its primitive form within seconds.)
So he sits there, in a trance, and watches the Great Ape burn people alive, char their skin, snap their heads off with its teeth and swallow them whole—killing them, mercilessly, making an earth-shaking noise akin to laughter as it massacres women and children, fathers and mothers. Even infants. Goku can’t look away. His stomach is churning with the nausea, but he can’t turn his head. His last show of respect for these people is that he did not pretend he didn’t see their butcher. A man is thrown half-dead at his feet with his eyes still open, gaze connecting with Goku’s in his final moments.
“Please,” he gasps, and Goku fights to keep his impassive front solid. “Please, help us—”
The ape’s foot comes crashing down on him, reducing him to a splatter of skin and bones and pulpy organs. Goku trails his stare up from its booted foot, recognition creeping up on him as he takes in ocean blue spandex and familiar, flowering armour pads.
It’s Vegeta. The Great Ape is Vegeta. There’s no doubt about it—the ape is wearing his princely armour, the same authentic configuration of it he’d donned when Goku had clashed with him for the first time, in that rocky wasteland all those years ago. A quick scan of the thing’s ki only confirms Goku’s suspicions; it feels different, wild and jagged, not nearly as honed as it is now, but that’s definitely Vegeta’s ki signature, blazing within the beast’s bowels. Goku would recognize it anywhere, from miles, light years away. Well, now he’s at least somewhat confirmed how far back in the past he’s been hurled—he’ll only know for sure once Vegeta reverts back to his normal form, so Goku can see how old he is.
He slaps two fingers to his forehead and teleports to another end of the field before the ape can see him, or sniff him out—it won’t sense him, because Vegeta doesn’t have that ability under his belt just yet, and his scouter is nowhere to be seen. He had probably taken it off beforehand so it wouldn’t shatter with the gargantuan transformation. Goku lets out a hollow laugh as he stares up at the pale moon hanging in the abyssal, pitch black sky, feeling a sudden wave of disgust wash over him as his red fur bristles with the brisk gust of wind that howls in the midst of the apocalypse. How ironic it is that he’d donned a form that drew from the innards of the beast he hated within himself, he can’t help but think.
He’s half tempted to transform back to his base, just because of the way his skin is crawling. But—no. He can’t do that. His Super Saiyan Four form serves as a good disguise, even if he knows logically Vegeta won’t recognize him anyway. Nonetheless, Goku keeps himself clad in its energy, its eldritch ape skin, as he waits out the chaos. Just in case.
He doesn’t have to stand by for much longer. The unwavering chorus of agonized screams and grotesque squelching alongside the thunderous footsteps of the Great Ape all come to an end swiftly, leaving the planet null of life, erasing a civilization from history like a wrong answer on a test paper. Goku can’t sense the energy of any other living thing aside from himself and Vegeta, who lets out another herculean victory cry, open mouth turned to the clouds as he beats his chest and dances in the blood of his prey.
It’s beautiful.
Goku dispels the thought as soon as it comes.
“Hurry up and turn back, big guy,” he murmurs to himself, eyes trained on the ape as it slumps over with a huff through its nostrils. The regression follows: the beast shrinks gradually and its Saiyan armour accommodates, its coarse, dark fur retracting back into tanned skin, shaving off the length of its maw and snout, canines shortening to fit in a more humanoid mouth. Goku’s heart hammers in his chest as the reversion completes itself, indubitably leaving Vegeta in its wake—a younger Vegeta, maybe twenty-five at the oldest, exhausted to the bone, but Vegeta nonetheless.
“It’s you,” Goku finds himself whispering, observing as Vegeta groans and shakes his head, cracks his back as he blinks open his eyes. “It’s really you.”
It is. Vegeta turns his head, and looks right at him.
Well, obviously, Vegeta had seen him. Goku couldn’t exactly hold himself back from stepping out from behind the rock he was hiding behind so he could get a better look at him, and Vegeta had been prim and proper about pulling his scouter out of a discreet pocket in his spandex and putting it right back on once he was himself again, so—it’s not really a surprise when he turns the device on to scan for any traces of life he might have missed in his eradication ritual, and finds Goku in the process.
