Chapter Text
Realizing it was a mistake to look at Vegeta’s freshly broken body again, you tear your eyes away from the main screen. Bulma isn’t watching either. Instead, she’s fully absorbed in a secondary monitor, elbows-deep in some wildly complex programming.
In a flash, Bulma pulls up a crisp image of the moon and overrides the drone’s live feed. The big bulky drone—previously streaming Chi-Chi’s face to distract Frieza—is still hovering aimlessly over the battlefield. But now, on its screen, Chi-Chi’s image is swapped out for a serene shot of the moon. How she pulled it off is anyone’s guess—frankly, it’s a million brain cells past your limit—and once again, you can’t help but be secretly impressed by her level of tech wizardry.
“What are you gonna do with that?” you squeak, immediately wondering if it’s a dumb question.
“I mean… what was a picture of the moon going to help with?”
Bulma, tongue poking out the corner of her mouth in concentration, clicks a few commands into the console. “Not much on its own, I suspect,” she mutters. “But maybe the guys can work with the idea. Maybe they can clear the sky or something...”
She turns back to the complex-looking software, calculating some sort of trajectory. A visual unfolds—Earth, surrounded by the pale arc of the moon’s orbit. “Hmmm,” she mutters, tapping her chin. “It should be visible from this hemisphere…”
“But what’s so special about the moon?” you press, suspicious.
Bulma glances up at you with a glint in her eye. “Well... the moon can trigger a transformation. They just need their tails for it... and I’m pretty sure Raditz still has his.”
You and Chi-Chi lock eyes for a heartbeat—your suspicions about the furry little nubbins confirmed. But there’s no time to freak out over it now. Both your gazes snap back to the screen, zeroing in on Raditz. You squint, trying to catch a glimpse of Raditz’s lower back, but from this angle, you can’t tell if anything is sprouting from his tailbone.
“A transformation,” you repeat slowly, staring at her. You can tell she’s deliberately avoiding saying what kind of transformation. Which only makes your stomach twist harder.
Instead, she’s steering the big, unwieldy drone toward Raditz, but he doesn’t respond. He’s too distracted—eyes locked on Frieza’s merciless beatdown of Vegeta—to notice the hovering thing in his peripheral vision.
Bulma expertly weaves the drone into Raditz's field of vision and jerks the controls, moving the drone back and forth. Finally, Raditz’s gaze flickers toward the feed. He freezes. His eyes narrow as he registers the glowing image of the full moon on the tiny screen. He frowns. Blinks. Then, slowly, recognition dawns. It’s only a second, but you can see the gears turning in his head.
Meanwhile, Vegeta is still being slammed around like a ragdoll across the battlefield. His screams—raw and ragged—cut through the speakers and straight into your bones.
“How can it be that we’re back here again?” you whisper, burying your face in your hands as tears leak through your fingers. It feels like you’re stuck in some kind of horrible loop, doomed to watch him being beat down over and over again.
Bulma yanks you gently but firmly back toward the screen, slinging a comforting arm around your shoulders. Chi-Chi grabs hold of you from the other side—not just to support you, but to lean on you too—tightly sandwiching you between them. “Look,” Bulma says, deathly serious. “You need to see this. Raditz—he’s doing something. ”
And for the first time in what feels like forever, a spark of real hope flares to life.
As a dull, glowing orb suddenly bursts into existence in the sky, both women squeeze you airtight against them, trapping you like a supportive vice—but it’s not like you were breathing anyway, not with this kind of tension. At first, it’s small and almost unimpressive, but the milky-white light it emits grows sharper, stronger, as the sphere swells in size.
You hear it before you even register what’s happening—Raditz, somewhere far off, shouting something hoarse and wild, voice raw with adrenaline. His arms are stretched high above his head, fists trembling with effort.
Above him, the sphere blooms fully into existence. Silvery. Glowing. Unmistakable.
With your mouth agape, you stare at the glowing object: A moon.
“Wow,” Bulma breathes beside you, her eyes wide with awe as she clicks through the drones' angles with her free hand. “I didn’t even think about the fact they could mimic an actual moon with their ki manipulation!”
