What You Need
He twisted in midair, body already committing to the same devastating strike that had failed him four times. Muscles remembered the pattern even as his mind screamed that it was wrong. The air ripped around him, hiss of shockwaves, the roar of his own ki in his ears—
"There! Behind you, Kakarot!"
The voice cut clean through everything.
It wasn’t the blow that broke him. It was the realization, a split-second too late, of what he’d missed. Of what he had missed.
Dirt-eating pool. The phrase rose from some filthy corner of his memory, an old insult for the cheapest kind of trick. The lowest form of scoundrel’s fighting. He, the Prince of all Saiyans, felled by the kind of move a gutter-bred Earthling brawler would use in a back alley.
The surprise was absolute. The impact almost irrelevant.
The shame, however, arrived on time.
It hit like a second blast—hot, corrosive, licking around his spine as he crashed into the rock below. It was not, he realized—it could not be—an error of ki control. His senses had been sharp, his power honed, his timing precise. No. This was a flaw of character. A blind spot only pride can dig.
The low road always finds its mark.Vermine.His aura snapped out. Gold bled away to black, hair falling around his face as he lay in the shallow crater his body had carved. His fingers twitched against broken stone while the white-hot fury fought with the pounding inside his skull.
Boots tapped down on the edge of the impact, the sound almost dainty compared to the devastation.
A low chuckle drifted over him, light and infuriating, like wind chimes badly played.
"What's the matter, Kakarot? Something got you down?"
He didn’t have to look up to see the smirk. The insult of it was so pure it was nearly art. The Sun standing over the fallen prince, too pleased with his own cheap victory to realize how deep the cut had gone.
Vegeta forced himself upright, every movement an order barked at disobedient muscles. He folded his arms because he refused to not fold them, even now, rooted by sheer pride. Kakarot hovered above the crater edge, shoulders relaxed, tail-less silhouette framed by the sky like a careless god.
"Dammit, Vegeta! You fight like a five-year-old when things don't go your way!" Goku’s growl carried down, low and frayed.
He shot upward out of the pit, dust spiraling in his wake. The anger in his eyes was different—not righteous outrage, but something taut and focused, locked on the smaller warrior. Vegeta met it with the only armor he had left.
"I will fight any damned way I please to win, Kakarot," he snapped, every syllable sharpened. "There is no honor in losing. Only the victor gets to write the definition of ‘honorable’."
He heard his own voice and recognized the ugliness in it. He heard the defense of method—because the result had failed.
He couldn’t defend the failure.
He flicked a speck of dust from his glove, ignoring the blood and sweat smeared over the knuckles. The gesture was ritual: restore the image, even if the substance was cracked. But something in the air shifted. The big idiot’s chin dropped slightly; the line of his mouth tightened. The stare he fixed on Vegeta wasn’t his usual easy challenge. It had that animal intensity he usually reserved for the brink between life and death.
"I know what you need, Vegeta."
The words were simple. No plan in them, no speech. Just a bare observation spoken aloud, like noting the weather.
Vegeta’s shoulders stiffened. Ki curled tighter around Kakarot, not flaring, not quite. A brittle tension, an edge of something unshed and focused entirely on him.
"
You need a lesson."
The Prince almost laughed. A lesson? From this third-class clown who’d just won with a trick? The derision climbed his tongue—and stopped. Instinct, older than rank or language, told him something in that gaze wasn’t about punishment or fairness.
Kakarot wasn’t looking at a cheater.
He was staring at a problem.
An interesting, new kind of energy source. Like a strange pressure point he’d accidentally hit in Vegeta’s ki and now couldn’t stop poking.
One white boot scraped against stone as Vegeta shifted his stance, spine lengthening, hair spiking a fraction higher with the growing pulse of his power. He flared again, aura scratching blue-white along his limbs, ready to erase the humiliation with brute force.
Kakarot’s power answered instantly, surging upward, too fast, too eager. The jagged locks flashed gold again as the aura exploded around him, licking at the air.
