He sliced through the silvery dusk, the whistle of the frozen steppe's gale an ominous ringing inside a bell jar of ice and snow. The world this far north would embrace night gradually, stretching its arms out to receive it for months and months until the dark, heavy with its own weight, stifled it for years.

Vegeta stalled above the crash site, flaring his nostrils at the scent of powdery snow acquiescing to the reaching fingers of the equinox. It crept from the warmer climes, dragging the dainty feet of spring. Spring would sprawl out into Summer and then steal the breath from the north, and this empty plain would languish in the bosom of a barren night for several revolving dances around the sun.

And with this planet's change in seasons came the Moon, that velvety and crooning wildness rising to its fullest potential at the height of Midsummer, swelling with promise. It was close, Vegeta could feel it. There was a pulsing, a knowledge buried deep within him like stone under ice that recognized the sanguineous warmth of the moonlight like a shared heart.

At this altitude, the wind lashed at him, but he barely felt it. That which remained of his logic kept him informed: the wind was bitingly cold, and were he a lesser man, he'd have been sucking his teeth and crawling into himself to conserve heat. His other half, the animal half, simply called his ki to a spitting blaze to protect against the elements of this white wasteland.

As far as he could see, the barren earth spread flat like dough all the way to the horizon. Fresh snow, loosened from the most recent snowfall, drifted on the wind, a soughing whippoorwill in his ears. He had become accustomed to the dark—shared a space with it in his pod, harbored it inside his chest on the Nova. He grimaced, narrowing his eyes against the blazing pure expanse.

Steam rose behind him from the small crevasse his pod had created as it impacted and set the dense snow to melting with the force of its descent. It satisfied him to know even the miles of ice floe below would know his fingerprint.

Against brilliant white, Vegeta stood surveying, a black mark upon the earth. His cape snapped behind him as he rose to the air. The landscape was in his nose, snowflakes clinging to his eyelashes and gnawing at his skin, the barbs tolling danger in his chest as he inhaled. But with a predator's certainty, he knew there was nothing within miles to concern him, not even the earth itself. It was his theater, only, and he was its starring lead.

He felt a twitch, and lurched to the right. A moment of confusion, and he understood he was being led that way, perhaps by the crone or the beast or the man, he couldn't say.

The civilized man, with no evidence of his target in sight, deferred to his gut. He didn't care whether it be intuition or instinct, the crone or the beast, that led him to the crumpled, fearful face of his beloved as she laid eyes on him in this glory. Whoever it may be, he would bask singularly in its shared returns.

Vegeta let his sharp teeth show and hurtled northward.

When Bulma opened her eyes, she was curious to see a familiar face hovering over her own.

"Dende?" Her breath hitched, fighting a weight on her chest. "Are you a dream?"

"No, Miss Bulma," his little voice replied. He shook his head and came into focus. "I'm really here." His anxiety was palpable, and more solid at the moment than his own expression as she blinked rapidly.

"Where's here?" She coughed hackingly. The cold had wedged its way deep into her chest after she'd been tossed like both tribute and refuse on the floor.

His lower lip trembled. "I don't know." He was afraid to admit it.

Her own voice was high, cracking with disuse. "Are we dead?"

"This isn't Otherworld," he replied softly, consideringly.

Her gaze rolled over her surroundings and struggled to sit up, limbs creaking. "It's cold."

"Yes."

"Dende." She felt his hand at her back, assisting her. "What happened?" But the panic that thickened the question made it clear she suspected no one could really give her an answer. She gazed at their surroundings blindly. Her head whipped back around as she pinned Dende with a look of cold trepidation. "Why are you here?"

Dende's green face creased with fear. "I think he wants to use me..."

Who? Her foggy mind caught the question as it floated past but couldn't make sense of its significance.

"...to summon the dragon."

"No." It fell out of her mouth heavily. "No, no, no." Her eyes raked the fletched dome, its translucent glass plated in snow above them. The cold was deafening and leached her strength. She couldn't feel her face. "Zarbon," she stammered, the knowledge stymieing into despair.

Vegeta's debts.

"But why are you here, Bulma?" Dende watched her with fear, in the quietly conflicted way of a child. And he was just a child.

