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English
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Part 22 of Writing Warmups (daily page-long drabbles)
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Published:
2019-10-04
Completed:
2019-10-04
Words:
1,680
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2/2
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12
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95
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Pretty Little Bug

Summary:

Mothra hatches.

... On Mars.

With a three-headed alien dragon waiting oh so eagerly to welcome her to her new life.

Notes:

Written for the prompt: "How bout a Mothra x San/Kevin prompt? (or any head of your choice!) Basically, one of the heads develops feelings for the devine moth, and doesn’t know how to handle it- Mothra confronts the head that has feelings for her about it while the other heads are sort of questioning it." I got this prompt when I asked for Rodorah & related prompts. I uh… I’m not gonna write a Mothra/Ghidorah prompt into a Rodan/Ghidorah series? So I moved this to my drabble prompt list instead.

There’s a tendency to go Oh Kevin He’s The Nice Sweet Friendly One based on the fact that he’s scolded for licking up the ashes of dead humans, as if… that’s a marker of sweetness? and I think that’s also feeding into the tendency to pair him, specifically, with The Nice Sweet Friendly Moth. Thaaat’s not how I write San.

So I steered as far from Nice Sweet & Friendly as possible.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Chapter 1

Chapter Text

Mothra knew something was wrong before she'd escaped her egg. The light filtering through the shell was all wrong. The gravity was weak. And—when she pierced her shell—the air was thin and alien.

And an alien, with three wicked grinning mouths and six sharp staring eyes, loomed over her. "Happy birthday, little bug."

She reeled back from them. "You're supposed to be dead!"

"Only frozen. Recently thawed," they said. Their voice—voices?—was an eerie synchronized three-note chorus, far too soft for the creature she'd once heard bellowing in furious combat. "You're supposed to be dead too, many times over. Just like us." They bent further over her, so she had to tilt her head to look up at them. "Tell us, little bug. Do you know where we are?"

She knew it from the smell of the air, the rusty dirt, the dull yellow sky. "Mars." They must have stolen one of her eggs. And flown it all the way to another planet?

"You've been here before," they hissed approvingly. "A starfarer—also just like us. And also one who can creep into others' minds and leave commands; one who flies; one who is alone; one who recognizes the power of small clever creatures who know how to build civilizations; one who is responsible for the fate of worlds..."

She cut into their list of parallels. "Why did you take my egg? You're listing the reasons you hate me."

Their right and middle heads exchanged a glance. "Are we?" "I suppose we are." They sounded condescendingly amused. But one of their minds was in disharmony with the others—the one whose gaze had never wavered from her.

She focused on their left face. "You. You're..." She didn't want to say out loud what he was really feeling. "You're—fascinated."

"You're fascinating," he countered. "Such a strange, pretty, powerful little thing. Why wouldn't I be?" The other two minds, however, were still revolted by her, wary of their parallels—and that revulsion flared up in response to the left one's keen interest.

Maybe she could take advantage of that. Maybe she could turn them against each other, get them infighting, get away. She turned toward the middle and right heads. "So you've let him—what—bring home an egg he's going to make you all be responsible for? Make you take care of your enemy? You'd let him boss the rest of you around like that?"

Her taunts barely ruffled their mood. If anything, it stirred up a bit of irritation—but at her, not their rogue sibling. "Oh, there's no 'bossing' anyone; we came to an agreement. We always do," the right one said. The middle agreed, "Sometimes he gets curious. We permit ourselves to indulge when we can. It breaks up the monotony."

No luck. The emotions between these two minds and their outlier might have been disharmonious, but they were still in sync with each other. She turned back to their left one—maybe that would be an easier route. "So they're letting you keep me as a pet," she said hotly. "You're okay with that? I can sense it in your mind, I know how you really feel, and this—this isn't how you treat someone you love."

She'd hoped to inspire guilt, remorse. Instead, she was nearly bowled over with his amusement. "It's how I treat something I love," he said, eyes wide and blazing as he gazed at her.

All of the attraction and none of the affection. They truly were alien—or just cruel. She shrank back from the three of them, backing up over her discarded egg shell. "I won't play along. I'll let myself die here. It won't be the first of me to die alone in space, it won't matter—in other bodies, I still remain on Earth."

"Do you? Are you sure?" They followed after her as she retreated, heads sinking down low near the ground, grinning up at her. "Are you sure you're not the last? If we're back from the dead, who knows what else you might have missed since your egg was laid? What else might we have done before bringing you here?"

She went cold. They were right. She had no way to know whether any more of her eggs were alive. She tried to dig for the knowledge in their minds, but they were strong enough psychics that she couldn't get past their disgust/disdain/delight that she'd tried.

"I'll fly home," she said weakly. "As soon as I can cocoon myself."

"We hope you do! We'll hunt you." Tauntingly, their voices almost singsong, they said, "Leave an egg before you go, just to be safe."

