***

Radditz idly kicked a stone on the ground, sighing deeply. He was bored, wanted a good fight, and it was uncomfortably hot down here! Was that a breeze? It had been so long since he'd been comfortable... at peace... alive.

Alive. The word struck his heart like a dagger. He was alive once, but he wasted his life. Wasted in being a ruthless mercenary for Frieza, killed -- sort of -- his own brother, and what did he have now? Bad breath and broken armor.

He grudgingly accepted what his brother had become. He'd become a hero. Lived, not like a saint, not holy, but good. He lived well. That was more than he could say for himself. Aside from not living well, he didn't live at all!

Money meant nothing to him, it never did to a Saiyan. Living well didn't mean being rich, well off, or any other such nonsense. It simply meant that his brother, his one-time nemisis, knew how to live for others. He knew how to make himself happy, and make others happy. How to protect himself, his family, and his home, and would sacrafice anything for the two latter.

His brother did what he never could.

Aside from his utter boredom, disgust at his own situation, anger towards his brother (how dare he be what he never could!!), and the numbing, mind-dulling silence that was hell, there was more going on than it seemed.

Lately, strange things had been happening. People were disappearing. All over hell, there had been reports of people being there one moment and simply not the next. They couldn't explain it, though they tried, and neither could he.

Of course, he wasn't foolish enough to try, either. Some things just happened. It couldn't be explained, but they did. Why was Vegeta-sei destroyed? Why did he die? Why was he the only of his family that ended up in hell? Well, the last, he knew of course.

He was an asshole. Radditz knew that fact, if nothing else. He was an asshole. He'd been told it many times in his life, and shrugged it off as the name-calling of people that he was about to kill, but he really was. It hadn't occured to him before that perhaps it was him, not them, but it hadn't. Not until after he was dead. King Yemma had said it. The ogres had said it. Everybody said it! He was an asshole and he knew it. Although he wished he knew why that hadn't bothered him so much when he was alive as it had once he was dead. Maybe it was that now he had the time to think of such things. In any case, being an asshole wasn't what had doomed him, nor was following the tyrant Frieza. Alot of people did that, and alot of people weren't here. His father, for instance. He hadn't seen his father since he was six years old. Then of course, they were both alive. Ah well, it didn't matter. He was damned for all eternity, and the ironic thing was, that he was suffering the same fate as his victims; immediate death.

Most certainly not of the physical variety, although it had been for them, but in hell, it was as if he was dying all over again, constantly replaying crucial moments in his life. Instances where one move other than the one he'd made just might have saved his soul. That was the worst part. Knowing that things that could have gone so right, went so wrong, and all because of him. He supposed it was pennance for all the pain he caused in his life.

He continued pondering his life, just as he had for years before, time having no meaning in the afterlife, for all mortal things concede to time. Worlds, peoples, and even the gaurdians, all perished to time, but he was in the one place where time had no meaning. Chronos couldn't touch this realm, nor heaven, as the case was, because as it was designed, time had no meaning, and therefore no power, in this particular dimension.

The weary Saiyan didn't know how long he'd been there. In all honesty, he didn't care. Nothing really mattered, his mind was in a state of perpetual depression. He also supposed that hell would do that to a person.

He sighed deeply, his own breath being the thing that kept him sane, and prayed for release. He knew the mistakes he'd made, he wanted a chance to make it right. He closed his eyes and suddenly had the sensation that he was somewhere else.

Onlookers to the solitary Saiyan would have seen nothing more than a lack of person in the spot. No bright flash, no magnificant whirring of colors, only that he was there one moment, and gone the next.

***