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It was dark. A disorienting mix of rain and smoke obstructed her surroundings, but not enough to block out the jagged skyline of broken, burning buildings. Roaring fires were scattered around her, but their light did nothing to help her see.
She heard a terrifying, dying screech echo out of the ruins far in front of her. A flare of blue light sent a thrill of fear down her spine.
“Maddie!”
The voice was faint and she had the impression that they’d been calling out for a while. It was full of desperation and pain. It made panic bloom in her. It was a young voice. It was Andrew.
“Please help me, Maddie!”
She lurched forward as if pulled by strings. Rubble shifted under her feet, nearly sending her to her knees. A collapsed building rose before her out of the smoke, looming like a mountain made of glass and concrete and steel. Human hands poked out from the dark spaces, their fingers opening and closing, trying to grasp something, anything. They were stained with ash and blood.
Maddie started climbing. Beams and fractured pieces of walls slipped out from beneath her and sent her backward every few steps. For every five she took, she lost two or three.
A hand grabbed her ankle. Andrew called for her again, and she ripped herself free with a pained cry. Bloody claw marks gouged her skin where the fingertips had pressed against her.
The rain pounded down on her, and she struggled against it like it was a living thing trying to push her back. Andrew needed her. She fought harder.
Glass shards sliced her palms as another terrible shriek—somewhere between animal and human—tore through the city. With a final heave, Maddie pulled herself onto the top of the rubble mound. Another hand clamped down over her foot, but she ignored it for the moment.
This was San Francisco; this was what was left of San Francisco. The darkness lifted slightly, enough to allow her to see her surroundings. Through the storm and smoke, there was almost nothing left. Fire consumed the horizon on her right and left, and a hurricane raged behind her. There was no sun.
Lightning flashed and Maddie looked down at herself. She was too tall for San Francisco, too old. In her hands—her hands, covered in blood, dripping unendingly with it—was the ORCA, wailing a song she couldn’t understand.
“Maddie!”
Too far away, she caught sight of Andrew. He was pinned beneath the bodies of their parents, of Dr. Serizawa and Dr. Graham. He reached out for her, even though she was still on the broken building. There must have been a mile between them, yet she could see the cuts on his face and the fear in his eyes.
He was twelve. So was she.
Maddie tried to take a step, tried to go to him, but the hand held her in place. Others joined it, stretching up out of the rubble to latch onto her legs. The arms were broken, showing bones jutting out through the skin and twisting them into monstrous things. Their nails, claws, dug into her and drew blood.
Lightning flashed. A dying screech boomed like thunder, trailing off beneath the sounds of pouring rain and blazing fire. Andrew was crying.
A blue light ignited across from her, past Andrew, near where the sounds of death were coming from. Godzilla stood there, his eyes and spines blazing, and stared back at her with bared teeth.
The ORCA continued to howl its call.
Godzilla took a step, then another, and another, until he was charging across the ruined city straight at her. Smoke leaked out of his mouth as he roared. Maddie tried to speak, tried to scream, but she couldn’t breathe. Her lungs were full of ash. She coughed up blood and couldn’t turn off the ORCA no matter how much she wanted to.
She saw Godzilla’s sharp teeth dripping blood, saw his stomping footsteps, and knew where the next would land.
“Maddie!” Andrew cried out one last time, his voice drowned beneath Godzilla’s roar. A shadow fell over him, and Godzilla’s foot was quick to follow.
“No!” Maddie cried as she lurched forward, waking up in the same instant. Her heart was racing, painfully so, and her chest heaved with every erratic breath she took. Bleary and confused, she looked around as the dark ruins of San Francisco melted into her bedroom.
Her whole body was shaking. She reached up and felt the sticky remnants of tears on her cheeks.
Clenching her sheets in her fists, Maddie bowed her head and worked on getting her breathing under control. It was just a nightmare. A stupid nightmare.
Though she was still painfully aware of her thumping heartbeat, she was able to get her breathing back to a normal pace. She fell back with a whump and stared vacantly up at the ceiling. What she had seen ran through her head, playing a highlight reel of worst moments. Her ankles tingled with the phantom feel of hands wrapped around them. Her palms stung.
(She double-checked to make sure they weren’t covered in blood.)
With a frustrated grunt, she rolled out of bed. Maddie jammed her feet into the slippers next to her nightstand and grabbed a blanket to wrap around her shoulders like a cape. A little midnight wandering with a side of fresh air sounded good right now.
And maybe the clear sky could remind her that the smoke had long been left behind.
The current house she and her dad were staying at was pretty out of the way. A rolling field stretched out behind it, ending over two miles away where a forest began. It wasn’t entirely flat, and Maddie had stood on the back deck once, staring out at the low hills, and imagined herself and Andrew trying to sled down them.
She quietly walked out there now, making sure to leave the sliding glass door unlocked. The moon was low and the stars were bright. Uncaring whether she got her slippers dirty, Maddie hopped off the deck and trudged through the grass.
It was eerie, being out when everyone else was asleep. The world was quiet and still, and without a watch or phone, time held little meaning among the flowers and weeds. There was no birdsong, no wind. Nothing rustled in the distance. Maddie was completely and utterly alone.
She reached the top of a hill—though it was more like a wide mound than anything truly deserving of the title ‘hill’—and squeezed her eyes shut.
