Work Text:
Goku thinks he’s been getting clumsier ever since he died. Well, maybe he’s always been a bit of a klutz, never graceful when he isn’t throwing a punch, but this is just ridiculous. He’s fallen right off of one of Heaven’s floors, which means he definitely lost his race against Bubbles, and now he’s sitting smack dab in the middle of the shallow lake of blood that stretches throughout Hell’s reaches. He’s drenched. The blood is cold—it seeps through his gi and chills his skin. Technically, he doesn’t have skin anymore, but the sensation still feels real, as if he still has a working nervous system running through his phantom body.
“Well, well. If it isn’t the golden boy, playing in the mud.”
Goku looks up at that. He isn’t sure who he’s expecting to see; Hell is full of people he’d battled and sent packing. He almost does a double take when he identifies who’s leering down at him.
Raditz.
Even after all these years, when he knows his estranged brother really stands zero chance against him at this point, the sight of his hulking frame still makes a chill run down his spine. After all, this is the first man who managed to beat him red and raw and take everything he loved within a flash, like he never even stood an inkling of a chance. (The first man Goku ever met who shared his blood.) Goku splashes to his feet in an attempt to lessen the difference in height between them. Raditz is still towering over him, obviously, perfectly dry on the shore and looking more unimpressed by the minute.
“Raditz,” Goku greets, civil enough, even though he’d like nothing better than to punch the guy in the face and then some. He’s really hoping the conversation ends here. From the way Raditz is sizing him up, though, he’s sure it won’t.
“So, Kakarot, you ended up in Hell too? Can’t say I expected that,” Raditz sneers, although his tone isn’t too cruel. “After all, you made such a show of rebuking our kind’s ways.”
Goku can’t hold back the snarl when it comes out, pulls his lips back and exposes his canines. “I ended up in Heaven, for your information,” he corrects him, although he’s aware he sounds like a petulant child when he says it.
“We’re both dead, what’s the difference,” Raditz drawls, tilting his head. There might be a hint of concern there, something indirectly trying to ask Goku, Why are you dead? Why did you end up dead, too? But Goku isn’t optimistic enough to believe this brother of his is empathetic enough to care about that. Raditz cracks his neck. “So what’re you doing down here, Mr. I-Made-It-To-Heaven? Trying your hand at being an errand boy for the higher-ups of the afterlife?”
Goku rolls eyes so hard they might fall out of their sockets. Oh, wait, he doesn’t have eye sockets anymore. “Shut it. I’m not anybody’s errand boy.” All of his bravado crumbles just a little bit. Raditz quirks a brow. The back of Goku’s neck feels hot when he says, “I fell down here by accident.”
Raditz stares at him—really stares at him, void of the green glass of the scouter to shield his bare and almost soft gaze. And then he barks out a laugh so obnoxious it makes Goku flush up to his hairline.
“Oh, you stupid little thing,” Raditz snorts, wiping a tear from his eye. “How do you even do that—”
“Shut up!” Goku exclaims, throwing his arms up. “You are so annoying and I regret even talking to you! I am leaving now.” He stomps out of the lake and past his brother, blood dripping down his arms and sliding off his fingertips. It paints quite a terrifying picture, Goku covered in blood with his mouth rippling into a scowl. But to Raditz, he’s still that small, round baby, crying his weak little lungs out in a spaceship all alone, so he catches the younger man easily by the wrist, unthreatened by the display of fermented rage. To him, it just plays out like a child’s temper tantrum.
“Don’t be so cold, Kakarot,” Raditz huffs, dragging out Goku’s birth name like rubbing salt on a wound and smiling with all of those true Saiyan fangs. “Don’t you want to catch up with the older brother you’ve sent to Hell?”
A callous laugh leaves Goku’s mouth. “Not really,” he admits, although he isn’t sure why he isn’t just shaking himself out of the other’s grip. He could do so, easily. “I haven’t missed you since the day I killed myself with you. Wasn’t that nice enough?”
Raditz chuckles, looking at him sideways. His smirk is somehow all knowing. “You’re soaking wet. Can’t you stop acting like a child for one second?” He produces a handkerchief seemingly out of thin air, and then he swipes it across the terse, taut muscles of Goku’s biceps. The gesture almost feels kind. “That’s a little better,” he hums thoughtfully.
