“The question of her decision is one not to be lightly considered, and it is not for me to presume to set myself up as the one person able to answer it. And so I leave it with all of you.” Frank Stockton

The small foot connected with the side of Vegeta’s head hard enough to make him blink. She had never lashed out so quickly before; he usually attacked first. Before he could react, the foot had retracted, taking the long slender leg with it, and she closed in, trying to slam her hands into his ribcage. Her hardest hits wouldn’t even bruise him, but the constant rain of light blows always annoyed him.

Even after these months, he had yet to discover how she circumvented his guard. Even her husband, the strongest of this planet’s measley defense team had to work to hit Vegeta. Yet this mere slip of a woman could sneak through his defenses without effort and beat dance rhythms on his chest.

The almighty Prince of Saiyans had never expected his most challenging opponent here to be a human female, and most certainly not this one. He never would have connected the loud and abrasive female he’d first met with the slim fighter he was facing now. It was only by chance that he had discovered she knew how to fight; the woman had drug him to one of her little reunions, where Yamcha and Krillen had persuaded Kakarot’s mate to fill in the last spot in a miniature tournament that Master Roshi’s island was hosting.

Her first step into the arena was when this had all begun; when she had become a true contender.

She had wiped the floor with every opponent she faced, including the short monk that Kakarot had been so fond of, and the weakling thief the woman was attached to. The triclops, Tien, had been the one to finally defeat her, but only because she had tired enough to let a ki attack knock her out of the ring.

What had surprised Vegeta was the vigor with which she fought, the unrelenting determination to succeed. What bothered him was the fact that during the length of the entire tournament she had not raised her ki. Even when Krillin and Yamcha had lifted theirs to fight her, the woman’s had remained unchanged while she had been able to easily match them. The rudimentary laws of fighting stated that a ki must be level or greater for a defeat, never weaker; especially with the ease that she dispatched them.

Son Chichi was a woman who defied one of the basic rules of his universe, which meant she had to be either understood or destroyed.

The next morning he had flown to her home and demanded an explanation. She had simply dropped her firewood and launched a full frontal attack, telling him he’d have to figure it out for himself.

Months later he still hadn’t discovered her secret—which was why he still toyed with her; why they were sparring here in a grassy clearing of Mount Patzou now.

He lifted his hand and stopped the fist that was flying towards his face just before it connected with his nose. Skin collided with a resounding smack, and he was startled at the stinging that tingled up his wrist. She had actually hit him hard enough to draw a sensation, something very rare indeed.

Floating her fist away, he countered with a light punch of his own. When fighting with Son Chichi, speed and skill were his goals, not sheer power. He could snap her neck or send her flying through the nearest tree without effort, but then he wouldn’t have the opportunity to learn her fighting secrets.

She blocked his punch easily. He hadn’t been paying attention to the fight, and she had taken advantage of it. She smirked at him, taunting her momentary superiority.

The woman was an entertaining spar.

With a growl of anger, he lunged at her and she stepped out of the way, catching him lightly in the knee with her foot as he passed. When he whirled and punched out she countered again with surprising force—and their ritual spar had truly begun.

For almost two hours they fought viciously, Chichi leaving no holds barred while Vegeta struggled to control his strength against her attacks. His power had been increasing steadily for days, and it would not do for him to injure the body that would shortly be nurturing his heir.

The thought so surprised Vegeta that he failed to deflect the incoming punch that landed full on his nose with a dull thud.

It was happening.

He was loosing his control.

He thought he could handle himself; he had experienced no problems before. But now was different. For if he had been on his home planet of Vegeta, this would have been the week that the full moon occurred, and even when the day wasn’t upon them, his strength and instincts increased to the point of no return. After all of these years, he still hadn’t learned how to deal with his body’s attunement to the demolished planet’s lunar cycle. The last few times it had happened he had still had a tail, and had gone oozaru, which he could control; but his tail was gone now, which meant he had to deal with his primitive thoughts and desires in this form, something that he had never done before.

And almost every cell in his body was screaming to take the woman before him as his own.

