Chapter 1: Flight and Where Am I?
---
There are moments in life that carve themselves so deeply into your memory that time loses all meaning when you revisit them. You close your eyes, and suddenly you are there again — every sound, every smell, every agonizing heartbeat as vivid as the day it happened.
I remember it as though it were only yesterday.
That day. That day.
The day everything changed — for me, and for my son. The day my family grew by two, and shrank by one, all within the span of a single breathless night. If you are wondering who I am, allow me to introduce myself.
My name is Teilanne. I am a Saiyan.
I know — it is not the most conventional name for one of our kind. Most Saiyans carry names that sound like vegetables. My husband was the same, his name just as unusual among our people as mine. We were always an odd pair. Even now, I find myself smiling at the thought of him.
But this is not simply a story about me and my husband.
This is the story of how two families, shattered by forces beyond their control, were woven together into something new. Something unbreakable. It is the story of how three children who had every reason to be swallowed by grief instead learned to laugh, to fight, and to love. And above all else, it is the story of how we found a family in the most impossible of places — a world none of us ever expected to call home.
It begins, as so many Saiyan stories do, on Planet Vegeta.
---
The pride of our race. A world of rust-colored earth, violet skies, and warriors who had never once questioned what it meant to fight. I had grown up breathing that air, feeling the heavy gravity press against my body like a constant reminder that strength was everything. And for most of my life, I had believed that wholeheartedly.
But then came Kizuna — my son, my heart — and suddenly strength looked very different to me.
It was a perfectly ordinary day when everything began to unravel. I was at the meat distribution center with Ginè, my closest friend and fellow mother. Ginè was not what most Saiyans would call formidable. Her power level was modest, her frame small, and she had a warmth about her that seemed almost out of place among our kind. And yet, she was one of the few people in the universe I trusted completely.
We worked through the shift together, exchanging quiet conversation the way only old friends can — saying very little and meaning a great deal. By the time we were done, the violet sun was beginning its slow descent toward the horizon, painting long shadows across the training grounds.
*My fighting days are behind me*, I remember thinking as we made our way to the nursery ward. *I am a mother now. That chapter of my life is over.*
Looking back on that thought, I almost want to laugh. Or perhaps cry. A Saiyan's fight is never truly over — it merely changes its shape. I was so naive then. So wonderfully, tragically naive.
Inside the nursery, I found Kizuna exactly where I had left him, sleeping soundly with that fierce little scowl he always wore even in slumber. He was going to be trouble when he was older. I could feel it in my bones. Ginè went a few pods down to check on her own boy, her little Kakarot, who was blissfully unaware of anything more complicated than hunger or sleep.
It was then that I noticed the two small shapes curled on either side of my son.
Tora and Faasha's children.
The boy, Uruk, had pressed himself as close to Kizuna as the pod would allow, one tiny fist clenched at his chest even in sleep. On the other side, nestled like she was determined to hold her ground, was the baby girl — still nameless. They hadn't had the chance to name her before everything went wrong.
My chest tightened, the way it always did when I thought of Faasha. She had been radiant, right up until she wasn't. Her dying words were not grand or defiant the way you might expect from a Saiyan warrior. They were quiet. Pleading, even.
*"Take care of my children. Please. They'll need a mother — a mother I can't be for them."*
I had made her that promise. I intended to keep it.
I was still watching the three of them sleep when it hit me — not a sound, not a sight, but a sensation. A cold pressure that settled at the base of my skull and spread outward like frost creeping across glass. Every warrior instinct I had ever honed snapped awake at once.
Something was coming.
Something powerful.
Something *wrong.*
---
On the far side of the planet, a different kind of chaos was already in motion.
Bardock tore through the upper atmosphere of Planet Vegeta like a comet, his battered body still bearing the marks of Dodoria's ambush, his mind a furnace of barely controlled fury. He had seen it. The vision. The truth that the wretched Kanassan had cursed him with — Frieza's laughter, the planet's end, the silence that would follow.
He had tried to warn them. He had shouted it plainly in the streets, to any Saiyan who would listen.
They had called him an idiot.
So be it.
He was done talking. If no one would stand beside him, he would face Frieza alone if he had to.
He did not get very far before a hand closed around his arm.
"Bardock. *Wait.*"
Bardock turned, irritation sharp in his expression, and found himself looking at a fellow Saiyan — lean and hard-eyed, with the particular kind of steady gaze that belonged to someone who had seen enough battles to stop flinching. Yuren. A warrior who had never been in Bardock's inner circle, but had orbited close enough to it that he knew better than to dismiss him outright.