Artificial yet somehow alive, pulsing with raw energy, the moon hovers in the bruised sky—a perfect, lavender replica, handcrafted out of sheer Saiyan willpower. It begins to travel, arcing high across the dusky atmosphere, even moving beyond where the last colors of daylight bleed out into the cloudy horizon.
Raditz directs the orb with trembling, outstretched arms, nudging it steadily toward the setting sun, until the moon carefully slides over the sun’s exposed, burning face, as if taking a careful, hungry bite out of it—before finally swallowing the entire celestial body whole.
Suddenly, a chill sweeps across the desert. The light falters. Shadows stretch like long fingers across the barren landscape. The sky itself seems to inhale and hold its breath as the artificial moon moves perfectly into place, eclipsing the sun in one flawless, heart-stopping motion. Only a thin, eerie corona of light remains, tracing the silhouette in a ghostly silver ring—until even that is swallowed up by the foreign body of energy.
From this distance, it looks larger than Earth’s moon—and it’s still growing. Its radiance burns at least ten times brighter. You glance around. Though the sun is obscured, the world isn’t dark—it's bathed in a strange ultraviolet glow. You can clearly see Chi-Chi tilt her head back to stare at the sky. The moonlight clings to her skin like silver dust, turning her clothes pitch black in contrast to her now luminous, pale face.
“A lunar eclipse , ” you breathe in awe. You can’t help but notice the serendipity of it all. You miss Vegeta now more intensely than ever.
“Technically, it’s a solar eclipse,” Bulma corrects, thoroughly ruining your moment of romantic reflection.
The vast and ever-brightening phenomenon distorts multiple feeds with its lavender milky glow.
Chi-Chi’s now clutching your arm so tightly you’re losing sensation in your fingers—when you feel it. Since the ‘imprinting,’ it’s always been there—like a lone candle flickering in the backdrop of your mind. Always present, always thrumming quietly under the surface. But it detonates.
That strange, fragile tether that has existed between you and Vegeta since the beginning broadens suddenly, like a freeway opening up, allowing messages to race back and forth at blinding speeds. The connection with Vegeta morphs from an unreliable signal to something vast, almost infinite, with the bandwidth of a supernova.
Everything he feels hits like a bomb. Your senses are slammed by a wave of despair so thick it’s almost suffocating—Vegeta’s will is unraveling, like the last fragile thread holding him together. His fury feels hollow, stripped of its usual fire, replaced by a crushing exhaustion.
Chi-Chi’s sharp, lacquered nails dig into your arm, betraying that she’s feeling something in her connection with Goku. Your own vision spins, as if you’ve been zapped, but you manage to make out a glossy sheen spreading over Chi-Chi’s eyes.
You have no choice but to feel Vegeta—every thought, every ache, every echo of rage, and shame—and more terrifying than all of it: you feel how close he is to giving up. Not because he wants to die, necessarily, but because he thinks this is all he’s meant for. That all he’s ever done is fall short.
No.
You’re not going to allow that. You break free from the friend burrito, because you need your focus to be 100% on him now.
Your voice—your presence—surges across that ethereal highway toward him like a lifeline. Y ou sense that his emotions are so overwhelmed with darkness, that it takes a moment for your presence to push through his shadows.
You're getting a taste of what Vegeta's been going through as you take a kick from Frieza’s legs, by proxy—meaning Frieza is having fun soccering Vegeta around again. You clutch your stomach as your insides react to the blow that you haven’t actually been hit with.
You'll marvel over these crazy Saiyan idiosyncrasies another time as you steady yourself.
‘You are not alone,’ you send in his direction, and this time, you can feel how powerful your words hit him, even harder than whatever Frieza is doing .
Vegeta flinches on the ground, like he’s been struck by something—not a blast, but something gentler, though far more invasive. In rapid motion, your presence is pressed into his tissue like an iron brand. You feel the weight of your connection thickening in an invisible space, now that he feels you this close.
On the screen, you see his eyes widen—reacting to your words—as Vegeta takes a barrage of laser blasts lying down, unable to do anything but endure them.
You grit your teeth through the sharp blows to Vegeta’s flank, as your thoughts braid with his—chaotic, raw, and painfully real. A chaotic blend of hearts colliding mid-crisis. You know he can sense you just as acutely, feeling every flicker of your emotions as if they were his own. But you can also feel Vegeta’s ambivalence in this moment. True to form, he experiences his psychic vulnerability as something too chummy, almost invasive, running deeper than when you witnessed his dreams through his own eyes.