He blankly realized that her fist was still against his face, and he lashed out with a foot, catching her by one ankle and sweeping that leg out from beneath her.

She refused to go down completely and planted her hands in the grass, pulling her body and legs over them to land feet down, facing the other direction. Whirling to face him again, she bent one knee and lifted her hands into position, stationing one at her side and the other in front of her, two fingers erect, and waited for him to make the next move.

The Prince of Saiyans looked at her, hearing nothing but the blood rushing through his ears. She was going to fight back.

He shouldn’t have come; he should have stayed at Capsule Corps like the interfering Namek had warned, but he couldn’t take the bubbliness of the blonde any longer. He would have killed her if he had to hear one more word about her daughter, the woman, who had gone with her father on a business trip. So he had gone to his second-favorite haunt, the house of his sworn enemy, to spar with the Princess that lived there. They had been doing so for several months now on a regular basis, and Vegeta had come to see the woman in front of him as a fellow warrior.

And lately, as a potential mate as well.

In account of the summer heat her normal conservative fighting clothes had been replaced by something that resembled Saiyan battle armor, although there wasn’t enough of it there to be armor. Just enough to barely cover the necessities, leaving far too much pale skin exposed for his hungry eyes to devour while she flaunted her womanly curves to the sexually driven Saiyan.

It was a bad choice for the Princess to wear on this particular day, when Vegeta’s hormones were thick and his control thin.

He really should have listened to the Namek and stayed at Capsule, but he had been sure he was able to control himself and come anyway. The woman was strong, yes, but still weak; and she belonged to another Saiyan, a fact that his Saiyan honor could not ignore.

Her dark hair had come loose from its restraint and was cascading down her back in glossy dark waves. Poised to fight, wearing the purplish armor, he could almost see a furry tail waving behind her, especially with her temper. She would have been the most beautiful Saiyan female he had ever laid eyes upon, had she really possessed a tail.

Before he could suppress his thoughts, the dark-haired woman closed for another attack, taking advantage of Vegeta’s lack of attention. As she approached, Vegeta got a good whiff of her scent—the pong of sweat combined with her own earthy smell, and his tenuous control wavered. He grabbed her arms, swung her around, and pinned her against a nearby tree, standing close enough to her to breathe in the scent that was driving him wild. She was very close to the peak of her cycle, which only enhanced her attractiveness to the Sayian. He was so close to her that she filled all of his senses, driving all memories of the exotic blue-haired woman who drove him insane from his mind. The Princess was here, in front of him, filling his very soul with her erotic scent.

Something in the back of Vegeta’s mind wondered if she tasted as good as she smelled.

He tightened his grip on her arms to the point where if she had been a normal human, he would have shattered the bones in several places. But Chichi was not a normal human, and she looked at him from her position against the tree, eyes fiery with the song of battle. She was completely unafraid of him; unafraid of the way he pressed his body against hers. He could hear each deep breath she took and see the way her pulse quickened at her throat, covered in a light sheen of sweat.

She was attracted to him.

This woman was worthy of him; she was unafraid to spar with a man several times more powerful than she, and most importantly, she was of royal blood. If he were to take her now, she would give him an heir. An heir with his Saiyan strength combined with the peculiar mix of her blood that did not, apparently, impede the most desired of Saiyan traits. He wanted an heir desperately; he desired the security to know that his bloodline, that of the Royal House, would not disappear from the galaxy should he die again. This Princess was the strongest this world had to offer him, the best candidate to bear his heir as well as stand by him as consort.

For to take her now, when she was ripe, would require bonding with her. Due to the influence of Planet Vegeta’s moon, he would give his soul to any woman with whom he mated in the next few days. And the woman who he currently held pinned between him and the trees already bore the mark of another male Saiyan at her throat.

The mark of a third-class saiyan who had mated far above his class, breaking the carefully constructed caste of his culture to marry the warrior Princess. He had also left his mate alone with a young son and almost no way to support him. Their funds would not last forever, and then she would be in trouble. That was not Vegeta’s problem, but Kakarot had left his mate alone for so long that she had been forced to look elsewhere for satisfaction, and he knew she wanted him. He could see it in her eyes, smell it in her skin, and feel it in the trembling muscles beneath his hands.