"Yuren," Bardock said flatly. "What do you want? I am not exactly on a leisure walk here."
"I heard what you said back there." Yuren's voice was measured, giving nothing away. "About Frieza. About the planet." He studied Bardock's face the way a soldier reads a battlefield — looking for the truth beneath the surface. "You and I were never as close as you and Tora were. But I have known you long enough to know you do not say things without reason. So I am asking you plainly — is it true?"
A long silence stretched between them.
Then Bardock exhaled through his teeth.
"Yeah," he said. His voice was quieter now — not softer, but heavier, like a blade that had stopped rattling in its sheath. "It's true. He's coming here. Coming to wipe us all out." He met Yuren's eyes. "You need to go. Get your wife, your son, Tora's kids. Get them off this planet before that monster arrives. I will handle this myself."
"You keep saying that as though I am going to turn around and leave you here." Yuren's jaw set. "I will not."
"Don't be stubborn—"
"Go." Yuren cut him off. The word was not loud, but it was absolute. "I will go. I'll warn Teilanne, get her out with the children. But Bardock—" He paused, and something unspoken passed between them, the way it does between men who understand one another without ceremony. "Don't you dare die before I catch up to you."
Bardock made a sound that might have been a laugh if his heart had been anywhere near it. "Tch. Get moving."
They parted.
---
Yuren had never run faster in his life.
He was through the door of their home before Teilanne even had time to turn around, and the look on his face — *that look* — told her everything she needed to know before he spoke a single word. She had been his wife long enough to read him like a second language.
He told her everything. Bardock's warning. Frieza's approach. The minutes they had left.
"Then come with us," she said immediately. Her voice was steady, but her hands had already closed around Kizuna, pulling him against her chest like armor. "Yuren, come with—"
"You know I can't."
"You *choose* not to."
He did not deny it. He simply looked at her, and in that look she saw everything — the apology, the love, the absolute immovability of a man who had decided. He could not leave Bardock to face this alone. Not after Tora. Not after everything.
A single tear escaped before she could stop it.
She did not try to stop it a second time. There was no time for any of it.
He pressed his forehead briefly to hers — something they did not do often, because Saiyans do not make a habit of tenderness — and then he was gone.
Teilanne stood alone in the middle of their home for exactly three seconds.
Then she moved.
She gathered everything she could carry with any practicality — food rations, infant armor, supplies, whatever her arms and a pack could hold. She scooped up Kizuna, then Uruk, then the nameless baby girl, arranging all three against her body with the efficiency of someone who had no margin for anything other than speed.
She ran.
The launch bay was a riot of noise and movement, Saiyans scrambling in all directions as word began to spread — Frieza was close, *too close* — but Teilanne kept her head down and pushed forward. She found a pod. Just large enough. Barely. She loaded the children first, then herself, fingers flying across the navigation panel.
The nearest habitable planet. That was all she needed.
The system returned a result: *Earth. Estimated travel time: approximately one year.*
It would have to do.
The hatch sealed. The engines ignited. And as the pod shuddered and launched upward through the clouds, Teilanne pressed her face to the small circular window and saw her.
Ginè.
Standing in the chaos below, looking up, wearing a smile that was the saddest and most beautiful thing Teilanne had ever seen. A smile that said: *I know. I love you. Go.*
Teilanne pressed her palm to the glass.
And then the planet fell away, and Ginè was gone.
---
Far above what remained of Vegeta's atmosphere, Bardock and Yuren stood back to back against a tide of Frieza's soldiers — purple and scaly and seemingly endless — and burned through them with everything they had.
They fought their way to the top. They always had been stubborn that way.
When Frieza finally appeared — hovering in his chair with that terrible calm, his black horns glinting, his smile the kind that had no warmth in it whatsoever — Bardock stepped forward.
"Frieza." His voice carried easily across the vacuum of space, augmented by the energy that crackled around his fists. "We quit. Every planet, every life, every filthy errand you sent us on — you can have all of it back. We don't work for you. We never *should* have worked for you."
He pulled his arm back, palm blazing.
Yuren fell into step beside him without a word, his own energy building in a bright, furious column.
"Consider this our resignation," Bardock said.
They threw everything they had.
The combined blast was the largest either of them had ever produced — a roaring column of blue-white energy that shrieked across the void toward Frieza's hovering silhouette.
And then Frieza began to laugh.