Now that you finally have his attention, this would be the perfect time for a grand speech. Something solemn, something epic— about destiny, or greatness, or how he was chosen, or whatever. Something that would make bards weep and inspire the masses.
But you’re not some philosophical guru with a staff, or actual Mufasa , offering cryptic words to guide him from the clouds. No, you're just a girl who somehow ended up in his orbit, and despite you two being a pair of mismatched socks, it just works . After only a few flickering glimpses from his dreams, you hardly feel qualified to preach about his fate, but you do have something going on for yourself: all your years of romcom wisdom are now being harnessed into pure emotional artillery, aimed straight at your ego-guarded Saiyan.
With your body and soul, you exhale deeply before sending your message: "I see you, baby," you whisper. "Please. Don’t give up. I need y ou." Your inner voice shakes, but your resolve is solid. "I couldn’t bear it if I couldn’t see that damn scowl of yours every day." Not exactly Shakespeare, but hey, you’re speaking his language. Or at least, you hope to break through that stoic glacier he’s built around himself. "You belong here, with me. We’ve not known each other for long, but it feels like everything I need, I’ve found in you. .."
And then, you feel it.
He’s reaching for you—reaching for your words. Suddenly, his mind sobers up a bit, though you sense him pause, shaken by your unambiguous declarations of love after you’ve resisted the bond for so long.
Through the broadband connection, he can’t hide what he’s feeling from you; there’s surprise, disbelief, and confusion. He never thought anyone would fight for him, because a fallen prince doesn’t think he deserves warmth. Despite Frieza confirming that his parents didn’t cast him out, but rather were their last beacon of hope, a lifelong self-punishing mindset is hard to break. Your heart breaks for him (though he receives that as a blow to his pride), but you couldn’t care less. He’ll just have to learn how to be loved.
With your eyes shut, you stretch your arms forward—instinctively reaching out to hold him with everything that you are. There’s nothing tangible, no weight in your hands, but your heart wraps around him like a shield. You desperately want him to feel that you see him, that you choose him, with all his emotional firewalls intact, and tsundere nonsense still clinging to him like battle armor.
“It’s okay, Vegeta,” you whisper. “I’ll be here for you. Always. ”
A conflicted wave hits you—a deep, reflexive urge from him to push you away, to shove this unbearable intimacy out of reach. But you don’t falter, standing firm like a pillar.
"Stop fighting it, you stubborn idiot." For once, you're the one who’s standing strong. "I’m telling you that I want you, too—that I accept the bond completely. I’ll give it to you—that whole accidental imprinting thing? Totally t he right call. I didn’t see it at first, because you were such a gigantic ass—but deep down, my instincts longed to reciprocate. From the very start. You probably sensed it, which is why you did it.”
He laughs at your choice of words, and you can feel him choke on sand and blood—but there’s also a flicker of relief from his side, just before he stammers in disbelief, “You… you really mean that, woman?"
You’ve stumbled and hesitated so many times before, but right now, this is the moment where you’ll hold him up. “We may have had a rocky start, but it’s crystal clear to me now: I want you as my ‘mate’, as you call it. Forever."
He falls silent after your declaration because he can literally feel that you mean it with every fiber of your being.
Frieza is still toying with him, throwing him in the direction of his horrible lieutenants like they’re playing handball with his body, before slamming him back into the ground again. But it’s as if he’s completely tuned out what’s happening to him physically.
You squeeze your eyes shut, marveling for a moment at how impossibly strong he is, when suddenly you hear a deafening noise from the battlefield, crackling through the speakers and echoing from afar a second later. Cautiously, you dare to open one eye.
Vegeta lies on the ground, no longer being tossed around, as Goku and Yamcha launch a full-out offensive, bombarding Frieza and his inner circle with a barrage of energy blasts. You’re no expert, but it seems like Goku has undergone a significant power-up, really going all out in the presence of the twin moons. Raditz, however, seems hypnotized, staring at the sky as if he can’t tear himself away from it. And as Yamcha’s voice blares through the speakers, shouting “Bulma, this is for you!” just as he releases an energy beam, you hear her breaking down in tears.