Goku has half a mind to remember to conceal his ki, statue-still as Vegeta regards from afar incredulously. He’s standing in molasses as Vegeta stalks over to him, making it face-to-face within seconds.
“Who are you?” Vegeta immediately demands once there’s a hair’s breadth of distance between the two of them. His voice is still a low, rasping tune, but it’s not as pronounced in the Galactic Standard as Goku knows it to be—it’s thick and rustic with his Saiyago accent, their home planet’s language, curling his intonation with a history lost to ashes. “You are not a citizen of this planet, and I did not detect you before I commenced my operation. Answer my question before it costs you your life.”
Goku is still sort of just staring at him, trying not to smile like a maniac at the sight of him: smaller than usual, the last traces of baby fat still clinging to his cheeks and jaw, infuriatingly precious. Goku has to vehemently remind himself that this was the guy who just wiped out thousands of innocents so he doesn’t scoop him and twirl him around in the air, cuddle him close to his chest and cover his face with kisses. “I’m, uh—” he starts, chewing on his lip. “Just. Passing by.”
Wow. Great answer, Goku.
“Passing by,” Vegeta repeats warily, eye twitching with the beginning of the end of his patience. “And what business do you have here?”
Goku feels a drop of sweat run down the nape of his neck, humid across his fur. Jeez, Chronoa, hurry up and realize you sent me to the wrong place so you can open up a portal for me already! “Nothing especially interesting. I’m not—working against you, if that’s what you think. I just have to, uh, wait it out here for a—a friend to come get me.”
It’s a measly explanation, but it’s really just the truth in diluted terms. Vegeta’s eyes narrow suspiciously.
“And why haven’t you mentioned that you are a Saiyan, yet?”
Crap.
“Ah!” Goku laughs nervously, scratching the back of his head and looking everywhere but Vegeta, the centre of his field of vision, a statement splotch on a canvas. “You—you could tell, huh? I thought—well, I didn’t really see any point in mentioning it, and you hadn’t asked, so…”
“Of course I could tell,” Vegeta huffs, like that should be common sense. He veers forward, blinking with a morbid sort of curiosity, raking his stare shamelessly over Goku from head to toe as though he’s an inanimate object. A still warm body on the autopsy table. It turns Goku’s veins into something molten. Vegeta murmurs, thoughtfully: “Though I can see why you wouldn’t want to tell me. You are… quite the unusual looker. Blood red fur.” He flicks his eyes up to meet Goku’s head-on, wholly unknowing of the heat fluttering through Goku’s belly at the lock of their gazes as he even ventures further to take hold of Goku’s chin in his gloved grasp. “Liquid gold eyes. I’ve never seen a Saiyan like you in my entire life.”
Goku thinks he’s going to faint. His knees have gone traitorously weak, pins and needles numb, just from feeling an inkling of Vegeta’s touch. “I’m, um—a little strange-looking, I guess! But I really am a Saiyan, honest.”
“I believe you,” Vegeta scoffs, turning Goku’s head in his grasp this way and that, the pads of his thumb and index denting right into Goku’s dimples. “How odd, though. Where were you when our planet was destroyed? Were you perhaps sent away on a seeding mission before it happened, and never had the chance to return?”
Goku’s throat is sandpaper. “Ah—yeah, that. I was. Raised off world, too.” Again—it’s not exactly a lie. Goku has nothing to feel guilty for, here. Just because Vegeta is looking up at him with those big, darling eyes and those squishy cheeks—
Focus, Goku.
“Hmm.” Vegeta releases him, and Goku finds himself mourning the pressure. “That explains why you’ve no idea who I am.”