This delectable female was not a Saiyan’s mate, he reminded himself, if other Saiyans still found her attractive. If Kakarot had truly bonded with her, then she could have disrobed in front of him and he would have thought nothing of it.

If she did so now he wouldn’t be able to control himself.

Closing his eyes, he leaned forward, tilted his head to one side, and slowly touched his tongue to her ear. As her essence drove his desire to its peak, he stared into her eyes. His taking her without her consent wasn’t a question; even during the full moon, the female always made the first move.

The question was if she would.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

She never expected to go this far.

When she had started sparring with Vegeta he had been a welcome diversion from the pangs of loneliness in her heart, something to keep her from dwelling over Goku’s absence. She had expected to take all of her anger out on the alien Prince who had treated her family so callously. After not being able to protect them she had felt helpless; and so very angry.

And like when her mother and brothers had died, she had thrown herself back into martial arts. They alone could help her tame the boiling anger that threatened to overwhelm her very being. Except this time, merely practicing the motions did very little to ease the turmoil in her soul; this time she would need to fight to release her anger. The only problem was that she had no sparring partner, and now that Gohan was back she didn’t dare to take him into Amazonia where she would find a willing one. She would not expose him to that culture if she could at all avoid it, and thus her anger had built, leaving her little outlet.

Her lust for battle was what had driven her to agree to participate in that little tournament on that island. And that was where this had all begun; where she had truly come in touch with her Amazon half again; and where she had first drawn the attention of the Saiyan Prince currently holding her against a tree.

She quivered slightly in his grasp, wishing she had the physical strength to pull away and continue their battle, although part of her was screaming to stand still and enjoy this situation. How long had it been since a man had been strong enough, brave enough, and prepared enough to defeat her? How long? Not since Gohan came along, certainly. His birth had not been easy, and afterwards she had been treated as if she had been made of porcelain.

The Prince did not treat her like a fragile doll; she was slowly losing the feeling in her arms thanks to his iron grasp. He restrained himself from exerting the force necessary to kill her or break her bones so he could continue to spar with her, but after that she was on her own. If she didn’t have the strength to deflect his blows then she carried the bruises to prove it, and those were what had fueled her to continue sparring with the Prince. He was stronger than she was and not to mention far more experienced, but he had no experience whatsoever with Amazons. The hot blood of her mother’s people gave her a slight edge over the Prince, and she enjoyed seeing the man’s confusion when she regularly performed the impossible. Her ability to increase her strength without changing her ki ran in her blood, but she enjoyed their spars too much to tell him that.

At first they had sparred only once or twice a week, but as time wore on they began to spar more regularly. Vegeta was prone to show up at horribly inconvenient hours and demand a spar; it was something she had come to expect. She began to wear her gis all the time, keeping her hair pinned back in case he showed up at the door, or sometimes even at the window. The two of them could spar at he drop of a hat.

She expected him to be surly and angry, and most of the time she was not disappointed. He carried even more history into the ring than she did, although he didn’t use it to fuel his fighting skills. She didn’t either; not anymore. Her anger was under control now; it only flared up when she generally felt guilty, more particularly when she saw the shadows in Gohan’s eyes. Her son was her world, and to see how he’d been hurt made her want to destroy something.

And no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t destroy Vegeta. She could beat on him all day and he wouldn’t even bruise; it was like beating on a steel wall. Goku had been like that, too, except he was more apt to stop her from releasing her anger and ask what he’d done wrong to make her so angry. The sweaty man in front of her just let her beat on him; he’d give her that little irritating smirk and punch back. She put up a good fight when angry, and he knew it. He always tended to show up when she was angry; she had come to expect his presence when she was particularly vexed.