Fire flashed across her eyelids, a scream echoed in her ears. She pulled her blanket tighter around herself and glared down at the ground, resenting the burst of fear that ricocheted through her bones. On the one hand, it felt stupid to be afraid of Godzilla. After all he’d done, after what she’d seen. On the other, most people were afraid of him, and they called it common sense.
It was one thing to be wary. It’d be too easy for him to forget his strength or turn the wrong way or take a poorly placed step. But this fear in her felt personal, and for that, she was almost ashamed.
Why had her stupid human brain taken one of her most relief-filled memories—the sight of him charging at Ghidorah, spines ablaze, just in time to save her from certain death—and warped it into the centerpiece of her nightmare?
“Stupid,” she whispered harshly. Maddie raised a fist, still clutching the edge of her blanket, and repeatedly pounded it against her forehead. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
A quiet thud and a strong gust of air from behind her drew Maddie out of her frustration. She turned around. Mothra stood at the base of the tiny hill, delicately folding her wings.
It wasn’t unusual to see her here. Maddie was pretty sure she simply enjoyed visiting, for whatever reason. And if this was when she always showed up, then no wonder she’d never seen Mothra actually arrive. She was always just out here waiting by the time Maddie woke up.
She chirred quietly as she settled down, and maybe Maddie was reading into it, maybe she was just desperate for someone to be there right now, when she was still faintly trembling from her nightmare, but she sounded concerned.
Maddie swallowed. “Hey,” she said. Her voice cracked on that one stupid syllable, and she cursed herself all over again. To distract herself, she started down the slope. “Nice night we’re having, huh?”
Mothra didn’t respond. Instead, she watched Maddie’s approach steadily, her head moving in tiny increments to track her every step.
“What?” Maddie asked as she came to a stop right in front of her. She’d almost gotten her shaking under control, though her mind wouldn’t stop replaying those last moments. Those last steps. She shuddered and tilted her head back to look up into Mothra’s eyes.
With a slightly deeper sound than Maddie was used to hearing, Mothra slowly bowed her head forward until the feathery softness of her face—an area close enough to a forehead—came to rest lightly against Maddie’s. Having involuntarily closed her eyes during Mothra’s approach, Maddie’s entire focus zeroed in on the infinite care and gentleness she could feel the Titan displaying.
She promptly burst into tears.
It was the ugly sort of crying, too, which left her shoulders shaking as she nearly collapsed forward against Mothra. She moved slowly, guiding Maddie down until she felt her knees hit the earth. Air punched out of her in hitched, stilted breaths, hindering her ability to speak. Not that she knew what she would’ve said, but it was the principle of the thing.
Mothra, with the patience of a saint, let Maddie sob against her for long, blurry minutes. She merely kept up a soft, nearly-inaudible trill while ever-so-slightly nuzzling against Maddie’s tear-stained cheeks.
When she finally had the strength to sit back on her heels, Maddie used the blanket to wipe her face and hiccuped out an apology. Mothra only shuffled closer so she could lean around Maddie’s back a little to encourage her to move. She followed the nudges until she ended up buried in Mothra’s neck, with the Titan entirely curled around her.
And—okay, it felt really nice. Comfortable and safe, for sure. She thought about telling Mothra about her nightmare, but the idea of giving life to what she’d seen, to her fear, made something in her chest squeeze.
She hardly had control over her nightmares. It wasn’t a betrayal, because she hadn’t thought of Godzilla as a monster—her weird, stupid subconscious brain did. Entirely without her permission too, so it didn’t count.
(Maybe in the morning, she would believe that.)
Regardless, she swallowed back the screams she hadn’t been able to voice in her dreamscape and tried to focus on the ticklish feeling of Mothra’s fluff against her face.
“Nightmares suck,” she said, muffled and a little hoarse.
She felt movement that was probably a nod. Which made her wonder…
“Do you guys have nightmares?” she asked. Maybe once upon a time, she wouldn’t have believed it—what could Titans be afraid of? But then she’d watched Godzilla have the life drained out of him, watched Rodan and Mothra’s brutal fight, watched Ghidorah wrap himself around Godzilla and drag him up up up and drop him down down down. Mothra burned twice over and died.
It wasn’t a matter of if they had anything to have nightmares about, but whether or not they dreamed.
Mothra’s wings fluttered as she chittered what sure sounded like a yes.
(She wondered if Titans comforted each other through their worst nightmares, or if they stayed apart too much for that. Godzilla had spent a long time alone, she knew.)
Maddie sighed, feeling very tired but not at all sleepy. Out of everything she’d seen while awake and aware, why did the fake memory hurt the most?
A faint glow suddenly lit up around her. She tilted her head back and watched Mothra’s wing above her flicker with light. It stayed dim, nothing at all like the blinding illumination Maddie knew she was capable of.
It was a bit like a nightlight, and she was pretty sure most kids had it trained into them that nightlights meant the monsters wouldn’t come out. She wasn’t a little kid anymore—some days, she was surprised she was still only thirteen—but there was no such thing as growing out of a need for comfort.
If a Titan’s nightlight wings and warm softness and soothing trills were being offered, then Maddie would gladly accept.
She smiled a tiny, weak smile, but the fires didn’t rage behind her eyelids when she closed them.
“Thanks, Mothra,” she whispered, raising a hand to thread her fingers through the fluffy strands of Mothra’s neck.
She received a gentle nudge in answer, and as she slowly drifted off, she almost thought she could hear promises of protection and unburdened sleep woven through Mothra’s quiet song.