"NNAAAAAHH!! Come back here, you cheater!"
Vegeta shot away, more reflex than tactic—a retreat that felt like dodging a blow he hadn’t seen. It tasted wrong in his mouth even as he did it. Behind him, Goku roared after, frustration mounting not because Vegeta had cheated, but because the chase had begun and might end too quickly.
He didn’t want the fight over.
He wanted the tension back.
A hand thrust out, ki flaring. The blast caught the Prince between the shoulder blades, not at full strength but with enough force to send him tumbling across the ground in an undignified scatter of limbs and armor.
Before he could drag breath into his lungs, Goku was on him—weight dropping, shadow swallowing the rock, a low rumble beginning in the broad chest above him.
Vegeta bared his teeth.
The imbecile.
"Get off me, kisama!! Third-class idiot!!"
He thrashed with genuine fury, struggling to break the grip clamped around his wrists. He twisted, kicked, cursed, his body full of the old, clean rage of refusing to yield. It didn’t matter. Kakarot’s strength wrapped around him with the same unconscious certainty he used to hold back a world-ending blast.
It wasn’t malice. That was somehow worse.
It was just that this was how much power his rival had to spare.
"Like I said, Vegeta, I know what you need."
The smirk that pulled at Kakarot’s mouth was not mocking in the usual way. It was bright, almost delighted, like a child who’d found a new game piece that responded when prodded. His eyes—greener in that light than Vegeta liked to remember—caught, narrowed with a savage curiosity that made the Prince’s heart slam painfully once against his ribs.
He swallowed. Hard.
The rumble of Kakarot’s words was too close, warm breath hitting the curve of his ear. For a fragment of a moment, the purpose of the struggle slid sideways. Not escape. Not victory. Just the urge to drown out that voice, to interrupt that gaze.
"First," Kakarot murmured, "you need to be taught a little etiquette lesson."
The Prince snapped back into motion, redoubling ses efforts to break free. The raw, frantic energy of his thrashing seemed to thrill the larger warrior, not warn him off. Vegeta could feel the idiot’s excitement spike, tracking every jerk and twist as if they were cues in some silent choreography.
"I think somewhere a little less… loud… will do, don't you, Vegeta?"
The calm way he said it—like they were choosing a restaurant—set Vegeta’s teeth on edge. The ki between them coiled tighter, looking for a place to go. This energy would crack the battlefield if they let it.
Kakarot made his choice.
Ignoring the inarticulate growls and perfectly articulate obscenities spilling from the fuming Prince, he lifted one hand, pressed two fingers to his forehead, and concentrated.
The world snapped.
For one dizzy instant, Vegeta felt everything—field, sky, broken stone—yanked sideways like a tablecloth. Then there was nothing but the press of Kakarot’s shoulder against his stomach, the iron band of an arm around his legs, and the rush of—different air.
They rematerialized with a soft pop, the violence of the teleport absurdly at odds with the softness of the place they landed.
Vegeta’s fists were already hammering at the broad back beneath him.
"Bakayaro! Kisama! Put me down!"
The blows landed, sharp, useless. Kakarot barely flinched, grunting now and then as much in acknowledgement as in discomfort. The idiot noticed them, at least. The change in the air slid in only gradually—cooler, heavier, moist. The soundscape shifted from emptiness and wind to something cluttered: birdsong, water, the low hiss of leaves.
He dragged his attention up for the first time since the teleport.
They stood at the edge of a narrow streambed, trees leaning in close overhead. The air was thick with the smell of moss and wet stone, the ground soft where his boots scraped.
It was wrong.
"Where the hell are we??"
The question tore out of him not on a wave of rage, but on a cold spike of clarity. This was not a training ground. Not a battle plateau or a stretch of wasteland. This was soft Earth, undefended. A place where his son might play. A place where he should never fall.
He realized with acid disgust that for a heartbeat, he had not been looking with the eyes of a warrior.
He’d seen it as a father.
"Oh, this is someplace I've been saving for a special occasion, Vegeta."
