The conversation happened at the crater’s edge, in the early morning with the farmland silent around them and the distant sound of a farm truck on a road a kilometer away doing nothing to make the situation feel less strange.
Tien had positioned himself deliberately — between Raditz and the direction of Goku’s homestead, not blocking access but establishing that the direction existed and was protected.
Krillin and Yamcha flanked the crater at angles that created a natural enclosure.
Chiaotzu floated at the rim’s south edge with the specific quality of stillness that meant he was ready rather than waiting.
Goku had come down from the crater’s edge to stand on the flattened farmland below the rim, closer to Raditz than anyone else, and the geometry of Goku’s position — between Raditz and the pod — was itself a communication.
Raditz had not moved to re-enter the pod.
This was the first meaningful data point.
“You said a different conversation,” Raditz said to Tien.
“About what I want.”
“Yes.”
“What makes you think I want something other than what I was sent for?”
“You haven’t attacked,” Tien said.
“You have a power level of thirteen hundred and forty.
Your scouter is broken, so you’re working from ki sense alone, and your ki sense is telling you that the people on this rim range from eleven hundred to eight thousand, with me at approximately thirty-eight hundred.” He paused.
“You’re a professional.
You’re calculating odds.
And the odds are telling you that attacking right now produces an outcome you don’t come back from.”
Raditz’s expression was controlled in the way of someone who has been told something accurate that they would have preferred to be inaccurate.
“I’ve fought worse odds,” he said.
“Maybe,” Tien said.
“But not for a retrieval mission.
Not when the primary target is voluntarily not attacking you.” He looked at Raditz steadily.
“Goku hasn’t moved.
He’s giving you space.
Why do you think that is?”
Raditz looked at Goku.
Goku met his eyes.
There was something in Goku’s expression that Tien had noticed since the moment Raditz had emerged from the pod and hadn’t quite been able to name.
It wasn’t warmth exactly.
It wasn’t the instinctive open goodwill that Goku extended to everyone.
It was something more careful — the specific attention of someone who is looking at a person they have been told is family and is trying to reconcile what they were told with what they actually feel.
“Because he’s Goku,” Tien said, when Raditz didn’t answer.
“And Goku doesn’t attack people who haven’t attacked him.
Even people who come here to take him away from his family.”
Raditz was very quiet for a moment.
Then he said, and his voice had something in it that his professional manner had been successfully keeping out: “He doesn’t know what he is.”
“He knows more than you’d expect,” Tien said.
“But no.
He was raised here.
By a human.
He doesn’t have Saiyan culture, Saiyan history, Saiyan anything except biology.”
“And yet,” Raditz said, looking at Goku’s power level — invisible to him now without the scouter, but felt, the 8,200 radiating like a furnace at this range.
“Eight thousand.” He said the number with a quality that was impossible to fully categorize — professional respect, something like disbelief, and underneath both, something that was more complicated.
“It surprises you,” Tien said.
“It shouldn’t exist,” Raditz said.
“A low-class warrior sent to a gravity well below Saiyan standard, raised among weak-ki natives, with no battle experience against real opponents — his power level should be in the hundreds.
The upper hundreds if he trained consistently.” He paused.
“Not eight thousand.”
“Why not?” Goku asked.
It was the first time Goku had spoken since saying his name, and the directness of the question — guileless, genuinely curious, the voice of someone who actually wanted the answer — seemed to catch Raditz slightly off-balance.
“Because that’s not how Saiyan development works,” Raditz said.
“Power is built through combat.
Real combat.
Against opponents who push you to your limit.
Through near-death and recovery, through the zenkai, through—” He stopped.
His eyes narrowed slightly.
“Unless.
Unless you have people around you who can push you.”
He looked at Tien.
Tien said nothing.
“That’s what you’ve been doing,” Raditz said slowly.
“You’ve been—” He was constructing the picture in real time, the professional part of his mind running the analysis even while the personal part was doing something more complicated.
“You knew I was coming.
You knew what I was.
You’ve spent years making sure there were fighters here who could push him.” He paused.
“You built a training ground for my brother.”
“For everyone,” Tien said.
“But yes.
For Goku especially.”
Raditz stared at him.
“Why?”
“Because what comes after you,” Tien said carefully, “requires him to be as strong as possible.
And because what comes after you will try to destroy this world unless he’s strong enough to stop it.”
