Chapter Text
Frieza dies screaming. The sound flays the throne room raw—shrill with rage, split open by disbelief—then cuts off so fast it feels torn away. Silence slams into its place, worse somehow.
Vegeta stands perfectly still.
For one warped second, the body stays standing, as if spite alone is holding it upright. Then it folds. Frieza’s corpse hits the polished floor with a wet, ugly crack. The impact splits the already shattered carapace across his chest wider, peeling open like something butchered. Blue blood spills outward in a widening fan, steaming faintly where it touches the cold metal tiles.
No one breathes.
His pink rat-like tail twitches once like a dead snake’s last dying reflex—its purple tip slapping and dragging through the spreading blood.
This is not how Vegeta imagined it. In every version she had kept alive in the dark, Frieza looked at her before he died. He knew. He broke with wide eyes and a broken voice, her hand through his chest. Fear, finally—real and animal and earned. Not this. She waits for triumph, but nothing comes. Only quiet where the hatred used to live. Even this, he stole from her.
Vegeta’s jaw tightens. Pathetic. All that power, all that terror, all those worlds made to kneel—and still the tyrant died like any other beast: bleeding, twitching meat on metal.
She steps forward at a measured pace. Her white boots ring against the metal floor, striking with hard, ringing clicks that carry through the chamber like a countdown. Up close, he barely takes up any space at all. The body that eclipsed planets lies broken at her feet.
No one looks at the throne, not at first. But fear moves through the room the way blood does—a slow, inevitable creep, impossible not to follow. One by one, their eyes begin to rise. Vegeta’s gaze reaches the throne last.
The throne is not empty. It is already occupied. One black nail drags over the armrest with a sound too soft to belong to a room this silent. Blue blood clings to his fingers, he flicks it away. Cooler sits where his brother once did. The crown of his own bone above his head scrapes faintly against the throne’s back as he leans, his size and spiked bio-armour forcing him to settle at an angle. Even seated, he is enormous; the throne barely contains him.
He inspects his hand first—black nails curved like claws, blood drying navy in the seams. Then he glances down at his little brother’s corpse. His tail slides with a lazy and terrible ease across the floor and nudges the body aside. Frieza rolls across the floor with a wet drag of ruined armour and cooling blood, discarded like refuse swept from a step.
“Hmph. He always insisted on making a spectacle of himself,” Cooler says.
His voice is wrong in the room—deep beyond reason, a slow grinding resonance that fills the chamber without needing to rise.
“All that screaming at the end—how undignified.”
No one laughs.
Except Vegeta. The sound escapes her before she can kill it—sharp and brief and vicious as a bite.
Cooler’s gaze lifts, and the soldiers lining the chamber hesitate for a fraction too long before dropping to one knee. Two court attendants near the dais sink down so quickly one nearly slips in Frieza’s blood.
Vegeta stays where she is. Still standing, she folds her arms across her chest.
Cooler rests his chin against one knuckle, focus drifting across the room as if sorting wreckage, passing over kneeling bodies, lowered heads, the blood. Then it finds her, and stops. His glowing eyes—solid red and depthless—move over her, clinical and exact as inventory.
Vegeta tilts her chin and meets his stare head-on. She doesn’t blink.
Cooler’s segmented mouthplate retracts with an unnatural sound, carrying easily in the silence.
“I had assumed my brother trained his pets,” he pauses, “better.”
Vegeta shows her teeth. “I’m not his pet.”
Cooler tilts his head, as though this is new information. His gaze flicks once to Frieza’s corpse.
“Well,” he says mildly, “he’s in no position to argue the point.”
A few court attendees laugh. They stop the instant he does not.
Vegeta’s weight shifts forward. Her eyes settle on the exposed line of his throat, fingers curling once at her sides.
Cooler’s gaze drops to her feet. Then her hands. Then the set of her jaw. Then his mouth curves.
“Yes,” he murmurs. “You may prove useful.”
A lazy gesture in her direction: barely more than a flick of two blood-darkened fingers. So slight it barely registers across his form—yet the whole room shifts around it. Every eye in the throne room turns to her as if pulled by gravity. Every kneeling body goes tighter.
“Remove the collar.”
No one moves.
Cooler exhales through his nose. “Must I repeat myself?”
The nearest guard jerks like he’s been struck. He stumbles forward, fumbles for the control release with sweat-slick trembling hands. For one ugly second his fingers slip. Then—a clean click splits the silence, sharp and final.