The whirlwind noise of shouting men, landing blows and exploding energy balls fades into the background, and everything goes quiet in your ears as Vegeta breaks through. ‘ Will you be my home?’
Home. That word burns in him like a glowing, festering ember—a weight he’s been carrying, a grief he didn’t know how to express. You can guess what it means—how the idea of belonging might haunt him, after everything he’s lost , but you’ll ask him about it later.”
"That’s all I want," you reply. "I’ll be your home, if you’ll be mine."
Vegeta takes a shaky breath. Almost instinctively, your chest tightens, mirroring the rhythm of his breaths. You feel it—he can’t speak, but you experience, live, how everything aligns for Vegeta, realizing that this whole merging with you is something he didn’t want—yet, somehow, the very thing he needed.
His heart slowing, his breathing deepening, almost to the point of a meditative state, falling into a silence before the storm. You can see it in each rise and fall of his chest, even as he remains lying broken on the ground.
And then something happens. Suddenly, a loud boom echoes through the terracotta rock formations, drowning out all other sounds, and instinctively, you all duck and cover your heads.
It’s not just energy exploding in the sky—it whips up a dry, dusty wind that howls past you. Because you’re breathing through your mouth, you can practically taste the conviction in the grit on your tongue.
The clouds are torn aside in one violent pull, ripping the sky open to reveal the real, earthly moon—a glowing celestial body carved sharply against the darkness of the eclipse. Now, two moons shine above: one massive and artificial, still eclipsing the downing sun; the other, Earth’s waning moon, just past full.
Light swells and bursts forth—golden, molten, radiant—spilling from the core of Vegeta’s body like liquid dawn, flooding a wide desert radius in a blistering glow so intense, it burns your eyes even from this distance. It appears to be the focused intensity of countless starlights condensed into a single, radiant light source. You just barely catch a glimpse of Raditz, his eyes glazed over as he continues to stare skyward, before the screens flare too violently to make out anything beyond shifting silhouettes and shadows.
You’re spellbound, mouth agape, as Vegeta’s scream rips through the veil of reality, like a sound meant for the gods. You feel that whatever comes next is something primordial, profoundly ancient, as though it has been brewing for millennia, waiting for its release. Something that blurs the boundaries between the earthly and the divine, something that transcends the natural limits of this world.
Every fiber of your being is seized by the feeling of Vegeta transforming into something else—but meanwhile, on a few of the screens, Bulma and Chi-Chi watch in shock as a massive creature begins to form. Thick fur expands outward, its silhouette a shaggy contrast against Vegeta’s blinding light. It grows so large that on some screens, Vegeta is completely blocked out.
Everything becomes too chaotic to follow, so you shift your gaze to the distance, where even from here, you can see a GIGANTIC monkey towering over the landscape, still growing, its face lit by the golden glow of Vegeta’s energy, swelling larger with every second. The beast is furious, wild, and it starts with him slamming his fist down where you think Frieza's men are standing.
“What the fuck…” You stammer, blinking, trying to process all the things happening at once. Your brain is practically exploding from sensory overload: Vegeta ascending into something near-ethereal… and a giant monkey flailing wildly in a burst of furry testosterone in the background.
"Yes!" Bulma cries, thrusting her fist into the air. "They’re both transforming!" She whirls around to face you and Chi-Chi, stunned mute with disbelief. "We’re actually going to win this!" Her bright blue eyes glisten with tears of relief, reflecting the kaleidoscope of light beams flaring in the distance.
On screen, Vegeta’s hair ignites like a flame that’s waited a hundred lifetimes to be lit. His golden aura detonates outward, and though King Kong–sized Raditz is already shaking the earth, this makes it tremble even harder.
As if all this weren’t enough madness, Chi-Chi suddenly clutches her stomach beside you, letting out a strangled cry. 'I feel… I feel something move …!' she gasps.
She grabs your hand mid-mayhem, pressing it to her belly so you can feel the ripple too, like she needs confirmation she’s not imagining.
Your eyes widen as a tremor runs through your hand. There’s movement—almost a vibration—like a bullet-sized, but powerful being has just been awakened.
"This… this can’t be real," you utter in disbelief.