A/N: Part 2/3. Thank you for the R&R!
It was eerily familiar to when Maddy had been snatched away from the false King Ghidorah. Mothra had placed herself above the foolish girl and challenged Godzilla to a standoff that no other kaiju could have attempted.
The monsters had glared at each other, haranguing each other in a language that consisted of grunts and squeaks. Their methods of communication didn't quite match, but they were conversing. It didn't exactly surprise the little girl in the middle of it all, since she'd gotten this far without speaking to Mothra in words herself.
The back and forth went on. All the while, Madison wrapped herself around Mothra's leg and clung with all her might. The fight in her was gradually disappearing. Madison deflated as she began to realize that no epic fight was going to occur - not in terms of a violent showdown.
No, it was more like they were… bickering.
Later, Mothra's trills were the only sound in the night.
A jungle teeming with life and yet all signs of it had extinguished upon the King's arrival.
The Queen swaddled Madison with a soft and caring forewing, managing to delicately clean the blood dripping from the child's nose with her lengthy tongue. It tickled as much as the tufts of fur covering Mothra's head did. And the gesture of it was just as much of a necessity as Maddy kept to her side of the nest.
Madison hadn't had a spontaneous nosebleed since she'd last seen Andrew. Thinking of him now, she supposed that she was lucky that she was only bleeding.
Now, she glared at the cause of his wake. Despite her intentions, Maddy's mom had implied some responsibility on the part of the Kaiju - on Godzilla's rampage. She'd tried to remain neutral, but how could a mother refrain from blaming everything in the world and herself for the loss of her own child?
Maddy had been the same way - it was obvious when she was little. Her parents were not to blame. They bared no guilt. It made their fighting, screaming, and sobbing confusing. Confusion was scary.
When they finally broke apart, like glass pieces from a broken window, the blame had shifted for Madison. She'd wondered privately if she was the one at fault.
Maddy stuck to Mothra's side; a duckling trailing its giantess mother. She'd begun climbing up and onto Mothra's back, and was carried with complete ease between the beast's beautiful wings. Thankfully, Mothra didn't deign to fly with Madison as her rider.
Maybe she never would, but being able to trail fingers through the lowest hanging leaves above them was enough for the little girl. Sharing the day with her Mothra was enough.
Godzilla barely bothered them. He slept in the day and at night. He woke to leave and feed, coming back with the copper smell of blood on his fangs or beneath his claws. Being up close and personal made him no less of a mystery. Surely, it could've been easy to ignore him in the day when he disappeared…
But the King insisted on infringing upon their nest.
Madison had no idea how a creature so gigantic could manage to move its girth around with such ease. On the border between night and day, he would lay far too close to Mothra - so close that their snouts would brush against each other every time without fail.
And the sight was strange, for it made Madison bristle inside. She'd had Mothra to herself for a while, and having to share with an intruder, thisintruder, wasn't fair.
His wary looks and snarls in her direction didn't smooth things over. If she didn't know better, Madison might've thought Godzilla didn't want to share Mothra with her, either.
Her clothes were in tatters. They'd survived strife with heavy weather and mischievous vines coated in thorns as big as her big toe, but the totality of the damage was hard to ignore.
Maddy was also getting too big. Her legs had been hurting the same way they did when she was 10-years-old. A tingling icy and hot feeling had thrummed in her bones as her father bequeathed it a "growth spurt" and squeezed her shoulders uselessly.
Her growth spurts were getting easier to handle, however. She had room to run even without straying 15 feet from her home of tree canopy, grass and straw and too-sweet maude flowers. Branches downed constantly in this land, for all the forest had plenty to spare, and most were sturdy enough to carry her weight as Madison hung from them like she was in a playground.
She could stretch and she could jump, and swimming was never an issue for the water was always transparent and warm. Growing was less an aberration than simply a reason to get up and move.
It became a funny feeling, rivaled by the hums and chirps of Mothra, whose antennae wriggled in the air when she snuggled Maddy. The moth's beak for a mouth poked the child's belly mildly, teasing.
It was a week of growing when Maddy began carving into the trees, connecting the tallies into pictures of nonsense. ' Optical Illusions' she'd mouthed to herself as she made spirals and tunnels halfway into the mindless task.
At the end of the day, or rather the beginning of the night, Madison would point to her newest design - wings with eyes that could look back at them - and wonder if the Queen was as proud of her as Madison pretended she was.
Even though she felt like a speck of dust in comparison, the two - yes, Godzilla was still there, still impossible to ignore though she longed to get out from underneath his thumb, so to speak - were always very aware of Madison's presence. If she were there or not around, lost and needed to be found, it was never in question. It wasn't given much thought on the girl's part, though Madison detested the brusque way she was shepherded back home whenever Godzilla found her first.
She could run and had, anywhere she pleased. Maddy certainly hadn't gotten very far, but she was given more independence now than then. Her memory was detached from the beginning but for the main things:
Echolocation was her only savior, clutched tightly to her chest in the form of a bulky machine, while three dragon heads snapped at her from all sides. Screaming lightning, determined to destroy. A false king that could be overthrown by the best efforts of an insignificant human being.
Mothra had shielded her from being decimated by blinding light and had beaten her powerful wings until she had caged the miniscule human over damaged skyscrapers. Madison would never know if her mother and father had survived the battle above Fenway Park, but Mothra hadn't come for them.