Goku isn’t sure how to feel. “What the hell are you doing.” It’s meant to be a question, but it falls flat from his lips. It sounds cornered and guarded and maybe a little scared. Goku feels like a deer making direct eye contact with a lion, hoping it’ll blend into the trees and the lion will be stupid enough to leave its meal candidate alone. The metaphor fits Raditz nicely, with all that shaggy hair growing out of his head and framing that sharp face of his. Ha.
“What’s it look like?” Raditz clicks his tongue. “You’re being too wary of me. I am aware of how strong you’ve become, Kakarot. I don’t need a scouter to tell me that. I couldn’t put a dent in you as you are now. That, and we are both dead men with nothing to lose.” He advances on Goku, who takes a few instinctive steps back. “What are you so scared of?”
Goku ignores the inquiry. He would rather die (again) than admit to Raditz even thinking about him still makes his hands shake, to this day. After all, the boy is my nephew! Goku shivers. “I thought you guys couldn’t sense the full potential of power levels,” he shoots back instead. He thinks Raditz’s grip on him is starting to burn, seering into his skin, leaving a scar in the shape of his brother’s folded palm there, but it’s probably just in his head.
Raditz looks at him as if he’s studying every atom of Goku’s soul. (Does it waver? Does it falter?) Goku can’t hold his unchanging gaze.
“You are my brother.”
He says it like it’s the simplest thing in the world.
Bile rises in Goku’s throat, hot and stinging. It’s not actual bile, of course, because he hasn’t eaten anything since he died three years ago. “You can hardly say that,” he croaks. “You didn’t even come for me until you needed me. You would have been okay with just leaving me on Earth whether I had destroyed it or not if you didn’t have to recruit me into your little space pirate crusade.” He hates how bitter he sounds. Since when has he cared about this? He doesn’t care, he decides.
Of course he doesn’t.
Raditz sighs and drops Goku’s hand. “It wasn’t like that,” he mutters, eyes gleaming distantly, like he can see the past Goku lost all memories of taking shape in Hell’s billowing skies. “You—I wanted to come for you. Earlier than when I did, I mean. They sent you off before I even got the chance to hold you.”
Goku feels sick. Did you want to hold me? The question dies in his throat before it’s even born. Suddenly, his shoes are very interesting. Raditz keeps talking.
“I always thought it was wrong of them to send you out there when you had just been born,” he admits, brows furrowing. “But taking orders from your elders and superiors, it’s a big thing in Saiyan culture. Loving your family, not so much.” He shrugs those mighty, hunched shoulders. “I always wanted to search for you, in the back of my mind. But I was always on missions for Frieza. Constantly under that bastard’s surveillance. Never had the time. And then I finally had an excuse.”
Goku shakes his head so harshly it feels like his brain slides from side to side inside his skull. “You—you kidnapped my son. You told me to kill one hundred people or you would—!”
“I had no intention of killing the boy,” Raditz interrupts indignantly, and at Goku’s doubtful look, he clears his throat. “At first. I panicked when I realised a half-Saiyan baby was going to be my end. That was low of me.”
Goku looks up to meet Raditz’s eyes. They’re almost remorseful, but Goku knows that such a word holds no meaning to their people. “You aren’t a good person,” he finally settles on saying, face to face with what he could have been if he was never found screaming and kicking in those woods by Grandpa Gohan.
“You’re stating the obvious,” Raditz snorts. “I’m in Hell for a reason, Kakarot.”
Realistically, the interaction can end there. Raditz looks like he’s said all he had to say—in fact, Goku didn’t have to listen to any of it in the first place. He wonders why he did. But all that aside, this really is the perfect time to high tail it out of here, leave his looming haunting spectre of a brother behind in Hell like he has for years, and go about his business. The business in question is really just annoying the hell out of King Kai at every given moment, but give him a break, he’s dead. There’s really nothing to do around in Heaven, believe it or not.
Instead, Goku does the inexplicable. He stays. Squares his shoulders like he’s preparing to go into battle when he says to the other man: “You still have your tail.” The appendage is slowly waving from side to side. Goku remembers his doing that whenever his grandpa gave him an extra dumpling at dinner. (Does that mean Raditz is happy he saw him?)
Raditz’s brows raise. He’s obviously surprised Goku hasn’t told him to eat shit and flown off yet. “Yes. Of course I do.” His face sours when he ducks his head to look obviously at where Goku’s tail should be and finds nothing. “Those Earthlings took yours, as I remember. It was the first thing I noticed when I saw you. I think that was part of why I was so angry.”