Wrong, I know exactly who you are. I know exactly who you will be. Goku bites the inside of his cheek until he tastes copper. “No, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Well, I’m Vegeta. Prince of all Saiyans. Your prince,” Vegeta huffs, a proud grin spreading across his face as he crosses his arms over his chest, fluffed up with his bravado, his tail curling around his waist like a loyal servant, standing before Goku with all of his boyish flourish. (It’s so gosh darned cute.) “And you are?”
Goku wishes he could take five million pictures of him right now. He’ll have to settle for burning the image of him in the backs of his eyelids forever. “Go…” He stops himself part of the way through. What should he say, here? He’s always been ‘Kakarot’ to Vegeta, as though the other man was obstinately trying to remind him of the rib he was created of—but this Vegeta doesn’t know who he is. Goku could overwrite everything about himself in this version of Vegeta’s brain from scratch, and the thought is exhilarating.
Vegeta taps a foot on the ground impatiently. “Go…?”
“Goku!” Goku exclaims, feeling a flush flood his face. “Um—my name is Goku, Ve— your highness.”
It feels good to call him that. Goku files that revelation away for unpacking later.
“Goku,” Vegeta parrots, testing the name out in his mouth, balancing it on his tongue, and the way it rips from his lips—reverent, hushed, syllables weaved into that stupidly attractive accent—it makes Goku want to fall at his feet and prostrate himself before him. “I see. Goku. What a bizarre name. I suppose it was given to you on that other planet.”
“Yes,” Goku squeaks, properly fidgeting now. “Are you—are you here alone, your highness?”
“I am,” Vegeta affirms, with a curt nod. “I was assigned to this mission by myself, since this planet was inhabited by a race of weaklings. Eradicating them was an easy job.”
Meaning the only companions he had at this point, Nappa and Raditz, aren’t lurking anywhere nearby. It’s just the two of them. Goku forces himself not to outwardly shiver with the bolt of heat that shoots electric down his spine at that realization. There shouldn’t be anything romantic or—arousing at the fact that he’s alone with Vegeta (a Vegeta that isn’t even his) on this deserted, horrorshow, murder scene of a planet. Seriously. If Goku steps to the side even slightly, he’ll get corpse juice all over his boot. Yuck! Right?
Right.
“So,” Vegeta hums, snapping Goku right out of his vehement inner denial with that gravelly timbre pouring out of his mouth, “I imagine it is only fair you tell me what you are doing here now, Saiyan nomad.”
Goku chuckles, scratching the back of his neck. “‘Saiyan nomad’? You can just call me Goku, your highness,” he says.
Vegeta’s tail (his tail! He has his tail, and it’s adorable!) swishes idly behind him. “I’ll refer to you as I please. So?”
Damn. He’s seriously not backing down here, is he? Goku works his jaw as he tries to come up with something more fleshed out than the lame explanation he spared Vegeta earlier, finally setting on saying, skating around the truth through another laugh: “Let’s just say I’m a space mercenary of sorts, kind of like you. I’m only stranded out here because my, er, employer”—he doesn’t even get paid for this shit, actually—“dropped me off at the wrong place.”
Vegeta’s brows raise. “Dropped you off? The person you work under must be multitudes more gracious than Frieza, if they help you make your commutes.” He cocks his head, catlike. “I can’t even begin to fathom being so pampered in my work.”
Goku puts his hands on his hips with a grin. “Hey, I’m not complaining. A word of advice, choose your workplaces carefully, kid.”
Vegeta is silent, just staring at him with an expression that’s a mystic cross between pissed off and something else Goku can’t place, and Goku belatedly realizes that he probably should not have said that, you know, considering the whole—‘Vegeta’s dad sold him into slavery under Frieza when he was just a boy’ factor. Not that this Vegeta knows that Goku is aware of that. Regardless, it was still a dick move. Goku opens his mouth to backtrack as he watches Vegeta’s features shadow over, preparing himself to deflect a punch in the face, worse comes to worst—
“I am not a kid.”
Oh.
Oh?