What she hadn’t expected was to see him in her dreams; to imagine what he looked like under the spandex gi. The first few times she dreamed about him she had been disgusted; Goku was her husband and yet she was fantasizing about the man who’d sworn to kill him. No matter how hard she tried she hadn’t been able to erase those vivid images from her mind; they had continued night after night as she laid alone in her huge bed. As her loneliness increased she had ceased resisting and allowed the dreams to come, filling her sleeping hours with false memories of when she wasn’t alone, when she had a man to fulfill all of her needs and desires, not just those that could be settled with fists and feet.

The problem with Amazons was that even this problem could be solved with a fight; a man who could defeat an Amazon in battle was worthy of being her mate. Once he won, all he had to do was claim her and she would be his. Vegeta was most capable of defeating her; he could snap her spine as easily as a child broke a stick, but he had restrained himself. He had never openly defeated her, either. Their spars tended to last until she tired herself out, and then he would just back off, refusing to return her last blow. He never did that to Yamcha or Krillin; she knew he’d use any and every opening to prove he was a stronger fighter. He respected her skill, and it gave her more than a small thrill.

As did the looks he had been giving her for the past few weeks. At first she thought she had been seeing things; that her subconscious had put the introspective look in his eyes, the light spark that she hadn’t seen there before. They had been real, and she had been too surprised to consider them. But her body wasn’t; she had subconsciously begun to fight him harder and longer, trying her best to get him to defeat her in a way that mattered; to claim her. She didn’t want to be alone anymore.

Vegeta had proved to have more control than she thought; he had resisted her onslaughts and she was still alone. He didn’t want her in the way she wanted him. It was something she was dealing with, but she never stopped trying to get him to defeat her. The anger that defeat would bring would help her get over him.

But in the past week things had changed; he was starting to warm up to her. He had shown up every day this week to spar, and had stayed almost all day. She had taken to sending Gohan away with the Namek, who had taken it upon himself to explain to her what was going on with Vegeta a few days ago. He had warned her not to do anything she would regret later, and she had responded by asking her father to take Gohan for the week and telling the Namek she was in full control of her faculties.

But now that she was faced with this decision, was she really? She was pinned between the Prince and the tree wearing nothing but Amazon ritual armor, which was not by any means modest. The Prince’s rock hard body was pressed up to hers, and she could feel the hardness of his body and his desire for her against her bare skin. And his eyes were dark, lusty, and somehow remarkably open.

He wanted her badly, but the final decision was hers. He wouldn’t do anything more unless she accepted him. She alone had control over her fate, she had to make this decision because he wouldn’t do it for her.

She wanted him, but could she do it? Could she betray the promise she’d made to Goku?

Goku had been the one to dominate her dreams since she was a child; there had never been anyone for her but him. He had been the man she grew up for, she had trained so she could challenge him, made herself strong to keep his interest in her, get him to see her as a warrior. She wanted to be his wife, his equal; she wanted him to love her for her, not as the Princess, the lone heir to two very unusual kingdoms.

He had never seen her as anything but Chichi, and he had loved her as much as his upbringing would allow. He had done anything she had asked, built her a house and given her Gohan, who he had loved. She couldn’t ask for anything more. She had, for a few short years, been happy out in the woods with her husband and her son, leaving the horrors of her life before them behind her.

But then the aliens had come, and her life had been turned upside down and inside out in only a few short days. She had found herself returning to the lore of the Amazon, something familiar to help her keep her sanity while her little family was out amongst the stars. And when they had returned, her life had changed forever.

Her knight on golden cloud was gone, and she was alone.

Alone.

The man in front of her was offering to change that; offering to make her his. His very nature appealed to the Amazon in her; she would have to earn his respect, and he would make her respect him. He was strong in a way Goku had never been; they were two sides of a coin; one amiable and light, the other dark and withdrawn; she loved the first, and could learn to love the second.

A different love for a different man, and she wouldn’t be alone in the world anymore.

But could she break forever?

As her soul was torn between the life she had once had and the one the Prince was offering, the man’s face loomed over hers, inhaling deeply. He closed his eyes, tilted his head, and she stilled as his tongue touched her ear, and her heart made her decision for her.

It was time for her to live her life for love, not waste away for a memory of it.

Son Chichi stared into the eyes of the Prince in front of her, seeing what could have been play before her.

Then she kissed him.