"And if I don't? You'll be risking killing me for good."

"You'd risk killing yourself for good. You won't. You're not desperate enough to escape to risk it."

They were right. She wasn't. (Not yet.) "I'll fight you. I'll never stop. I'll fight you to the death, over and over, until I kill you."

"And we will rise from the dead, just like you," they promised, "to hunt you again."

"I'll change," she threatened. "Little by little, every time I'm reborn, to make myself stronger and more dangerous. I won't be a 'pretty little thing' by the time I've become whatever I have to be to kill you for good. I'll be a monster."

They lunged toward her. "Just like us." Two sets of massive teeth loomed before her eyes; she felt the left neck coil around her like a serpent constricting its prey, ready to swallow hole. "Good. Make yourself a monster. We're looking forward to it."

Chapter 2: Wicked Little Bug

Notes:

Written to the prompt: "ok first off *that fic was absolutely amazing and well-written and also perfectly lines up with my headcanons on san's feelings on mothra....* but now i'm incredibly worried about my girl and i need to make sure she's gonna be okay 8(" How flexible is your definition of "okay"?

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Where once there had been soft white fuzz and iridescent curves, now she was flat black plates with sharp edges, smooth and shiny enough to reflect distant stars as camouflage. Over the many painfully short generations, she'd become all but invisible against the void of space.

They always found her anyway.

She sensed their approach like an impending migraine, a blunt nail piercing her mind. She hurried to put the last pieces together in her trap and retreated deep into the labyrinth—an asteroid, dozens of miles across and all solid metal, that had once been the core of a planet.

"Is this what you've been working on for so many dozens of generations, our wicked little bug?" In the void of space, their voice was a triple telepathic echo, bouncing through the iron tunnels. Then a psychic roar of pain—they'd stumbled into some of her razor wire silk, triggered her carefully-rigged blades. When they called to her again, their voice was louder—and there were only two. "Clever! But have you forgotten we can grow back anything you remove?"

"Have I?" she taunted, and crawled deeper into her asteroid, nimbly dodging traps, letting razor silk slide off her hard carapace. She felt the vibrations in the asteroid as they barreled into deeper and narrower tunnels, snarling and howling as they fought through her traps, chasing her to the heart of the dead world.

They cornered her in a small chamber, walls lined with jagged metal like daggers and swords and spears. By the time her pursuer caught up to her, wild-eyed and wide-eyed and manic with furious adoration, he'd been reduced to a left head and left wing to drag himself along—wing membranes in scant tatters hanging from bone—torso lacerated and half missing, tails torn off and one leg broken. And even at that, in a one-on-one fight, she knew he'd still be more deadly than her.

"You made me work for it!" It was half a pained hiss, half a loving coo. His wing—without its membranes, converted into spindly, bloody fingers—pulled him into the chamber of knives. "You've never gotten any better at fighting, and yet I'm constantly amazed at how bloodthirsty you can get." He lurched fully into the small chamber, curling up to fit, and ran his black-blood-dripping tongue over her face. She tasted liquid rot on her mouth. She hated how satisfying it was, this putrid evidence that she'd made them bleed. "Is your bloodlust satisfied for this round, love? My turn to taste yours?"

"I'm not finished," she snarled, and spread her wings wide.

Once upon a time the lights that shined from her wings had been called "god rays"—holy, uplifting, enlightening. Now it would have been more accurate to call them a god's wrath; they burned like the last ugly fatal burst of a dying star.

He cackled in pain. "You're slipping in your desperation!" Beneath the black blood, his torn flesh glowed golden-white. "You've forgotten that fire regrows us!"

"Have I?"

As his torso regenerated, as a wing resprouted, as two more heads began to re-emerge, his eyes widened: his body was filling the remaining space—and pressed into the many blades. The newly regrown heads' psychic shriek nearly deafened her as they skewered themselves alive. "What have you done!"

"Healed you," she spat. "I was called a goddess. That's what I do. The rest, you did yourselves."

They roared. The center one clamped his fangs around her—her carapace had become harder than their teeth many generations ago, but even if they couldn't pierce her, they could still crush her. But as they tried desperately to move enough to pin her with their mass, they felt the tips of the blades piercing through her wings. She too had been pressed to the walls when they'd regrown. They laughed harshly. "You fool. You've trapped yourself with us."

"Have I?!" She snapped out a leg like a serrated blade, seizing the left neck in it. His eyes widened. "I'm in an egg on Mars, waiting to be reborn. I'll fly home to Earth. But you? Even if you got off your skewers, you're too big to get back into the tunnels you used to get in here. You've trapped yourselves with me. Forever." She began to squeeze. "And I'm going to enjoy it."

The left head gave her a terrified, bloody smile. "So will I."

Notes:

Originally posted on tumblr.

Notes:

Original post on tumblr.