Morning light filtered through the curtains like pale honey. The room smelled faintly of jasmine and smoke; a small, private hush had settled over Capsule Corp's quieter wing.
Buu opened his eyes to the slow breath of someone beside him. Fasha lay curled against his side, one arm draped across his chest, hair spread over the pillow like dark silk. For a second the world was nothing but the steady rise and fall of that breathing.
He watched her for a long moment. The soldier's face, usually set in hard lines, was soft in sleep. The contrast pleased him in a way he didn't bother to name.
"Wake up," he murmured, fingers tracing the line of her jaw.
Fasha's eyelids fluttered. She blinked, then gave him a glare that would have been fierce in any other context. "You call that a wake-up?" she grunted, voice rough with sleep.
"Good enough," Buu said, and the grin that followed was simple and honest. "Did you sleep well?"
She sat up, rubbing the back of her neck. For a heartbeat she looked at him — really looked — and the question that had been waiting on her lips all night slipped out in a different form.
"Are you going to do it or not?"
He knew what she meant without the words.
Buu's expression softened. "Only if you want it," he said. It was always the same with him — an offer framed like a bargain, simple and absolute. "You'll still be you. Stronger."
She studied him for a long second, then reached for his hand and placed it against her chest. Her thumb found his skin and squeezed. "Do it," she said. "I don't want to wake up another morning wondering if I made a mistake."
The Majin energy rose from him as gently as dawn. A part of him wrapped around them both, a warm, luminous tide: pink and gold, humming against their skin. Fasha didn't scream. She smiled, a soldier's smile stripped of armor.
Her ki shifted: it widened, deepened, folded through itself. The raw, direct hunger of Saiyan power fused with the malleable, responsive nature of Majin energy. It looked, for a breath, like two worlds touching without swallowing each other.
Fasha inhaled, and when she exhaled there was a new ease to it. Her posture changed subtly — a tiny loosening of the jaw, the shoulder that had been wound tight before now relaxed. She laughed, a low bark that was half relief, half triumph. "Finally," she muttered.
Buu helped her sit up. "Welcome," he said softly, because words like that mattered to someone who had asked to be remade.
She examined her hands, the faint glow along her veins. "Don't screw this up," she warned, but the voice was lighter than the warning.
Later, when they finally left the privacy of the bed, the corridor felt ordinary and strange at once. Buu walked beside Fasha with an air of possession.
He'd wanted a family; little by little, he'd been building one.
He paused at the doorway, looking back down the hall. "We should tell Bardock," he said. "He'll like this."
She looked at him, eyebrow arched. "You think he needs telling? He probably already know."
Buu shrugged, small and confident. "Still. He will want to train."
Fasha's smile was quick and sharp. "Then don't get in the way."
He laughed — a short, happy sound — and the corridor seemed, ever so briefly, bright.
Outside, in the courtyard, the rest of their ragged family moved through morning tasks.
Panchy was sitting with Mai and Bulma talking, while they watched the Saiyans training
Bardock's group drilled in the distance, hard and intense.
Buu took Fasha's hand and led her toward the yard.