Vegeta is—he’s blushing, eyes darting upwards to catch Goku’s and then to the side shyly, teeth gritted as he trembles with his embarrassment. Goku actually has to chomp down on his tongue until his mouth fills with iron to repress a squeal at how much of a teddy bear he looks like right now. Out of all the words in Goku’s most recent sentence, kid isn’t the one he envisioned ticking Vegeta off. He’s as unpredictable as ever, still throwing Goku for a loop, even as a young thing who hasn’t even learned half of what he’ll be capable of in time. It’s sickeningly endearing.
“My apologies, my prince,” Goku lilts, unable to curb the slight waver in his tone, dimples twitching with the wide slant of his grin as he dares to bend down a little so their faces are aligned, biting his lip at the way Vegeta’s cheeks flush further. “I just assumed—”
“I’m twenty-four!” Vegeta exclaims angrily, or, at least, he’s trying for angry—he’s about as threatening as a hissing kitten, tail fluffed up like a bottle brush, turning as red as a cherry. Goku wants to pluck him right off the tree.
“Ah, I see,” Goku agrees, swallowing a snicker, putting a commendable amount of effort into not fawning over him. “I’m sorry. You’re just—you look a lot younger than me, that’s all.” And he practically is a kid, at least compared to Goku, at the moment; no matter how much he wants to insist he’s all grown up.
Vegeta clears his throat, glancing back up at him. “Whatever.” Then he harrumphs, turning his head and sticking his nose up in the air, even though his body is still traitorously posed in Goku’s direction. “How old are you?”
“Eh.” Goku makes a so-so motion with his hand. “Mid fifties, give or take. I stopped keeping track a while ago.” He never kept track, actually. He was born of Son Goku’s ultimate potential, the same Son Goku who is probably still living a quiet, blissfully unaware life in the mountains with his almost-ordinary family in this very second—in this Xeno figure, a taxidermied copy of his original, he’s a Pandora’s box of cosmic power in the shape of a man, and it’s not something he likes to dwell on for too long.
Vegeta is looking back up at him, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth ever so slightly. (Mm. So that’s how it is.) “Old man.”
Goku’s eyes crinkle around the edges with his smile. “Well, you’re not wrong!” he chimes with a roll of his shoulders, even throwing in a wink and watching Vegeta’s cheeks redden further. So cute. So dangerous. (Bad idea.) Goku’s heart flits in his chest, grows wings in his rib cage. “So, I, uh—I guess you’ve gotta get going soon, huh?”
Vegeta’s eyes are hazed over. There’s a flash of his tongue as it runs over his top lip, salmon pink with quicksilver scales. Bad idea. Bad idea. “I have time,” he says, trailing his smoking guys up and down Goku’s body. “I could wait it out with you, Goku. Until your people come to get you.”
Is he—? Goku gulps around the painstaking emptiness in his throat as he examines the coral dusting still dappling Vegeta’s high cheekbones, feels a red flare of heat pool between his legs at the offer.
Vegeta tilts his head, raises his brows. (Oh, yeah, he totally is.)
“I… I don’t see why not,” Goku titters, throwing in a cough at the end of his acceptance just to fill in some empty space. “But, I just—I don’t know how long I’ll be waiting, wouldn’t wanna keep you, and all that—”
“Goku,” Vegeta interrupts him firmly, and oh, the sound of his name, his Earth-made name out of his mouth when he’s commanding authority like that—it’s enchanting, a spell fallen over him like a veil, ripping the sturdiness from his bones; “I would not have offered if I didn’t desire it. You are one of my subjects, even if there are hardly enough of us left for you to appreciate it… it’s insulting not to accept your prince’s kindness.”
Goku is a ship, and Vegeta is his anchor. He’s tethered to him even in this old world where they haven’t had the chance to change the orbits of each other’s paths yet, which has to count for something.
“You’re right, Prince Vegeta,” Goku says, throwing a cursory glance at a cave nearby.
“Of course I am.” Vegeta follows his gaze and smirks. “Shall we, then?”
The match hasn’t even begun, and Goku’s already lost. “Lead the way.”