Gine and Kakarot spent the first three days of the trip to Namek training in ever-increasing gravity, accompanied by an ever-increasing tension. Kakarot was being careful with her in a way he'd never done in his life. Not physically—he was as rowdy as ever during their training, and he laughed when she walloped him for a solid day just because she was used to higher gravity than he was.

But in the in-between moments, the rest breaks and the meal times, he would watch her, and he said very little. It was almost eerie, but the last piece of advice Grandpa Gohan had given her before his final farewell was to let him bring it up. She did not ask what 'it' was. She had already guessed there was something specific troubling her son, and apparently he'd already sought his grandfather's advice and had not been satisfied. Whatever it was, only she could give him closure.

On the fourth day, after their morning training, Kakarot flopped down on the floor, wiping his face with a towel, breathing hard. Then, once he caught his breath, he slowly straightened, stiffening his back and pulling his legs in cross legged.

"Ma?"

Here it came.

"Yes?" she said mildly.

"Well… You said Saiyans were bad." Kakarot looked down, picking at the laces of his boots. "An' King Kai tol' me some stuff they did. An' it was real bad. And so I was wonderin'... My pa… Was he… bad? To you?"

Gine hesitated, unsure how to answer. Bardock hadn't been a good partner, by Earth standards— heck, by Earth standards he hadn't been a partner at all— but for a Saiyan he'd been above average—

And then it hit her what Kakarot was really asking, and she blanched.

"Oh! Oh, no. No, he— it wasn't like that. He was—"

Gine was appalled. What a thing to be burdened with. Where had he gotten such an idea? From King Kai? According to Kakarot, King Kai was some sort of hammer-wielding cricket. Or perhaps an ape, though he'd assured her he'd seen no Saiyans during his stay in the world of the dead. But in his deluge of storytelling Kakarot had never once mentioned King Kai telling tales. Did a god who lived ten thousand miles from anywhere even know anything about Saiyans?

Kakarot bit his lip, and Gine pulled her mind back to the problem at hand: how to make him understand?

Her coupling with Bardock had been mutual; most Saiyan couplings were. Saiyans enjoyed a challenge, and for most of them, someone weak enough to coerce would have been too unappealing to bother with. But to say Bardock had been good to her would be to vastly misrepresent what they had been to each other.

"He saved my life," she said, partly to stall for time. "A lot."

Kakarot brightened. "Really?"

Having one's life saved by one's lover did have romantic overtones to humans— their storybooks were full of such things. But a Saiyan saving another Saiyan's life was at best a friendly tease and at worst a deadly insult. A proper Saiyan wasn't supposed to need saving in the first place.

"He was always so cool about it," she went on. At seventeen she'd been breathless with the way he'd swoop in, take out an entire army, and fly away to the next engagement without so much as a glance at her. It wouldn't sound romantic to an Earthling, but his immense strength together with the absence of scorn had been enough to send her head over heels.

Still, she wouldn't have been brave enough to act on her infatuation, until one day he actually made conversation with her. It had only been something like, "Hey, how's your arm?" when it had been bleeding the last time he'd seen her, but the fact that he'd noticed, that he'd actually asked about it, had given rise to a thousand girlish fantasies.

And then, when they'd found themselves alone together, and she had, without hardly meaning to, brushed the back of her neck with the tip of her tail in a silent invitation, he had, just as silently, taken her by the waist and—

Kakarot giggled, and Gine was mortified to realize she'd been sitting there with her cheeks flushed and a dreamy look on her face for who knows how long.

"Shut up," she said, giving him a good shove. He fell over, still smiling.

"So he was good to ya, huh?"

"That's enough out of you," she said, trying to be stern and failing. She could not stop smiling, partly from embarrassment, partly just because Kakarot was. He teased her and she punched him and they grappled despite their exhaustion, Kakarot alight with a buoyant joy she hadn't seen in months, back to himself at last.

That night, Gine lay awake thinking of her other encounter with Bardock.

She hadn't seen him in years, and she'd been prepping meat in the mess hall when he came sauntering into the kitchen, ignoring the head cook's stammering pleas for him to leave.

"Hey, Gine," he said, like they'd seen each other yesterday. "C'mon, let's go do something. The others all took a mission while I was in the tank, and they're already on their way back, so I have nothing to do."

Gine was a little older, a little wiser, a little more beat down by life, but she found herself just as tongue-tied as she'd been at seventeen.

"I— I—"

"C'mon, we can go cloud-hopping."

It was blatant slang for what he really wanted to do, and Gine blushed.

"I'm— working," she stammered. "My boss…"

She glanced at the bright yellow being, who daily threatened to fire her despite being his best worker. Bardock snorted.

"What's he gonna do, kill you? You're a Saiyan." He made a fist. "He gives you trouble, just remind him of it."

She'd gone with him. What else could she have done? 'You're a Saiyan.' They were perhaps the kindest words anyone had ever said to her.

Lying awake on her way to Namek, Gine did not think about what Bardock had said a few months later when she told him she was pregnant.

"Huh. Maybe this one won't be such a failure."

A/N: BUT MASAKO! You said you'd do a Gine/Bardock relationship video and you never did! Unsubscribe! ;)