Disclaimer: Godzilla: The Series belongs to Touhou Ltd. and Sony-Tristar. Buffy The Vampire Slayer belongs to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. Robin Goodman belongs to himself, really. This short is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association of America for references to violence and minor bad language. It follows "Sowing Dragon's Teeth" in the "Lizards and Wizards and Demons, Oh My!" series.
Midsummer Meetings
I hate New York in the summer. Not enough to move, of course- my whole life's here, especially now. Where would I go, Cleveland? (Actually, we should maybe make some time to check out Lake Erie one of these days. Sure, they've cleaned it up, but it was very nasty for a very long time, and we've seen way too often how problems can pop up years after the fact.)
But with all the concrete and people, New York City was what they call a "heat island," an area that's considerably warmer than its surroundings. Add in that we're on the bay with the attendant humidity, and yeah, in the summer, the air isn't so much gaseous as a very thin liquid.
So why was I walking downtown, in a neighborhood I was barely familiar with, at nine o'clock at night? Because I wasn't fit company for anyone human right now, and I was too restless to go back home and try and get any work done in the lab.
The past few weeks, ever since we got back from Sunnydale, I've been trying to find my balance, given how much has changed in my life. Everybody, including my newly-acquired therapist, has been reminding me that I can't just slip back into the same slot I filled before, that I won't fit. And I've been listening, but… Some things are hard to give up on.
Tonight, I finally had to give up on me and Audrey. It's been coming for a while, and I think we both knew it, but we're so damn stubborn- and I do love her. I probably always will, and I know she loves me too. That's not the problem. The problem is that we've both got dreams, and they're pointing in different directions, and neither of us can walk away from those dreams and possibly be happy. The problem is that we've both got too many sharp edges, and they don't fit together like the pieces of a puzzle.
The problem is, we know too many ways to hurt each other and I really don't like the fact that I was willing to use that to keep her, when my brain was scrambled. I still loved her, still wanted to protect her, but that I thought it was okay to casually stab her with words like that- No. Some of that was F- Drake's influence, I know that. But I also know that it's a trait I have, that I've always tried to keep control of. And the fact that I didn't- We aren't healthy anymore. And maybe we haven't been for a while.
I'd told her all of this tonight, walking in a park near her apartment. It was private enough for a conversation, but still public enough to draw attention if things somehow went bad. (Randy says I'm too paranoid about my temper at this point, and he's probably right… but as Monique says, paranoia saves more lives than under-preparation.) It had gone… about as well as a breakup speech can go, honestly. She'd cried, I'd cried, she'd hugged me, and we'd agreed to try and save something of the friendship eventually, when it didn't hurt so much. I'd dropped her off back at her building and now I was just… walking.
::Hurt?:: Worry brushed my thoughts gently, like a cool current in a warm pond. That was also taking some getting used to- Godzilla and I'd always been able to sense each other, but it had been mostly subconscious, at least on my end. But the link Willow'd opened up that night hadn't completely closed, and so it was one more ball added to my juggling routine.
/I'm sad, but okay,/ I sent back, trying to render it into something he could understand. The ins and outs of healthy human romantic behavior were hard enough for humans to understand, let alone a giant lizard whose sex was indeterminate and whose gender identity was at least partially a matter of convenience. /Sometimes things that are good for you can still hurt, for a while./
I got a feeling of understanding back, plus a wobbly image of Elsie and me pulling barbs out of his side after a spat with a mutant porcupine a few months back. He'd roared loud enough to startle every bird in a five mile radius, but it had been the only way to stop the wounds from getting infected.
/That's it exactly,/ I replied. /The barbs are out, now I just have to wait for the pain to fade./
A feeling of surrounding warmth through the link, then his attention slipped away again. I sighed, then looked up as I realized I was standing at the door of a small restaurant tucked onto one of the smaller side streets in Audrey's neighborhood. "The Avalon Café." Heh, and it was Midsummer's Night, too, after sundown on June 21st. Maybe that was a sign. Pushing the door open, I stepped inside.
Inside looked like a fairly typical diner, tables, booths, and a line of stools at the counter, behind which sat a white-haired man reading a newspaper. He looked up as I came in, and I got a glimpse of a pair of vividly blue eyes before his eyebrows shot up and he came to his feet.
"Well, as I live and breathe, if it isn't Eleni Tatopoulos's boy, all grown up," he greeted me, laying aside his paper as he stood. His voice had a faint British accent- kind of like Giles's, but not exactly. His age could have been anywhere from thirty to sixty, and all of my senses, old and new, were in violent agreement- he wasn't the slightest bit human.
Then his words registered, and I blinked. "Wait. You knew my mother?"
"Oh, quite well, I assure you. … Good lord, I did not mean that how it sounded. Hold on, I have the picture around here somewhere." Turning, he rummaged through a drawer in the bar for a moment before pulling out a framed photograph and handing it over to me.
"I keep it around, mostly for sentimental reasons," he explained. "After all, it's not every day someone like me gets named as a child's godfather."
Taking the picture, I managed to aim myself so that I landed on a stool as my knees gave out. Sure enough, the picture showed my mother, twenty-some years old, lying in a hospital bed and cradling a small bundle with an exhausted smile. Grandpa and Grandma stood to her left, and on her right, still clad in a set of scrubs, was the man in front of me, no different despite thirty years having passed.
"I… Godfather?"
"It's not as if anyone bothers much with the actual meaning of the term these days," he replied. He snapped his fingers, and I saw the sign in the window flip around to display "Closed."
"There we are. A little privacy, and you can tell me, young Nick, why it is you look like you've been through the wars. And where are my manners? Allow me to introduce myself, my name is Robin Goodman." He poured a mug of coffee and sat it in front of me, along with a few creamers and packets of sugar.