It was not a nervous laugh, or a surprised laugh, or even a cruel laugh. It was a *delighted* laugh. The laugh of a creature that found the effort genuinely charming in its absolute futility. The purple tyrant raised one hand, and his energy expanded — not grew, but *expanded*, billowing outward like a sun being born, swallowing the Saiyans' combined blast without so much as a flicker of effort. Then it kept growing.
The ball of annihilation swept outward, and the two warriors disappeared into it.
But in the last moment — in that last half-second of light and fire and everything — both of them smiled.
And each called out a name.
"*Kakarot!*"
"*Kizuna!!!*"
The blast struck the planet.
Pillars of flame erupted upward. The surface cracked, split, and folded in on itself. And then, with a sound that no one who heard it would ever forget, Planet Vegeta ceased to exist.
The Saiyan race was ended.
---
*Almost.*
A handful of survivors remained scattered across the stars, each for their own reasons. Prince Vegeta and his companions, away on a mission. Raditz. Nappa. The disgraced Tarble. The infant Kakarot, already hurtling toward a distant blue world in his own tiny pod. Paragus and his son Broly, escaped through some means that would remain unexplained for years. And Teilanne, racing through the dark with three babies and a grief that would take a very long time to name.
She had managed to soothe Kizuna and Uruk into an uneasy sleep when the pod began to shudder.
It was not turbulence.
It was something else entirely.
A darkness crept over the viewport — not the darkness of space, but something alive. Swirling. *Intentional.* It curled around the pod like smoke with purpose, and she felt it press against her son, against Kizuna, and watched his tiny face screw up in pain and confusion before he began to wail.
The other children followed. All three of them, crying with the kind of terror that only infants can express — total, wordless, bone-deep.
And somewhere beyond the wreckage of Planet Vegeta, two figures hovered in the silence.
One was a woman. Blue skin, crimson eyes, a black staff held loosely in one hand. She watched the pod's erratic trajectory with the detached satisfaction of someone watching a plan unfold exactly as intended.
Beside her stood a man — white-haired, red-eyed, equally unhurried.
"Well," the woman said softly, "that should be sufficient."
Whatever she had done to Kizuna — whatever *gift* she had left coiled in the child's energy like a splinter — it had already done its work. A wormhole, thin as a crack in old glass, had torn open in the fabric of space in front of the pod. The navigation system shrieked warnings that Teilanne did not understand. The stars outside the viewport blurred and stretched.
And then the pod was gone — *phased* — dragged sideways through dimensions toward a destination that bore no resemblance to Earth.
The two figures from the Demon Realm watched it vanish without particular urgency.
"Another Saiyan won't be interfering in *this* timeline," the woman said, and smiled.
---
The children were still crying.
Teilanne held all three of them, which was not physically comfortable and under ordinary circumstances would have seemed absurd. But there was nothing ordinary about this, so she simply held on, murmuring nonsense sounds, swaying slightly in the cramped pod, willing them to breathe.
Kizuna settled first — her son, always her son, quieting the moment her voice reached him through his panic.
Uruk followed, worn out and hiccupping, eventually going still against her shoulder.
But the little girl — Faasha's daughter, the one still without a name — kept crying. Soft and lost and searching for something she did not know how to ask for.
Teilanne looked down at her.
At the curve of her cheek. At the dark wisps of hair. At the way her tiny hands opened and closed, reaching for something solid to hold onto.
*They left that up to me,* Faasha had said.
There had been a name sitting quietly in the back of her mind for months. A name she had not spoken aloud since the launch bay, since that last glimpse through a pod window of a woman smiling in the middle of chaos.
She brought the baby girl closer.
"Shh," she whispered. "Shh, shh... it's alright, Ginè." Her voice caught, just barely. "Mama's here."
The crying stopped.
It stopped the way a candle goes out — suddenly, completely, with a small breath of warmth remaining. The baby girl opened her eyes for the first time, and they were dark and bright and very much alive, and she looked at Teilanne with the peculiar directness that newborns sometimes have, as though she was assessing the situation and finding it acceptable.
Then she laughed.
It was such a small sound. Such a profoundly, ridiculously small sound to mean so much.
Teilanne pressed her lips to the top of the baby's head and breathed in.
"Ginè," she said again, softly. "My little Ginè."
---
One year is a long time to spend inside a pod barely large enough to turn around in.