Goku’s chest warms, just a little. “It was for the best that I had it removed. It was a weakness.”
“It was your strength,” Raditz growls, looking enraged. But Goku can tell it isn’t aimed at him. “And they took it from you! They mutilated you.” He takes a few steps into Goku’s space, and this time, Goku doesn’t back away. “How could you have let them do such a thing to you?”
Goku swallows, a little uncomfortably, and then shifts his gaze to the side. “It was… For me, that tail was nothing but a curse. It was always a part of me, and deep down I hated it whenever someone removed it, but I didn’t know how to train it to not be a liability.” He looks up at Raditz again. (All these years, and Goku still only comes up to his chin.) He’s listening, arms folded over his chest, mouth pressed into a firm line. Goku continues: “I never knew what its true power was until I fought Vegeta. But it still didn’t mean anything good to me when I found out. Because seeing him transform made me realise that…”
“What was it?” Raditz demands, leaning down just a little. He almost looks like he’s attempting to talk to a scared, lost child, but he still looms over him, terrifying.
Goku lets his eyes fall closed. “You know, my grandpa was killed when I was little.”
Raditz stares at him. “Who?”
“The man who raised me,” Goku answers, blinking away the wetness that’s abruptly pricking at his eyes.
“Ah.” Raditz shifts. He looks like he wants to say something else, but he keeps his mouth shut and waves a hand, motioning for Goku to keep going.
Goku sits down on the grass. It might as well be a sign of surrender, but his brother doesn’t goad him. He takes a seat next to him instead. (A draw, then.)
“He told me not to go out at night when it was a full moon, probably because he’d seen me transform before,” Goku says, and Hell’s wind blows cold on the nape of his neck. “Said a monster comes out. And one night, I disobeyed him. I was a stupid kid. I ended up finding him dead the next morning, and I believed it was that monster who killed him for my entire life until I found out the truth.”
Raditz doesn’t look saddened or disgusted by the story. He just nods, blatant understanding dawning on his face. “It was you,” he affirms, voice level. “It was you who killed him.”
“Yes.” It feels like Goku’s rib cage is closing in on his heart. “It was me. So you can understand why I never wanted my tail back after finding out about that.”
“I suppose.” Raditz lays back, looking up at the endless clouds, head propped up his arms. Silence descends over them for a long moment as they watch little waves form in the blood of the lake before them, curling to life and then smoothing out. Rinse and repeat. A constant cycle of life and death. The horizon is twinkling, an eternity away from the two of them.
Somehow, Goku finds he doesn’t regret pouring his heart out to Raditz, of all people. He isn’t vulnerable often—he’s gotten quite good at that, convincing himself that he’s let something roll off of his skin, ignoring the fact that it’s actually rotting inside him.
“You know,” Raditz speaks up, “on the day you were born, our old man told me he saw a vision.”
Goku blanches. Their father? He’d never even thought of the man. He vaguely remembers Frieza telling him he looked just like him, beady eyes wide like he was seeing a ghost, but after that, he never let his mind wonder what kind of person he might have been. “A vision?”
“Yes. Of you.” The corners of Raditz’s lips soften into a wry smile. “All grown up, he said. He called you a saviour. I had no idea what the hell he was talking about, so I just told him to piss off and then left for my mission.” He leans back. “I got the news that our planet exploded while I was out there. I think I was too young to feel anything. I didn’t even cry.” He laughs. “Well, that’s how we were all trained, anyway. Crying wasn’t really a thing we did.”
Goku stares straight ahead. He knows that well. The Saiyans were a warrior race who put strength at the top of their hierarchy. Meaningful bonds with others weren’t a priority—that was obvious from how easily Vegeta had taken Nappa’s life as soon as he was deemed useless. Goku grinds his teeth. “But you cared about me.” He can’t believe he’s even asking that. It shouldn’t matter if the brother he killed gives a damn about him, but Goku needs to hear his answer.
“I did,” Raditz murmurs. He surveys the slope of Goku’s jaw, the wild hash of his hair; so much like their father, and yet not at all. “In my own way. I had your best interest in mind when I suggested you join us, believe it or not. I despised what those Earthlings had done to you.”