A long silence.
The farm truck on the distant road had gone.
The birds that had scattered at the pod’s impact had not returned.
The morning was very still.
“Vegeta,” Raditz said.
It was not a question.
Tien met his eyes and did not answer.
Raditz looked at the ground.
It was, Tien thought, the most human gesture he’d made since emerging from the pod — not the professional fighter’s controlled posture, not the Saiyan warrior’s ready stance, but the gesture of a person looking at the ground because the ground is stable when other things aren’t.
“You know about Vegeta,” Raditz said.
“You know he’s coming here.”
Silence.
“You know what he does to planets that have something he wants.”
Tien said, very carefully: “I know enough to understand that the only thing standing between this world and what Vegeta would do to it is Goku.
And I have spent three and a half years making sure Goku is strong enough to stand there.”
Raditz looked up from the ground.
He looked at Goku.
Goku was looking back at him with that expression — the careful attention, the attempt to reconcile.
Then Goku said: “Do you want to stay?”
The question hit the morning air and stayed there.
Nobody moved.
Raditz’s face did something complicated and then stopped moving entirely, held in the careful stillness of someone managing a response that they are not yet ready to have.
“That’s not—” he started.
“I’m not asking if you were planning to,” Goku said.
“I’m asking if you want to.” This story is hosted at g.com.
The answer was not simple and it did not come quickly.
Raditz did not say yes.
He did not say no.
He stood at the edge of his landing crater in the morning light with his broken scouter and his Saiyan armor and his improbable long hair and he was silent for long enough that the silence itself became an answer of a kind.
What Tien watched, in that silence, was a person running a calculation that had more variables than their professional framework was built to accommodate.
Raditz had been sent on a retrieval mission.
The retrieval target had a power level of 8,200.
The planet’s fighters included at least two others above one thousand.
The person who appeared to be coordinating all of this had demonstrated foreknowledge of Raditz’s arrival, knew about Vegeta, and was sitting at approximately thirty-eight hundred with what the scouter had read as a ki signature of unusual density before it cracked.
The mission, as briefed, was no longer executable.
But that was the professional calculation.
The other calculation — the one running underneath it, the one that had made Raditz’s voice go briefly complicated when he’d said he doesn’t know what he is — that was something else.
“I have a communication device in the pod,” Raditz said finally.
“Vegeta expects a status report.”
“What will you tell him?” Tien asked.
Raditz looked at the pod.
At the seam where it had split on impact, the interior dim and metallic.
He looked at it with the expression of someone looking at an obligation they are reconsidering.
“I don’t know yet,” he said.
“That’s the most honest thing anyone’s said this morning,” Yamcha said from the rim, and he said it without heat, with something that was almost wry, and Raditz looked up at him with an expression that might, in a different context, with a great deal of time and different circumstances, become something recognizable as a reaction to humor.
“I’ll need time,” Raditz said.
“To think.”
“How much time?” Tien said.
“A day.”
Tien looked at him.
At the broken scouter and the professional posture and whatever was happening underneath both.
He thought about the original timeline — about Gohan being grabbed, about the desperation of that confrontation, about Goku dying in the hold with his brother on a muddy plain while Piccolo’s Special Beam Cannon went through both of them.
He thought about what the original Raditz had been in that moment — cornered, professional, without options — and what this Raditz was, which was something different, something that had not yet resolved into its final shape.
“One day,” Tien said.
“But I want to make something clear.”
Raditz looked at him.
“Goku’s family is not a leverage point,” Tien said.
“His son.
His wife.
If at the end of your day of thinking you decide the mission takes priority — that’s a fight you lose, and I mean that literally, not as a threat.
But if the thought of using them occurs to you, I want you to understand that it changes what happens to you afterward.
In ways I am not currently planning on.” He held Raditz’s eyes.
“Goku has given you something you didn’t come here expecting, which is space.
I’m asking you to respect what that space is for.”
Raditz looked at him for a long moment.
“You’re very confident,” Raditz said.
“I have three and a half years of preparation and a power level of thirty-eight hundred,” Tien said.
“Confidence is appropriate.”
Something happened at the corner of Raditz’s mouth.
It was not a smile.
It was the twitch of the muscles adjacent to a smile, in someone for whom smiling in this context would require a recalibration of self that they hadn’t made yet.
“One day,” Raditz said.
He turned and walked back toward the pod.