And yet, Teilanne would later say that it had not been entirely unpleasant. There is something about absolute confinement that strips away everything except what matters. Kizuna learned to pull himself upright against her knee. Uruk made his first sounds — low, stubborn syllables, very much like his father. Baby Ginè laughed at everything: the hum of the engine, the pale light of passing stars, the faces her brothers made.
They were not yet a family in the way that families are built over years of shared meals and ordinary days.
But they were *something.* Something that was beginning to take shape.
When the viewport finally brightened with reflected light — blue and white and flooding the pod's dim interior — Teilanne sat up sharply and pressed her face to the glass.
An enormous sphere hung before them, far larger than Vegeta, swathed in ocean and cloud and great swaths of deep green. Her navigation data had been scrambled by the wormhole; she could not verify coordinates. But something in her chest loosened at the sight of it — the first instinctive *yes* she had felt in a year.
*That must be Earth,* she thought.
She would discover, soon enough, that she was wrong about that.
But she was not wrong about the warmth.
The pod hit the atmosphere hard, trailing fire, rattling like it was trying to shake itself apart. Teilanne kept her arms around all three children and her eyes open and told herself the same thing she had been telling herself for a year: *hold on, hold on, hold on.*
The forest came up fast. The pod plowed through canopy and undergrowth and buried itself into the earth at the center of a respectable crater, steam and smoke billowing from every seam.
Silence.
Then the sound of three babies simultaneously deciding that they had opinions about this landing.
Teilanne coughed, wiped soil from her cheek, and began to coax the hatch open.
---
He had been walking for about twenty minutes when he found the crater.
He had heard from a few nervous locals about something crashing into the forest — a great fireball, they said, like a star falling, though it hadn't killed anyone as far as they could tell. The locals had assumed it was a monster of some kind. That was, he reflected, usually how these things went.
So Gildarts Clive had come to look.
Reddish-brown hair. Dark eyes with that particular quality of someone who has walked a very long distance and intends to walk considerably more. A beard that was heading toward unruly. A worn black cloak that had survived more than its share of misadventures, because the man wearing it had survived more than his share of misadventures.
He stood at the rim of the crater and looked down at the strange spherical object smoking at the bottom of it.
It was not a monster.
It was, as far as he could tell, a very large ball.
He descended the crater wall with practiced ease, approaching it the way he approached most unusual things — with casual confidence and one hand loose near his hip just in case. When he was about three meters from it, the hatch blew open with a hiss of released pressure, and a rolling wall of steam billowed outward.
He jumped back on pure reflex.
From inside the smoke: coughing. Then a voice, low and strained, cycling through what sounded like several different soothing sounds in rapid succession — and underneath it all, at least two, possibly three sources of very loud infant displeasure.
Gildarts blinked.
Well. That was not what he had expected.
He leaned forward slightly. "Hello? Is someone—"
Another round of crying from inside, louder this time.
He made a decision. The kind of man who would walk alone into a monster-infested forest was, generally speaking, not the kind of man who would stand at the edge of a crashed pod listening to a woman struggle with multiple babies and do nothing about it.
He stepped forward and extended a hand into the hatch.
"Here," he said simply. "Take it."
A pause. Then fingers closed around his, and he pulled, and the woman emerged from the pod into the grey morning light.
She was tall — not dramatically so, but with the kind of build that made you instinctively adjust your assessment of her. Dark hair. A face that was exhausted in the deep, bone-level way of someone who had been holding things together through sheer force of will for much longer than was reasonable. Three small children were arranged against her — two boys and a girl — all of them peering at Gildarts with varying degrees of suspicion.
"Are you alright, miss?" he asked, offering his free hand to help stabilize her on the uneven crater floor.
She accepted it with a dignity that, given the circumstances, he found quietly impressive. "I am fine now, thanks to you." She settled herself, adjusted the children, and met his eyes. "Thank you — for me and my children both."
"Of course." He glanced at the pod, then back at her. "You're welcome, miss...?"
A faint color rose in her cheeks. It was, he would later think, one of the more charming things he had seen in recent memory — this woman who had survived whatever had put her in that pod, still capable of being embarrassed by a lapse in manners.
"Oh — forgive me. I am Teilanne. And these three—" She adjusted the children again, briefly becoming a small masterwork of balance. "The boys are Kizuna and Uruk. And the girl is Ginè."
"Teilanne," he repeated, tasting the syllables thoughtfully.
She seemed to brace for something. "I know. It is a rather unusual name."
"No," Gildarts said, and he meant it, which was why it came out the way it did — simply, without ceremony. "It's a wonderful name." He offered his hand properly this time. "Gildarts. Gildarts Clive."