Kakarot’s amused tone floated over his back, too light for the moment. Before Vegeta could spit an answer, a sharp slap landed on the curve of his armor.
The sound cracked the damp air.
It wasn’t the force—that was nothing. It was the casualness of it. Not a strike to injure. A tap. A mark. As simple and obscene as a child tapping a toy to say mine.
Vegeta’s head snapped up with a yelp he would have denied to his dying breath—just in time to collide with the rocky lip of an overhang as Kakarot hauled him forward.
White blanked his vision. Stone bit into his skull. The birdsong snapped to a remote, tinny echo as pain rang in his head like a bell.
"Kisama!" He clutched the back of his head, thrashing harder. This was familiar rage, clean and bright.
Kakarot’s laughter bounced strangely around them as the light dimmed. He’d dragged them into the shallow hollow carved beneath the streamside rock, stepping sure-footed over uneven stone as if he’d done this walk in his head a hundred times.
"Oh come on, Vegeta, it's your own fault for trying to get away," he chided, unbothered. "Besides, it can't hurt that much."
Vegeta blinked against the haze and finally saw the place Kakarot had chosen.
It wasn't a cave proper, no gaping maw of darkness. The stream had chewed at the underside of the rock shelf over years, patiently gouging out a broad, low chamber. A few leaning pillars, furred with vines, half-screened the entrance from the outside world.
Sunlight filtered through green, breaking into shifting patterns across the slanted floor. Thick moss and creeping plants had colonized the stone, turning it into a soft, irregular carpet. Here and there, the rock still showed smooth and bare where water had once run stronger. From the deeper shadow at the back, a slow, irregular drip marked the river’s continuing work.
It was not a hell.
It was worse.
A soft refuge. A silent hollow where noise would be swallowed, not carried. A place you could drag someone and no one would hear. A tomb of intention dressed up in green.
"You bastard! What the hell are we doing here, Kakarot?"
Kakarot dropped him like a sack of armor onto the moss. Vegeta braced for the impact that never came; the ground caught him gently, too gently. The treacherous softness turned the fall into an embrace.
He pushed up on his palms, eyes slitting with fury—and something else. Something sharp and nervous. The fine hairs at the nape of his neck lifted as he caught the look on Kakarot’s face.
The idiot was smiling.
Not his bright, empty grin. This was the wild, almost feverish smile he wore when he’d found an opponent who could finally push him past his limits. The smile of a child who had just discovered fire and realized no one was coming to stop him.
That was, Vegeta realized with a cold, sinking feeling, the most terrifying part of all.
The big warrior’s voice dropped as he crouched down at his side, closing the space between them with an ease that felt like another kind of pin.
"Like I said, Vegeta," he murmured, "I'm going to give you what you need."
He glanced at the opening, at the curtain of vines, at the way the sound of the outside world had already thinned.
"I thought this would be a nice out of the way place," he added, lips quirking, "where no one can hear you scream."
He said it like a practical detail. Vegeta heard it like a verdict.
His throat worked. He could have spat a dozen comebacks, but they jammed there, tangled like wires. Kakarot reached for his gloves. For a heartbeat, Vegeta thought the idiot meant to adjust his own.
Instead, calloused fingers closed around his wrists.
The slow, deliberate peeling away of the Prince’s battle gear felt louder than any explosion.
The gloves came off with a soft rasp, leaving his hands bare, useless. Ritual protection stripped, the last buffer between his skin and the world removed. It was an unmaking of armor in every sense.
The real violation, his mind supplied traitorously, is always the first thing taken off.He knew he couldn’t overpower Kakarot in close quarters; he wasn’t delusional. Firing ki in here would bring the cliff down on both their heads. He knew that. He knew a hundred ways this could end badly.
He did not try any of them.
His body—traitor prince, heir to shame—went very, very still.
The warmth of Kakarot’s hands bled through the thin fabric of his shirt, brisk, efficient, not fumbling. Vegeta registered that detachedly, the smoothness of it, the lack of hesitation. This wasn’t the happy-go-lucky idiot fumbling his way through an idea.