She tilted her head on her shoulders, thinking. A tear carved its way down her pale face, ignored. The reaction of a body that hadn't yet learned what the mind knew of its uselessness. "I think...I think I'm bait." The corner of Bulma's mouth twitched downward with emotion. And then her eyes widened. "Where's Bardock?"

"The one who looks like Son Goku?" Dende's curiosity was innocent. "He's in the far corner. He has not yet come to." Dende's eyes slid to their corners, and she followed his gaze to a heap of black in the corner.

The urge to do something fired through her. There was still hope if Bardock was still among the living. "Heal him, Dende," she hissed through her teeth, falling onto her hands and knees to crawl toward her improbable partner. If they were only all awake, if they could spend their precious time brainstorming...She tried lunging to her feet to run but took the brunt of her weight on her knee as her legs buckled, tearing leather.

She lurched forward anyway. "Bardock," she cried, her knuckles dragging against stone before resting on his collapsed shoulders. "Wake up!" Then the panic trilling through her turned hard. "Dende!" Despite her thin voice, it still came out snapping, inarguably a demand.

There was hope yet.

Dende was already on a knee beside her, his hands hovering, for fear or necessity, over Bardock's broad chest as it rose and fell with shallow breaths.

Bardock's eyes fluttered.

"I need a cigarette," he complained before he'd even assessed his surroundings.

Bulma laughed, her hand resting on his shoulder, the tender skin fetching against icy metal cloak snaps. "Silly Saiyan. We need to get out of here."

But as soon as she said it, her face fell.

How?

How would they get out of here, in their condition? How could they pool their sluggish wits and avoid capture again? This world's northern climes stretched on for miles and miles, and Bardock hadn't sufficient ki to fly them. Technology had failed them; their strength, and ingenuity, and efforts, had failed them. What else did they have? Her eyes bounced between the two of them, mouth trembling. Their lives were now contingent on Zarbon, who, without a doubt, had no intention of keeping them alive much longer. She lowered her head, hair falling into her face. "What are we going to do?"

It was a whispered plea in the deaf muteness of an empty cathedral, and even the pupil of a god could offer no encouragement.

He knew he was getting close because he could smell it.

Something leapt in his chest, pounding with the force of his blood as it sang through him on his straight shot north.

Would her skin be cool against his heated tongue, her fire dim beside his own? Or would her blood be as hot as her mouth as he captured it in his? Seduced by the heat of it, the smell of it. His excitement helped close the distance between them.

Some time had passed since he'd cleaved through the snowstorm brewing at the pole, and his visibility was constrained to only the immediately proximate as a gust of wind turned the world white and blinding. The snowflakes were fat against the gunmetal gray dusk, plummeting hard as if the bellies of the clouds had been ripped open by the determined claws of his flight. The snowflakes whipped around him in the gale. He caught one on his tongue, and then smiled brutishly. He was so near.

He shot forward, letting the animal take the reins. The beast would know where to find her, as easily as if led along a line from here to there. It answered with a growl that vibrated his vision.

There.

And that's when he saw it, unveiled from the curtain of snow: a sprawling white palace carved from the valley, rising from the fringes of a rippling mountain chain, its dull gold domes obscured by sleet and dim, gray twilight.

There there there there there

Vegeta felt something like a giggle burble up inside him, and he hacked with laughter, spitting phlegmy blood. Excitement beat at him, his ki exploding outward with anticipation. It unfurled upward and wide, chasing the snow away. Inside beat a song of victory and blood, iron lingering in his nose as a shiver of pleasure wracked him.

Vegeta dropped into the courtyard as graceful as the snowfall around him.

"Where are you, my sneaky cat?" He took a few steps forward, expanding his senses outward with a toothy grin. "Hm?" His head swung in one direction. "Where, oh where, oh where have you gone?" He slid his fingers over his lips, imagining they were her own, supple and open, spreading like her thighs, wet as the blood he'd make weep from the other Saiyan's flesh as he yanked and peeled it from hot muscle. A cloak, you will be, the beast singsonged to the trespassing Saiyan.

His boots rang on stone, hard and icy, and through the valley, the long arm of the path stretched toward the domed entrance. The palace could not have been used in centuries, probably didn't even exist in men's memories. It lay immense and empty as the man before it. Lust encircled him again, for blood, for his woman, leaving those two things indistinguishable in its fire. This was single minded intensity, and no Saiyan expatriate could hold a flame to the strength that flooded him. This was bloodlust, this song of his people, this was Saiyan vengeance, a maw, a bloody wound.