The metal ring drops from Vegeta’s throat and strikes the floor with a hard, ringing clatter that cuts through the chamber. The guard falls and crawls backwards. Several soldiers recoil from her before they can stop themselves, boots squabbling back over blood-slick metal.
The collar settles at her feet. Cool air touches the skin it once sealed. Vegeta goes motionless. Cooler watches her small hand rise and pause at her throat.
“Your previous master is dead,” he says.
He leans back in the throne.
“You will answer to me.”
Vegeta lifts her head—and she laughs. The sound is raw.
“You think that makes me yours?”
Cooler’s mouth curves. “By all means.”
Vegeta moves without warning, without even a shift of breath. One instant she is standing at the foot of the dais, and the next she is on the steps in a blur of black and blue and white and murder. By the time the nearest guard’s hands reach their weapons, she is already there. Even from the top step, she barely reaches his chest plate.
She goes for his throat anyway.
It isn’t enough. Her forearm vanishes inside his grip, swallowed to the bone. The force of her lunge shudders through her shoulder and dies there. Cooler turns her wrist, slow in his hand, testing the bones under his grip.
“No hesitation at all,” he says. “Good.”
Vegeta snarls and throws her free hand at his face.
Cooler catches the second strike as easily as the first. Now both her wrists are locked in his hands, her arms held wide. She strains hard enough for the tendons to stand out in her forearms. He does not pull her closer so much as reposition her—one wrist twisted, the other pinned, her body angled where he wants it. Vegeta braces for pain—it does not come. Instead he inspects the line of her arm, the set of her shoulder, the failed path of the blow.
“Your strike lacked precision,” he says, and he corrects her wrist a single inch.
“There.”
Vegeta goes rigid.
Then she snaps forward and slams her forehead into his face. Teeth bared, all the old, feral spite in her body. The crack echoes through the throne room.
Several soldiers flinch.
Cooler’s head shifts half an inch. But his grip loosens for the smallest fraction, and a thin line of blue blood runs from the corner of his black lips. It cuts down his unguarded chin in a bright, ugly strike. Cooler tastes the blood. Then he goes very still. The glow of his red eyes sharpens.
“So,” he says softly, blue blood bright against his mouth, “there is at least one Saiyan left of use.”
His grip reseals around her wrists. The ease is still there, but the indulgence is gone.
Vegeta tips her head back to hold his gaze, trembling with the effort to tear free—yet she drives upward again. The motion brings her too close. She feels his breathing before she registers the sound of it. Impossibly slow and even and utterly calm, as if restraining her costs him nothing.
“Should I expect biting as well?” Cooler deadpans.
“Give me a reason,” she hisses.
Without thought, her tail coils around his knee, then drags along the heavy line of his thigh. Bristling fur rasps over smooth, cold, scaled violet skin. Vegeta goes dead still. Cooler’s eyes flick down at once, and his grip cinches tighter. Then she tears her tail back as if contact itself burns. Her mouth twists. She bucks once against his hold, violent and useless, her pupils narrowed to needlepoints.
“Kill me,” she spits. “And be done with it.”
He considers it. His attention shifts to Frieza’s corpse cooling on the floor, then back to her.
“No.”
Vegeta stops struggling.
“If I intended to erase every problem my brother created, I would have killed you before he finished screaming,” Cooler says.
Vegeta smiles without parting her lips. A canine presses white against the corner of her mouth.
“Your mistake.”
Cooler’s focus drops to the strain in her body as she fights against his hold like something half-wild trying to tear its own leg out of a trap. He lifts her only a fraction. He releases one wrist only for an instant—and one finger comes to rest at her throat.
Vegeta jerks hard against him, tail lashing.
Cooler’s gaze catches on the crest carved into her armour.
“Saiyan royalty,” he says softly.
For the first time, his attention leaves her and moves across the room instead—over the kneeling subjects, the lowered heads, the corpse at the foot of the dais, the blood, the silence. Half the room lowers their eyes at once. Somewhere near the back, something metal slips from numb fingers and hits the floor with a sharp clatter. The sound skids through the silence and stays there. No one dares retrieve it.
“That explains the insolence.”
Vegeta lunges for his hand with her teeth. Cooler withdraws his hand an instant before they meet.
“Release me,” she snarls. “Or I tear you apart!”
Then she drives a knee toward him—not wild, not desperate, but precise. Cooler answers by lifting her higher by the remaining wrist clear of the throne. She kicks once on reflex, robbed of force before it can land.