This was Kakarot the warrior. The thing Vegeta himself had sharpened over years of battle.
His voice, when it came, almost trembled. He hated that.
"K–Kakarot?"
Ebony eyes caught his, glittering in the greenish half-light. Canines flashed as the mouth curved.
"Yes, Vegeta?"
The tone rippled down his spine like a low growl. This was the voice from Namek, from the first time Kakarot had looked at him and meant it when he said they were the last of their kind. A voice that remembered blood and ruined worlds and didn’t apologize.
Looking up at him now, Vegeta didn’t feel like a prince.
He understood, with brutal clarity, that Kakarot had never really been replaced by the bumbling backwoods fool. The beast had just been put on a leash. Kept for when he was needed.
Reserved, apparently, for this.
For him.
He was—for his sins—the only audience Kakarot would ever have for that pure, undiluted instinct. The sole necessary witness.
A thin, shocked gasp escaped him as Kakarot hauled him unceremoniously across his lap. His pride screamed that this position was beneath him, beneath any warrior, but his body reacted on its own, tensing, twisting.
He hated how strong the hold felt. He hated how much he noticed.
He went still, eyes wide, as a large, warm hand swept up his thighs and over his ass. The raw physicality was a language he had spent a lifetime learning to forget—the language of drills, of barracks, of the silence before a beating.
The other's voice rumbled against his skin, low and dangerous. "Watch your mouth, Vegeta. You don't need all those words to get attention." Condescending prick. Speaking to the Prince like a raw cadet.
Vegeta bit back a whimper as fingers fisted in the back of his spandex pants and tugged them down. The rough palm rubbed over each rounded cheek of his ass. The sudden burn was a chaotic contrast to the soft, cool moss beneath his fingers. Even the dirt was a witness. His heart leapt into his throat. His flesh tightened, not in fear, but in a furious, traitorous expectation.
I hate that my body knows this drill.Kakarot bent his head down over the writhing form in his lap. A low rumble vibrated in his chest—a sound of pure animal satisfaction. "
You need a spanking, Vegeta." He thinks he has the right.
The lower-class trash thinks he has the right to discipline royalty.A startled cry rang out within the rocky hollow accompanying the sharp slap of skin on skin. The Prince trembled as a burning sensation crept across his ass, grunting as the second harsh slap sounded out. It wasn't the bone-shattering impact of Frieza’s tail, nor the crushing weight of gravity training. It was the simple violence of the commoner—stinging, small, domestic—and it penetrated his royal facade more effectively than any Ki blast.
Another shiver chased up his spine as the rough voice sounded again in his ear. "
The next time you want me to listen maybe you should try the word 'please'." Ridiculous. Infantilizing. He would never.
Kakarot's chuckle filled Vegeta's ears. Of course the idiot was happy. It was the sound of a child breaking a toy to see how it worked. His calloused palm rained down a series of sharp slaps, faster and harder. The Prince was soon writhing and whimpering, his squirming hips betraying him. Obvious. Disgustingly obvious. Every twitch was a surrender he hadn't authorized.
"Mmmn, what's this, Vegeta? You're greedier than I thought. Bad, bad Vegeta." Kakarot saw it. He was looking right at the shame, poking it with a stick, grinning at the reaction.
The final slaps were heavy, ringing. A strangled whimper tore free as he was turned, his cheeks glowing nearly as red as his ass as Kakarot pushed the spandex down and off. His hands were rough as he shoved boots and all from the Prince's feet. Bare feet. Stripped. Handled like livestock.
"Hmmm, yes you are bad, Vegeta."
The Prince's head fell back with a cry as Kakarot's hot palm wrapped around his fierce erection, stroking up and down firmly. His brain short-circuited. He couldn't process the duality—the stinging burn on his backside feeding the heat in his groin. He stared unseeing at the water-smoothed rock ceiling, refusing to look at the face of the man dismantling him.