"This is Saiyan strength!" He roared. "Where are you, you hissing cat?!" His voice echoed in the courtyard as he closed in on the great gold door, and bounced off bare, bone white marble.

Neither he nor the beast could sense her. He scowled. "Crone," he snarled. "Where does she hide?"

It is not she who hides.

Vegeta immediately burst into ki in defense, hands fisted cautiously at his shoulders, and not a second too late as laughter skipped across the ruinous expanse.

He bared his teeth, sharp and ivory, viscious black ki congealing around him and spiraling to an arc above him.

He was not alone.

Vegeta's voice was raw, but dangerously teasing. "Who would like to play a game with the Saiyan Prince?" He asked silkily, a taut tenor ringing on bleached stone. "A game of hide and seek? When I find you, we will see how cleanly I can rip your skin from your bones in one go."

"Okay. But be careful not to bring down the house around you." It was a voice as familiar as it was cultured and smooth. And half-mad. "Someone is waiting for you in there. Wouldn't want them crushed."

Vegeta stuttered with shock.

How dare he give him advice?! The beast roared with indignity, causing the ice to shimmy off the windows and shatter on the stone.

"Those are the words of a creature who knows it's prey," the beast growled, thunder rippling through the courtyard. "Come meet the Legendary, you sack of meat."

Vegeta took advantage of the pause as his enemy dithered and pushed the span of his senses outward as far as they'd go. He caught a flicker to the west, but no sooner braced himself to bolt to it, his ki answering its twin call, before he felt a presence lithely settle in front of him.

A familiar beryl face pulled upward into a leering grin, hair tracing his chest like braided seaweed, oily and half-forgotten.

Vegeta's chest heaved with anticipation. Inside him sang the beast, and the crone, and Saiyans across the centuries. He was all things, and he cackled with impish delight. "Hello, pretty boy. You just cannot seem to die, can you?"

"I could say the same of you," Zarbon sniffed.

"We can't all be winners." Vegeta's face splitting grin faded as he pinned Zarbon with a dark look beneath severely drawn brows. "Now where is my woman?"

"Wouldn't you like to know." Zarbon smiled, his face contorting as his body seized around him. Widening, growing, heinously bulging with barely contained, critical danger.

"I have an idea," Vegeta offered, the beast chomping at the bit like a race horse waiting for its door to spring open. "Let's settle this in a fantastic display of your excrement and innards, shall we? I'd like that."

Zarbon lunged toward Vegeta in pale lilac light.

Her eyes drifted upward as thunder tumbled around the dome of the ceiling.

Bulma's palms lay flat against something hard and so far beyond cold that it was as distant as cold to heat, solid and immovable as her despair. But despite the stone inarguable beneath her hands, she felt as if she were suddenly floating, and the fear and the strong sense of self that had braced her all this time began losing its grip and falling from her like scales.

There was a tremble beneath her, a roar with such low decibles that she was certain no one else but her could hear. A calling, an urge to ascend, even as the floor seemed to drop out from her and the pale, muted light darkened at the corners of her vision.

Her head was cobwebby. She shook it to free it, heard her name called distantly.

The ceiling was a dome above her; its silence rang in her ears.

She inhaled hard, chest constricting painfully at the movement, her nails biting into her numb palms.

"I can't touch it," someone was pleading far above her. "It's not something I can heal!"

"Vegeta," she uttered, the sound of her own voice muffled inside her head. A prayer, splintered and dull, cutting a valley through the fog of her head.

Bardock stiffened at the corner of her vision.

"He's here."

And she bolted upright, surveying the room, milky alabaster and sprawling, tumbled marble, dull gold sconces. She stepped forward, once, twice. His name dropped from her mouth like a stone into water, with the conviction that he should appear, like a demon, upon the recitation of his name.

"Bulma," Bardock called, and it was a warning, red and thrumming at the edge of her vision.

Vegeta, she thought, her hands opening, outstretching.

There.

She turned, and a smear of black caught at her periphery. The crone, at her side, facing ahead.

He waits. The crone's stare gripped her with pale white eyes.

Bulma began walking.