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"He will tend his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms; he will carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are with young."
— Isaiah 40:11
The air in the small, high-tech Capsule Corp bedroom was thick with the scent of warm milk, baby shampoo, and the ozone-clean smell of alien metal. It was a smell Raditz was still learning, a far cry from the acrid winds of Planet Vegeta or the sterile corridors of Frieza’s ships. Here, everything was soft-edged and fraught with a quiet tension he wore like his own armor.
Gohan, a warm, solid weight in the crook of his arm, was the epicenter of this strange new world. The baby’s black hair was a wild, downy mess against Raditz’s chest plate, his tiny fingers splayed over the hardened leather. Raditz held the bottle with a grip that could shatter planets, yet his thumb stroked the silicone nipple with a precision that felt alien to him. He was learning this. The slow, rhythmic suckling, the dimpled cheeks working, the occasional contented sigh that ghosted against his wrist—it was a ritual that had begun to carve a quiet, bewildering space inside his ribcage.
“See?” he muttered, the gravel in his voice softened to a rumble. “Efficient. No mess.”
He’d said it to the empty room, a boast to the ghosts of his Saiyan upbringing. Gohan merely blinked up at him, eyes dark and trusting, and drank.
Then it happened.
A tiny, misfired swallow.
A bubble, out of sync.
The milk went the wrong way.
It was not a dramatic sound. Just a wet, choked little gasp, almost silent. But to Raditz’s senses, honed on battlefields across galaxies, it was a detonation.
Gohan’s face, round and placid a millisecond before, contorted. His skin flushed from peach to a terrifying, mottled red. His eyes, wide and shocked, bulged. His mouth opened in a soundless, desperate ‘O’, his tiny body seizing, back arching against Raditz’s arm.
Raditz’s heart didn’t just skip a beat. It stopped. It crystallized into a shard of pure ice in his chest, and for one endless second, the universe narrowed to the terrifying sight of his nephew—his son—dying in his arms.
The terror was a tidal wave, cold and paralyzing. But beneath it, something older erupted. Primal. Instinctual. It bypassed his racing mind, shooting directly from his frozen heart to his limbs.
His hands moved. They did not tremble. They became instruments of pure, desperate purpose. The bottle fell from his grip, hitting the floor with a dull plastic thud. In one fluid motion born of a thousand life-or-death fights, he rolled Gohan forward, cradling the baby’s jaw in one massive, calloused palm, angling him face-down along his forearm. His other hand came down, not with force, but with a firm, precise certainty on the small, heaving back.
One.
A controlled thump between the tiny shoulder blades. The sound was a soft, awful punctuation in the silent room. Gohan’s body jerked.
Two.
Another. Raditz’s breath was held, his entire being focused on the feedback through his palm. The world was this weight, this warmth, this fragile architecture of bone and breath.
Three.
A wet, spluttering cough. A gag. A dribble of warm milk spilled onto Raditz’s wrist, tracing a path through the dust and scars. Then a ragged, indrawn wail—the most beautiful, wrenching sound Raditz had ever heard.
The red began to recede from Gohan’s face, leaving tear-streaked patches and a trembling lower lip. The wail crescendoed, a furious, frightened, alive sound that shook the baby’s whole frame. The ice in Raditz’s chest shattered, and in its wake flooded a sensation so violent it left him dizzy.
It was heat, weakness and a possessive fury so profound it stole the air from his own lungs.
He pulled Gohan back, swiftly, clutching him against his chest. Not the careful bottle-hold from before.
This was an engulfment.
One hand splayed across the entirety of Gohan’s back, feeling the frantic heartbeat hammering against his own. The other came up to cradle the damp head, his fingers tangling in the fine black hair, his wet wrist smearing milk and tears across the baby’s cheek.
“Hush,” he rasped, but his voice was broken glass. “Hush. Be silent. It’s over.”
He was commanding a child, not a planet. But he held him like he was the last ember in a dead universe. He stood rooted, a monolith of muscle and armor, and began to rock. Not a gentle sway, but a deep, rhythmic movement from his core, a warrior’s stance adapted to a new purpose. His cheek fell to rest against Gohan’s hair. He inhaled the scent—milk, tears, that indefinable sweetness of a child’s scalp—and it was an anchor.
His own breath came in ragged gusts, stirring the baby’s hair. He could feel the fine tremors running through Gohan’s body, tiny aftershocks of panic, and realized they were mirrored in his own limbs.
The great Saiyan warrior, trembling over a spilled ounce of milk.
“Foolish child,” he whispered into the soft hair, his lips moving against the warmth. “You must be stronger. The universe is… it is a chokehold. You must learn to swallow it, or it swallows you.”
Gohan’s cries softened into shuddering hiccups, the anger fading into exhausted confusion. A tiny, sticky hand fumbled against Raditz’s neck, finding purchase on the line of his jaw. The touch was a brand.
Raditz closed his eyes. The poetic, possessive truth rose in him, undeniable and terrifying.
This is my weakness.
This small, fragile life.
This is the only thing that can truly destroy me.
He had faced death a thousand times with a smirk. He had faced this for three seconds and been unmade.
Slowly, incrementally, the tension bled from his shoulders. The rocking softened into a genuine sway. Gohan’s hiccups subsided, his breath evening out into puffs against Raditz’s throat, warm, damp and regular. The grip on his jaw loosened, the small hand sliding down to rest, palm open, over his heart.
He did not move to the crib. Instead, he lowered himself slowly into the room’s only chair, a stiff, foreign piece of furniture beside the changing table. He adjusted his hold, ensuring Gohan’s airway was clear, his head supported.
He would sit vigil.
He would listen to the rhythm of this newfound, terrifying heart.
He would feel the warmth seep through his armor, past his skin, into the marrow of bones that had known only conquest.
When he looked down, Gohan’s eyes were heavy-lidded, long lashes clumped together from tears. They held no recrimination, no memory of the terror. Only a deep, trustful saturation. A single, final tear traced a path through the dried milk on his cheek. Raditz’s thumb, which had delivered blows that could crater moons, swept it away with a touch softer than moonlight.
The bottle lay forgotten on the floor where it had fallen, a neutral white puddle beside it.
“Next time,” Raditz murmured, his voice a low, vibrating promise in the chamber of his chest, meant for no one but the child falling asleep against it, “...you will be stronger. And I will be here. To ensure it.”
For now, in the quiet, with the scent of milk and survival hanging in the air, conquest had a new name. It was the steady rise and fall of a small back under his hand. It was the total, vulnerable weight of a son who had choked, cried, and now slept, in absolute safety, against the chest of the most dangerous thing in the room.