Cooler holds her aloft in one hand and lets the room look.
“You tried to kill me,” he says.
Vegeta wets one canine with her tongue. “I’m not done.”
Cooler looks at her again. His thumb settles over the pulse in her wrist—exactly where a restraint would sit.
“Yes,” he says quietly. “Then the matter is settled.”
His fingers tighten until she stills.
“She remains.”
Ki flashes hot under her skin, looking for violence. Vegeta meets his eyes. Her lip curls, peeling back from her teeth.
“I am not kept.”
Cooler studies her.
“In time,” he says.
Then he releases her.
Vegeta drops the distance and hits the floor hard, shock driving through her knees and up her spine. She does not stumble. She does not step back. Her chin lifts and she looks straight at him, already readying another strike.
Cooler tracks the movement.
“Hm,” he says. “You are troublesome.”
Vegeta smiles. All teeth.
“You haven’t seen troublesome yet.”
Cooler’s smile widens slowly.
⋆⭒˚.⋆
By morning’s end, the throne room is full of corpses. Vegeta counts the first ten. After that, she stops bothering.
Cooler never rushes. A gesture, a flicker of violet light, and another body hits the floor. He watches her. The room keeps sinking until she is the only thing left standing. Every time she looks up, someone else is already dying. Vegeta has not moved to kill again, but not because the impulse is gone. Cooler keeps finding something else to slaughter first.
Even the Ginyu Force kneel when they arrive. Cooler lifts one finger. One unborn excuse earns five bodies.
Cooler tilts his head, focusing on the smoke curling from the bodies. Then he loses interest.
“I have little patience for inherited incompetence,” Cooler says.
Armour blackens. Flesh burns. No one reaches for the dead. The remaining soldiers along the walls stare at the floor.
“Dispose of that.”
He does not specify which body.
Cooler’s gaze drifts across the room again. It finds Vegeta and stays there. Then his mouth curves, just slightly.
“At least he failed to ruin everything.”
Vegeta does not look at the bodies.
“You assume too much.”
Frieza’s body still lies twisted at the base of the throne. Beside him, the Ginyu Force is strewn across the floor in pieces of colour and armour.
At the far end of the chamber, the doors grind open again. Two Saiyans enter.
Nappa strides in first, broad-chested and loose with confidence, heavy boots echoing across the chamber. Raditz gets one step farther and stops dead.
Vegeta sees the moment he understands. His nostrils flare once. His eyes catch on the bodies, the throne, and the creature sitting on it.
Cooler hasn’t moved from the throne. His tail drags once across the floor beside him, heavy enough that Vegeta can hear the faint scrape of scales on metal. It stops the instant she goes taut.
A guard near the doors lowers his rifle without taking his eyes off the throne.
Then Nappa bares his teeth in a wild grin.
“Well,” he says, voice already swelling, “looks like the boss finally got—”
Cooler sighs. It is a small sound—almost weary.
Raditz drops to one knee so fast it’s like a flinch. The sharp crack of a knee plate against metal punches through the chamber. He doesn’t look at the throne. He looks at Vegeta first. Instinct before thought, troop before terror.
“Princess,” he murmurs, low and immediate.
Vegeta’s lip twitches once—not fear, almost a snarl. She doesn’t kneel.
Nappa scowls at them both, shoulders bunching.
“What’s wrong with—”
Nappa turns toward the throne.
The sentence ends in violet light. His body jerks and collapses. The hole through his chest is perfectly round.
Raditz’s head lowers another inch.
Cooler’s gaze drifts to Vegeta’s hands.
On the throne, he shifts his weight—the spikes along his back forcing him to settle slightly sideways again. Bone-white armour grinds softly as the spike beneath his elbow drags across the metal. His tail slides across the floor. Then it hooks against Nappa’s corpse and flicks it aside. The body skids across the metal, limp and heavy, until it bumps against the other corpses with a dead, ugly sound. Cooler watches it come to rest.
“Remarkable,” Cooler says.
“Your race did produce formidable soldiers. Unfortunately, it also produced an alarming number of idiots. I was told Saiyans possessed survival instincts.”
Raditz kisses the floor.
Cooler glances down at him.
“Good. One of you remembers how.”
His gaze lifts again and settles on Vegeta. She still hasn’t moved. The corner of his mouth pulls, not quite a smile.
“This day,” he says quietly, “has corrected more than one disappointment.”
His tail stills on the floor. He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t look away.
“Come here.”