"Don't you agree with me, Vegetaah? I think you need to be punished further."
Kakarot shifted the Prince slightly, cradling him in one arm. He cast a curious, hungry smile down at the shivering body before laying him out on the ground. The moss was thick against Vegeta's back. Soft. Too soft. Metal would have been a fight. This softness... this yielding earth was the trap.
Then Kakarot caught the pearly gleam of wetness at the tip of Vegeta's cock. He didn't ask. He didn't hesitate. He dipped down, wrapping his lips around the pulsing flesh, his hand never ceasing the slow, inexorable strokes.
"Mmmm…"
Vegeta nearly screamed as wet heat encircled him. His hips thrust up greedily—traitor, traitor, traitor—only to be pinned down by the other's sheer weight. Slender fingers sank into velvety black locks, fisting and locking as he struggled weakly under the torment.
"Ahhh! Kakaaahhrrot!!"
The teasing lips quirked up around Vegeta's cock as the Prince's control finally slipped. Kakarot continued to torment the swollen flesh with long licks and suckles, taking him deeper. His hand left the throbbing length and slipped down to caress and stroke the tightened sac beneath.
Vegeta's entire consciousness narrowed down to a pinprick of sensation. The logic of the Prince was gone. There was only the raw, begging flesh.
"P-Please!!"
I hate you. I hate that this works. I hate that I am begging a clown for mercy.A low purr sent vibrations wracking through him; he sobbed with need. Finally the torturous mouth left him, rending a wail of disappointment from the Prince's throat.
"Shhh, it's alright, Vegeta. I know what you need."
Strong hands turned and lifted him, his knees pressing into the moss. Vegeta gasped and panted, a strangled moan escaping. His cries increased as a hot tongue suddenly swept up the cleft of his ass, wetting and teasing the tight ring of muscle tucked inside.
"AHH! GOD!"
A rough chuckle vibrated against his skin. Calloused hands locked around his hips, holding him in place like a vise while the heated tongue worked over the sensitive hollow where his tail had once been.
"Mmmn, yes, Vegetaah.
I am your god."
Vegeta froze. Freeza. For an instant the name was a blade across his mind, dragging with it every collar, every order, every time he’d been forced to kneel because someone stronger willed it. Terror and fury hit at once. His body jerked, a violent spasm trying to throw the rider off.
No.
The tongue swept down again, circling, pressing. His hips lurched back in spite of him, betrayal written in the way he pushed into the touch. His body was a collaborator; it leaned toward the claim even as his mind spat in its face.
The licks and nips grew rougher. One of Kakarot’s hands left his hip; Vegeta heard the wet slide of skin on skin, the low moan breathed into the curve of his spine.
"Ohhh… yes… Vegeta…"
His fingers clawed into the sweet moss as a new, blunt heat nudged at raw, oversensitized flesh. The sound that tore out of his throat when Kakarot drove in was more shriek than word.
It wasn’t a slide. It was an impact—like taking a blast full-on with his guard down. Pain flared white-hot, rolling through him in waves that stripped the Prince of Pride down to a shaking shell.
Kakarot’s own shout bounced off the stone as he buried himself to the hilt. His grip trembled on Vegeta’s hips as he drew back to the edge and pushed in again, harder, falling at once into a brutal, hungry rhythm.
Strong hands slid up to clamp over his shoulders, pinning him. The pounding became pure motion, pure force, each thrust a wordless insistence that he hold, that he take, that he yield.
Vegeta's howl rang out and filled the small space. The flashes of light across his vision blinded him. It felt like a transformation gone wrong, a power level rising until the vessel cracked. Climax slammed into him with the force of a tsunami.
He trembled violently beneath the muscled form above him, his flesh rippling as thick jets of cum fired into the moss-carpeted ground.
Just as the echoes of the first cry began to fade, Kakarot's own joyous shout of bliss roared out. Bursts of heat exploded into Vegeta, driving him into a void of satiation where titles, pride, and planets ceased to exist.