Something in her expression eased, just slightly. "Well then. Thank you just the same, Mister Gildarts."
He winced with a good-natured enthusiasm. "Easy there — drop the mister. Just Gildarts."
"...Just the same, then. Gildarts."
He smiled. Then he looked at the three children, then at the woman holding them, then at the crater behind her, and made another of those simple, uncomplicated decisions that had always been his way.
"I take it you don't have anywhere to be," he said.
It was not really a question.
She answered it anyway. "No," she said quietly. "Not anymore."
"Then come on." He turned and started up the crater wall, glancing back once. "I need to stop by the guild first, but after that you're all welcome at mine until you've got your footing."
She followed without hesitation — which told him rather a lot about her, he thought. Either she was very trusting, or very practical, or she had simply arrived at the end of her capacity for caution and found, on the other side of it, something that felt like relief.
He suspected all three.
---
Magnolia was everything that Teilanne had not expected.
She had compiled a rough image of Earth from the records Saiyans had gathered over the years — a blue-green planet, unremarkable in size, low-level civilization, no notable power signatures worth mentioning. A quiet place. A *small* place.
What she had not compiled any record of was cobblestone streets and warm-lit shop windows and the smell of food and river water all woven together in the late afternoon air. She had not prepared herself for the sound of people laughing in outdoor cafes, or children chasing each other around fountain squares, or the particular quality of a town that had clearly survived a great deal and somehow remained, in spite of it all, *cheerful.*
She had not prepared herself for the guildhall.
It rose at the end of a wide street like something between a fortress and a celebration — the crest above the doors unmistakable, the sound of voices from inside already carrying out into the street. Gildarts led her toward it with the comfortable ease of someone coming home, and Teilanne followed while her mind quietly began to come undone at the edges.
Guilds.
She knew the concept — loosely, academically, the way you know things from old records. But that was different from standing outside one. That was different from looking at that crest and understanding, with a slow and dawning disorientation, that nothing about this place matched anything she knew about Earth.
Where am I?
Inside, the guild was exactly as loud as the outside had suggested it would be, with the added dimensions of several simultaneous conversations, someone laughing very loudly in the far corner, and the general atmosphere of barely-organized chaos that seems to spring up naturally wherever a large number of strong-willed people are asked to coexist. Teilanne held the children closer and kept her expression neutral, which was more effort than it usually was.
A small man with broad shoulders and an enormous mustache appeared before them — age worn into his face like something earned, eyes that were presently directed upward at Gildarts with the long-suffering air of a man who was used to being surprised and had made his peace with it.
"Gildarts," he said, with the specific tone of someone greeting a force of nature. "You're back early."
"I am." Gildarts gestured toward Teilanne with easy informality. "Found her and her three out in the forest. No place to go. I'm taking them in for a bit."
The old man — Makarov, she would learn, Guild Master of Fairy Tail — shifted his gaze to her, and she found herself being assessed by a pair of eyes that were considerably sharper than their owner's stature suggested.
"And your name, miss?"
"Teilanne, sir."
Something flickered across his expression. Not quite recognition — more like the particular attention of someone who has learned to pay attention to the feeling of meeting someone remarkable before they know it yet. "Teilanne." He said it slowly, as though measuring it. "Well then. I do hope you'll consider joining our guild, at some point." A small pause, a slight smile. "I have a feeling you are considerably stronger than you look."
Teilanne glanced between the old man and Gildarts, processing this.
*Guilds.*
*Magic.*
*A world that should have been Earth and very clearly was not.*
The baby Ginè chose that moment to bat her small hand against Teilanne's chin and make a sound of profound contentment.
Teilanne exhaled slowly through her nose.
Wherever this was — whatever strange, warm, impossible world the stars had sent her to — she was here. Her children were alive. There was a man named Gildarts who had offered her a hand without being asked, and a guild master who had looked at her and seen someone worth watching, and a town outside the window that smelled like river water and food and the specific scent of a place that people *chose* to come home to.
It was not Planet Vegeta.
It was not anything she had ever planned for.
But then — pressing her lips to the top of Ginè's head, feeling the warm, solid weight of Uruk against one shoulder and Kizuna's small hand closed around her finger — she found herself thinking that perhaps that was not, in the end, such a terrible thing.
She would figure out where she was.
She would figure out all of it.
But for now, her children were safe and warm and accounted for, and that was enough.
---
Next Time — Chapter 2: Saiyans and Cana