Goku looks back at him. Maybe, in another universe, the two of them grew up together. Killed thousands together, in true Saiyan brotherhood fashion. There’s a timeline where Raditz is helping Goku into a new suit of armour, pressing his hands into the shoulder pads and asking him, Are you sure it fits all right, Kakarot?, and that is the closest thing he’ll ever say for their entire lives to I love you. Goku exhales. “I wouldn’t be who I am if Earth hadn’t changed me. By the time you met me, I was nothing like a Saiyan.”
Raditz is looking at him like he can see right through him, churning guts and all. “I know,” he agrees, quietly. “It is my biggest regret.”
Goku can’t respond to that. If he thinks about how he would have lost himself morally if a murderous older brother from outer space came to retrieve him, scooped him into his arms and told him it was all going to be okay when he was small and weak and alone, he might go insane.
“I sacrificed myself,” he blurts out instead, and he isn’t even sure why he says it. What does he want? Pity? To be coddled like a child? “It’s how I died. Again, I mean.”
“Ha!” Raditz rolls his eyes. “You got a habit of doing that, or what?”
“I couldn’t help it!” Goku exclaims. “I had to. There was no other way—”
“There’s always another way,” Raditz cuts him off, seething now, fisting the front of Goku’s gi and driving him closer. “I don’t know who taught you to be such a self sacrificing moron, but it’s not the right way to live. Although I guess you don’t have to worry about that last part anymore—”
“What do you know?!” Goku roars, getting equally in his brother’s face. “I don’t— You’d never understand. I had to do it to keep the people I love alive. When it comes down to that, I’m willing to do anything.”
“And now those people you love can’t see you anymore,” Raditz hisses. The word ‘love’ comes out of his mouth like it’s a foreign concept to him. Why does he care, anyway? “You may have saved them, but you’ve given them a wound they’ll carry with them forever. It sounds quite redundant, to me. Pointless. I don’t understand these human values of yours.”
“At least they’ll be alive to carry it.” It comes out weary and wobbly, post-cathartic. Goku doesn’t sound anything like the saviour his father thought he would become, he thinks. “That’s all that matters.”
Raditz’s grip loosens, but he doesn’t let go. “Listen, Kakarot,” he starts, moving his hand to seize Goku’s shoulder, “I understand. Or, well, I don’t, because you know how I am. But I understand how you are.” He leans forward so their foreheads are touching. Somehow, it feels like this isn’t the first time they’ve done this. Goku can’t find it in himself to draw back. Raditz gives his shoulder a squeeze. It would leave a bruise if Goku still had a body.
“You’re a good fighter, Kakarot. And a good man. Brainwashed by the Earthlings, but probably the best of all of us.” Raditz frowns. “I don’t like how easy it was for you to throw it all away.”
Goku stares at his reflection in his brother’s eyes.
“Perhaps being dead will teach you a thing or two about valuing yourself. Feh,” Raditz grunts. He detaches Goku from himself like he’s ripping away his other half. (And what are two brothers, if not two halves of the same whole? Yin and yang, dark and light.) “Guy like you may get another chance to live. If you do, don’t ruin it with these suicidal ideations of yours.”
Goku sputters. “I— I don’t think that’ll happen. I’m dead for real. They can’t bring me back with the Dragon Balls anymore. I told them not to, anyways.”
“Told them not to?”
“I’m a danger magnet,” he says frankly, shrugging. “It’s better if I’m dead.”
Raditz erupts into peels of laughter. “Better off falling into Hell and hanging out with your bastard of a brother, is it,” he teases, and Goku lets a tiny smile grace his face.
“Maybe,” he sighs. The urge to reach out for Raditz again makes his hands itch, every piece of his soul screaming at him to grasp him while he still can, like an instinct he forgot about a long, long time ago. “Raditz—”
“Hey! Raditz, the fuck are you doin’ slacking off over here?”
Both men dart up at the call, seeing Hell’s ogres standing not too far away from them.
Raditz kisses his teeth and lazily sways to his feet. “Damn. Guess I’ve gotta get back to work.”
Goku follows, trying to quell the childish, stupidly upset feeling that’s bubbling in his stomach. “Yeah.” His chest feels full. “I’ll see you around, Raditz.”
Raditz has already started walking away, but at this, he turns his head. Goku can see half of his crescent moon face. He’s grinning wolfishly. “Try not to fall into Hell too often, little brother.”
Goku watches his brother’s steady stride until he can’t see the outline of his back anymore. He isn’t sure why he feels like crying.