Both muscled bodies slumped to the ground in exhaustion; all was silent but for heaving breaths and a deep reverberating purr.
Vegeta surfaced into consciousness on a breath that tasted of water and stone.
Cool currents slid around his wrists and down his forearms, eddying against his skin. He realized slowly that he was half-sitting, half-floating, his back pressed against something solid and warm behind him.
He blinked up.
The canopy above them had turned to a lattice of shadow and deep red, the last of the light filtering through autumn leaves. The sky beyond was dimming into early night. His muscles ached with a completeness he knew too well—the exhaustion of having gone past empty. Past failure. Past anything one could call “holding back.”
The exhaustion of total defeat.
The awareness of the body behind him arrived all at once. The steady rise and fall of a chest against his spine, the easy, effortless weight of an arm looped below the waterline, anchoring him. The ki, banked now but far from gone, humming like a sun under skin.
Shame punched him so hard he almost choked on it.
He’d forgotten. Somewhere in the middle of all that noise, he’d let go of who he was. Worse—he’d liked it.
"Kakarot…" His voice came out hoarse, rough around the edges. His cheeks still felt too hot, as if the heat in them were some kind of brand.
"Hai, Vegeta?"
The answer brushed his ear, softer than usual but carrying the same unbothered note as always. Kakarot sounded tired, but not wrecked. No strain in it. No edge of guilt. Of course not.
Vegeta twisted in his hold, dislodging the arm enough to spin partially around. The movement made things protest—lower back, thighs, deeper bruises he didn’t intend to name—but he rode the discomfort, used it.
His eyes flashed, catching the last of the red light. Rage was easy. Rage was safe. It filled in all the places where something else threatened to rise.
"It was my turn."
He spat it like an accusation. Like a ceremonial charge. It wasn’t just about what had happened here. It was about the fight. About all their fights. About keeping the score even in a universe that refused to play fair.
Kakarot blinked at him, then winced as Vegeta’s fist thudded into his shoulder. The blow was solid enough to bruise, not enough to damage. It wasn’t meant to.
"Ow! Vegeta!" he complained, rubbing the spot with exaggerated care. "I thought you were done fighting!"
He grinned even as he said it, that same reckless smile softened now by the edges of contentment. Before Vegeta could snarl something fitting, Kakarot leaned in and stole a kiss.
It landed squarely, confidently, on his mouth.
For half a heartbeat Vegeta froze, more from surprise than anything else. Then he jerked back, splashing water.
"Kisama!" he snapped. "No more than my ass is going to hurt!"
The words came out sharper than he’d intended, which was fine. Let them cut. He folded his arms over his chest in the old, familiar gesture, lifting his chin to sharpen the glare. It would have been perfect if they hadn’t been waist-deep in a stream, if his body hadn’t still been humming with the memory of being taken apart.
Kakarot ignored the posture as completely as he ignored most social cues. Warm hands slid down, under the water, finding the curve of Vegeta’s hips, the sore line of bruised flesh. His touch gentled, rubbing slow circles in wordless apology that wasn’t really an apology at all.
He dipped his head, lips brushing lightly over the twin crescent scars at the base of Vegeta’s neck. The mark of a bond they never named out loud.
His voice rumbled against warm, damp skin, amusement threaded through an unthinking certainty.
"Oh come on, Vegeta," he said. "
I always know what you need."
He believed it. That was the worst part. He had no idea how close he’d come to being wrong. Or how thin the line was between “need” and something Vegeta would have killed him over.
"Hmph."
The sound ripped free before he could stop it—a sharp exhalation, half snort, half something he refused to call a laugh. He turned his face away, arms still crossed, spine stiffening against the temptation to lean back into that chest and let the warmth finish what it had started.
If Kakarot heard the nuance in that single breath, he gave no sign.
Vegeta, Prince of all Saiyans, clung to it like a last shard of armor. A rejection of the tenderness. A fierce, silent retrieval of his pride.
He let the idiot keep holding him in the water.
Just for now.