Chapter Text
The dream always starts and ends the same. It’s dark, like an abyss that swallowed me whole. Then lightening blinds me. I am face to face with a three headed dragon, wings so large they touch the sky. In a blink, I am dead. Every time, the dream repeats and there’s no way to change it. Every time, I speak of it and those around me only shake it away. Too much monster research, too much stressful college and work, too much caffeine before bed.
I shot forward in my bed, the alarm bells rang from my phone and from my alarm next to my bed. A clever trick I found to ensure I woke at the right time every day. With a groan, I rubbed my face and went about making peace with my never endless sleepless nights. I shuffled off the bed. My phone trilled, another urgent alarm to send me off about my day. Monarch would not excuse tardiness.
“Mottie? You awake?” A knock to my apartment doors stirred my bones. I ripped my nightgown off my body and neatly folded it into my dirty laundry basket. Silk against the dirty cotton and jean material that filled the basket.
“Yeah!” I Chirped. “No way I couldn’t be.” I sighed to myself. A pair of trousers yanked up onto my hips and a shirt over my head. Keys jingled till I was witness to a familiar face as it poked into my one room apartment. Monarch paid and owned, a residence for their lower level employees. I was technically still an intern until I finished my master’s degree. An intern with a pilot’s license!
May put her hands to her hips as I snatched up my tote bag off the floor next to my bed. “Seriously, Mottie? You still haven’t unpacked?”
“I live every other week on the base, when do I ever have time to unpack?” I let out a snort as I tossed the duffel that also sat next to my bed onto my shoulder.
“I meant the moving boxes.” She nudged her chin in the direction of my lone couch covered in trashbags and boxes full of stuff. I eyed my couch then looked back to May with a slow shrug.
“Never know when I’ll need to move again.” I wiggled my toes into my sneakers. I bounced back and forth on my feet a bit until both feet were comfortably in them and ready to go. “Besides, it’s kinda hard to decorate this place. Concrete walls, concrete floors, it’s almost like it was a prison redecorated to be an apartment complex.”
May rolled her light brown eyes and swiveled to follow me out of the apartment. “It wasn’t a prison.”
“Uh-huh, sure.” I tossed a wink over my shoulder.
“A reform center isn’t a prison.” She countered, as she closed the door behind me and locked it up behind her.
“Whatever makes you sleep better at night.” I teased. May tossed long onyx locks over her shoulder and tied them behind her shoulders with a thin scrunchy. Then she cocked a hip out and crossed her arms, her eyes narrowed on me. “What?”
“Speaking of sleep-”
“Oh! Hear that? My rides about to leave, better get to steppin-” I interrupted with nervous laughter. I launched across the floor as May called out after me. May was the intern lead, a Monarch employee specifically meant to oversee the education and well-being of interns like myself. Though, I was a completely different can of worms than her usual 18 year old spring chickens fresh out of highschool with big dreams of being scientists to experiment on titan blood and tissue samples.
I was twenty-four, for starters, and I paid my way through college by signing away my soul to the military. Four years in the army as a trained pilot, two years as electrical engineering and back up pilot, made up six whole years that I refused to talk about with May. Which only infuriated her more, as May was completely and entirely a nosey busy-body. It’s what made her so good at her job. She wiggled into their lives and heads and made sure they were tip-top shape and in working order for Monarch. I almost gave her access to my brain once, late night over three pitchers of prickly pear flavored margaritas and damn good chimichangas. Then I realized I might actually tell her the reason I never slept the best.
The horrors of a world at war with Titans was not what kept me up at night. It was me, my own brain and dreams of a life in the clouds, the chill of air as it passed around me. So i soothed that itch by learning to fly. Dreams of a life with no face, of a life where I was murdered. No rhyme or reason, I held to tangible memories, and I could only remember the pain.
I launched myself out the front of the apartment complex into the dusty morning light. A city reborn from the ashes of a monster attack. Buildings built over long forgotten monuments. Radiation left light traces everywhere, an ever present reminder of what happened twenty-four years ago. The king fought and won a war right here in the streets, and left into the depths of the ocean that night. As far as the world knew, the king was gone and missing. As far as Monarch knew, or at a lowly intern level that I could figure out, was he’d found a new place to rest. A place we could not follow. We had to just hope and believe that if the need arose, he would return.
“Coming, Mottie?” I looked up from the steps of the complex to the jeep that hummed in front of the building.
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” I laughed as I tossed myself and my bags into the back of the jeep. One week on the base in the middle of the ocean, one week back at the apartment to continue my work, a hectic, fulfilling life if you asked anyone else… so why did it always feel like I was missing something?
“How goes my little lightening bug?” Aaron Michaels chuckled from the back of the jeep. My direct boss, so to speak, over electrical engineering, specializing in locating and analyzing new titans as they broke through the earth. The original 17 were no longer the only titans we knew of.
“Ready to get the heck off the land.” I laughed as I buckled up. The Jeep roared to life and whirled back away from the complex. I watched the horizon show a dock with a helicopter already loaded, a few people clambered aboard. Other interns readying themselves for work. Some of us were land-locked, some of us were given the special privilege of working on the sea base three hundred miles off the shore.
“Good to hear,” Michaels patted me on the shoulder. “I’ve got a whole stack of paperwork and toys for you to tinker with when we roll in.”
“Oh goodie.” I rolled my eyes as Michaels roared with laughter. The jeep rumbled down the road toward the docks.
It had been twenty-four years since Godzilla had been seen last, and Monarch stayed to clean up the mess when he submerged.