"h-hey, Goku! You did it! Alright! Way to go!" A certain laughing, portly man ran up to Goku, shouting all the while.
"huh?" Goku's mind went blank for a moment, but then he remembered Yajirobe's personality, "Oh, hey, Yajirobe. Where did you come from?" He asked.
"Who, me? I've been here the whole time! You didn't see me cheering you on from behind the rocks back there?" Yajirobe told him, making Goku laugh.
"Sounds like you did a whole load of nothing, then." I interjected.
"I don't want to hear that from someone who was calmly slurping noodles during the whole fight! I was starving, you know! But I stayed and I supported Goku as best as I could, actually FOCUSING on the fight, unlike you!" Yajirobe yelled at me.
Drat. I was hoping that only Vegeta had seen me, but I'd completely forgotten about this fat idiot.
"Waait... You were eating during the WHOLE fight?" Goku asked. All eyes turned to me, so I explained in a rush.
"I wanted to annoy Vegeta. I wanted to make it seem like we were making light of him. The best way to do that, was to eat! I most definitely did not just take out a bowl of noodles because I was starving!" Clearly, nobody believed me.... or so I thought,
"Well... It is a good way to annoy someone like Vegeta... But it seems a bit..." Raditz thought aloud after a moment.
"Who cares!? We won! You're awesome, Goku!" Yajirobe slapped Goku on the back as a congratulatory gesture, which elicited a small scream from my dad, whose adrenaline levels were already starting to go down, forcing him to actually feel the pain that he'd put himself through by going Kaio-Ken times four.
"That's what you get for going over your limits, Kakarot. Try asking for help next time. You can't do everything alone." Raditz told his brother.
"Yeah, I overdid it a little bit, but I can still move. At least there's no way that he'll still be capable of fighting after taking that blast." Goku said.
"Good thing, too. I was starting to wonder if I needed to step in and give that guy a what-for." Yajirobe said, making everyone laugh. Yajirobe was incredibly strong compared to the average earthling, and after training on Kami's, he was even stronger, but he'd have been a sitting duck against Vegeta and everyone here knew it.
"Yeah... You're real strong, Yajirobe." I said sarcastically.
"Yeah, whatever... Isn't this cool, though? The Earth's greatest defenders... Standing together!" Yajirobe said, acting as if he wasn't the one out of place here.
"No... The Earth's greatest defenders would include Pigero." I told him, sorrow in my voice. I hadn't expected Pigero to get involved at all, and now he was dead. And instead of helping Yamcha survive, I'd simply taken all the nobility out of his death. I felt awful about it.
"And Yamcha..." Goku agreed with me, "Wait, who's Pigero?" He asked.
...
"Why haven't you killed me? You could've. Done it while I was unconscious. I wouldn't have even felt the pain, you know." Nappa asked his captors. He'd woken up not that long ago, but there was no point in fighting against Piccolo and Tien, who were keeping an eye on him. He was pretty much completely drained from the battle with Raditz, and he knew that Vegeta'd already abandoned him. The prince was a Saiyan, after all. Saiyans abandon and kill the weak... weak like Nappa.
"That's not how we do things here on Earth." Tien told the bald Saiyan.
"Though, you deserve it, he's right." Piccolo agreed.
"I'd have killed you, you know. Without a moment's hesitation, if you were this helpless in front of me." Nappa told them.
"Maybe that's why us Earthlings were able to beat you. It takes strength to do the right thing, rather than the easy thing. Goku taught me that." Piccolo told Nappa. The bald Saiyan didn't say another thing for quite a while...
"Maybe you're right..." He muttered after the long pause. Nappa couldn't even blame Vegeta for discarding him like trash. Nappa'd basically raised the boy since he was ten. He'd taught him the meaning of ruthlessness. Of being a Saiyan... But maybe he'd been wrong all this time. If Saiyans were the strongest, then why were they all dead? Maybe because they were weak where it really counted...
As Nappa was shuffling through his thoughts, a white pod landed in front of him.
"My spacepod!" He realized, "Vegeta... He must have called it to me!"
He made no move to enter it, though. His world had been shattered. Going into that pod, going back to the Frieza force, it wouldn't change anything...
"Are you going to go?" Tien asked Nappa, making no move to stop him.
"Tien!" Piccolo shouted. He agreed that the Saiyan shouldn't be killed, but he couldn't agree with just letting him go free.
"Piccolo." Tien gave Piccolo a look. He wasn't going to budge. Tien knew that letting Nappa make his own decision was exactly what Goku would do. Goku'd done it with Tien himself, as well as with Piccolo. They'd both made the right decision in the end. Piccolo couldn't find an argument for why Nappa didn't deserve the same choice, so he backed off.
"I don't know... Should I?" He asked. Neither Tien nor Piccolo answered him. Somehow, that helped him with his answer, "The next time we meet... I hope that we do it as friends, rather than enemies." He decided, entering the pod with Tien's help. They watched as the pod blasted off. At the same time, another pod blasted off from the direction that Goku and the others had gone to fight Vegeta, proving that the battle was finally over.
...
"She just left, huh?" Krillin muttered. After Gohan's tail had been cut off, Hanna had just vanished, leaving an injured Krillin and a naked, unconscious Gohan stranded together in a crater in the middle of nowhere. Flying and using his right hand, Krillin'd covered Gohan's waist with his shirt before laying down beside him, utterly spent and in immense pain.