She'd recognized the little girl that was brave enough to reach out and offer kindness to a beast.
Said little girl had been half-mad when she'd been taken away, and thus had been put on a short leash. Exploring was done at a slower pace when she was still too human to grapple with the new reality, and Mothra was too big to run from.
Maddy had jumped at shadows like Peter Pan and called out to mirages and artificial shapes, begging humanity to come find her.
The clouds were dark and heavy, and the tally marks were nothing when she begged for Mothra to come find her.
Using her voice to call for help was as easy as catching fish with rocks. Madison couldn't take the sensation of a knife stabbing through her larynx and the burn of her calloused feet across the jagged rocks. Night was not yet approaching, but she'd run and forgotten that not everything waited until nightfall to prey.
Raptors of some kind, tailing her with speed that made her heart bounce in her ribcage. They'd been quiet for such a long time, letting the sun drown beneath ever-growing storm clouds as they hunted her amidst thinning tree trunks on a flatter, open wide plain.
Rain drenched her in less than a minute before Madison went completely still, noticing too late as a hulking yet lanky nightmare with drool dangling from its smiling jaws stood in the dead center of her view. Distant growling came from her right, and her left. Places in between that she was blind to without help.
Her legs began to ache while she remained rooted to her spot, unknown territory no longer wonderous but deadly. If it was another untimely growth spurt or the strain that came with freezing like a deer, Madison didn't know.
Thunder culled from above them, heaven and the world beneath it disappearing in the flash of lightning that followed. It startled like the sound of a starting pistol at a dog race. Maddy flew to her left and threw her entire body, pained legs and burdensome arms, forward as carnivorous teeth snapped into the flesh of her back.
The bite made her pitch forward, and Maddy lost balance, stumbling down the grim edge of the plateau they'd driven her to. Lightning and searing hot agony turned the world a shapeless, all-consuming white once again.
She rolled from her belly onto her back, senseless. There was no end and no beginning to the pain. A life was moving behind her eyelids: the faces of her mom and dad were blurry and almost unrecognizable, just like Andrew's, and she was the target of a golden monster in a dirty wasteland.
When she opened her mouth, water droplets bubbled on her tongue and the wind whistled through her teeth, but the sound that brought her hearing back was not from herself.
Yet it encompassed all her furor.
Abruptly, claws that were digging into her chest disappeared. A gash on her back was oozing, was packed with blades of grass and swamped dirt. The rain and thunder were born again, and Maddy gasped as she sat upright, gasping. The first thing she could see through the misery were wings glowing bioluminescent.
No. Not wings. Spines.
The short lived battle between Godzilla and the raptors came and went like slides on a projector. His roar echoed far above the sound of the night sky as he easily flattened one and tore through another's fragile frame.
The carcasses were flung away, not worthy enough to be sustenance, before it was only her, and him. And Madison dragged herself up from the mud, retching through the agony she'd been dealt.
The rumble from deep within Godzilla's chest was followed by a definitive huff. It calmed Maddy in a way she never thought it could.
She was bleeding, yes. She was lucky she was only bleeding.
Madison bit her lower lip so hard that it split and stung. Her eyes stung, filling with rainwater and salt, while the blood that had drained from her face came rushing back.
The urge was pathetic, but her shoulders were shaking and her limbs were dead and soaked and Madison didn't stop herself from sobbing. With her hands balled into fists, the little girl shook with rage and fear, with an ache in her heart that she hadn't wanted to attend to. It had been too hard. It still was.
Her cries were powerful, turning ragged in haste after her voice had been obsolete for so long.
All the while, the blazing gaze of Godzilla smoldered in the dark. Watchful. Knowing.
He stood in the rain, a mountain that could not be cowed by the harshest storms, though the thunder and lightning in the heavens looked close enough to strike him easily.
Until the King slowly leaned toward her, carefully looming above Madison as she lost control. She wanted to scream, but wasn't strong enough this time.
It was no use screaming at the King of Monsters while he sheltered her with a simple incline of his head.
Like so long ago, Madison slept afterward. For days, she assumed. It was a long and dreamless sleep, never quite broken until the time was right.
Something was always crooning in her ear, lulling her back to sleep in the softest cocoon.
Maddy woke with a sneeze. And it hurt like hell .
The moon hung above her from the gap that Godzilla had made in their canopy, the first thing she saw as regained full consciousness. The child stared up at it, blinking slowly as she felt her body as heavy as stone.
At the very least, Madison was not collapsed on the apathetic dirt. Beneath her was a cushion of sorts - fine silk that glowed when in contact with moonlight, shaped around her small form as if by design.
That wasn't all.
A breeze ruffled her hair, but it was hot and heavy as though it were coming from the mouth of Hell. She could just manage to turn her head, and wall of bloodied scales replaced the moon in her eyes.
Madison stared. Stared and stared and stared. No particular thought worried her mind. The world around them remained silent. Subdued for them, letting them rest.
On her other side, Mothra warbled in her sleep, fern-shaped feelers vibrating to the tune of a lullaby that Madison knew by heart now.
Maddy listened for a time, breathing in and breathing out. She tucked herself into the fetal position, held in place by two kaiju, and slept.