I stared at the mug for a second, then looked back at him, arching one eyebrow. "What'll it cost me?" I asked. The name, plus the way my magic senses were screaming at me, gave me a pretty good idea of what this guy was.
He snickered. "Wise boy. As the sign says, though, the coffee is free but you'll need to pay for your meal, should you have one. All locally sourced- in fact, I get my eggs from a nice old gentleman with a rooftop coop two blocks over."
Okay, then. Taking a sip of the coffee, I relaxed a little as the heat and caffeine hit me. I'd been cutting back a bit, since predators and stimulants didn't always interact gracefully, but it was looking like that, at least, wasn't something I was going to need to worry about.
"How'd you meet my mother?" I asked finally.
"Well. Thirty-plus years ago, I was running a bar in Bangor, one that was frequented by a number of college students. Your mother needed a part-time job, I needed a bartender, and the arrangement worked very well for both of us. Until one day I came in to find her sitting at the bar and crying into her hands."
I had a feeling I knew where this was going. "She was pregnant."
"She was, but more than that, she was suddenly noticing many things about her boyfriend that were… wrong. Not just the common red flags, such as disliking her friends and trying to monopolize her time, though there were those too. But stranger things, like the fact that sometimes, when they argued, she would suddenly find herself changing her mind without reason. Or losing track of time when they were together, so that she found herself missing engagements that she had wanted to attend. He knew enough not to make her miss work, of course. Her employment was a contract, and causing her to fail to fulfill it would have had very unpleasant consequences. For him. No, he'd kept it quiet and subtle, and she hadn't noticed- had been unable to notice- until something had changed."
"The pregnancy?"
A nod. "Yes, it seems the magic you carried with you interfered with his powers somewhat, giving her the space and clarity to see him for what he was." He sighed, leaning back a bit, blue eyes focused on something far in the past.
"Your mother was amazing, brilliant and brave, and most of all, kind. It's something I find too rarely, to be honest. It's not that she was nice- although she could be, and polite too, when the situation allowed- but she was blazingly, flamingly kind, and that is a far more difficult thing to be, especially when your own life becomes difficult. So, when she poured out her troubles to me, I told her that she could ask me for a favor."
My eyebrows shot up at that. Favors from a fae are a momentous thing, I knew that just from my reading, let alone what I'd been learning from the Ghostbusters over the past weeks. For him to promise my mother one…
"And do you know what she asked me for?" Goodman continued, smile flickering across his face like a candleflame. "She asked if I would be her child's godfather. No thought for herself, only for the life she was going to bear, the one she already had decided to love. Of course, I said yes. A few mundane favors called in, and we had her moved out of her apartment and on the way back to her parents before her boyfriend even caught wind of the situation. And some months later, I received a phone call and headed to a small hospital in rural Maine. Your grandfather almost took my head off before I could explain who I was, and why I was at the hospital. Then I had to talk my way into the delivery room, which, in 1970, was probably the harder of the two tasks. But some hours later, you were born, and I gave you my blessing."
"The limiter."
"Well… that was part of it, yes. You would appear to all intents and purposes completely human, and be hidden from things that would find you tasty, or useful. Including your sire. Your mother had intended to bring you to me when you were eighteen, to remove it, but… well. I did hear about the accident."
"And you couldn't look me up to do it yourself?"
He grimaced. "Alas, no. There are some rules and restrictions to what I am, and one of those is that direct interference is prohibited. There are ways around it, I am the master of loopholes, but… well."
"Okay, I get that." And I did, power had to come with restrictions, or it had a tendency to backfire and eat you alive. Usually metaphorically, but not always. "So I was basically human until something rewound me back to age ten and… ate the limiter off me somehow."
"Safety catch. If you were ever exposed to a large and dangerous amount of magical energy, the limiter would disengage, so that you'd have access to all your abilities. Of course, since you were ten, those abilities were mainly enhanced endurance and a slightly more inhuman mindset."
Like being willing to put a ten-gram steel-tipped dart into somebody's head. Those things were made to get through the hide of giant mutations, shooting somebody in the head with one would probably be fatal. I'd known that even at ten; I just hadn't given a damn. Not with my friends in danger.
"So… as I said, you look like you've been through the wars. Care to tell me about it?"
I looked at him for a long moment and then started to talk. The whole story fell out, even the bits that I hadn't told anyone other than my therapist. Some things I couldn't bring myself to share even with my friends, after all. About how much of my father's traits I had inherited, and how easy it had been to fall into thinking the way he wanted me to. Sure, he'd used magic to punch up normal brainwashing techniques, and I knew from Monique that nobody was immune to those, not forever. But he'd promised me things that I really did want, even if I wasn't willing to pay the price for them, and sometimes, late at night, they still beckoned.
When I finally finished, he chuckled slightly. "Well. No wonder the Powers That Be Unwelcome have been running around like headless chickens recently."
"I beg your pardon?"
"There are forces in this world using the so-called 'lesser inhabitants' as chess pieces, steering the events as they see fit. One of those sides, the one that styles themselves as the 'Good Guys,' even, are known as the Powers That Be. They're either idiots or incredibly self-serving, I'm not sure which. I'm a smaller player in the game myself, but I can't challenge them directly- and they've claimed Sunnydale as their playing ground. You and yours going there and upsetting all the careful plots must have chapped them something fierce."
I was missing something. "Why would I, why would we upset them? We're something they didn't plan for?"
"Exactly, but beyond that, you're not one of their pieces. I suppose you could technically be considered mine, but really, you move at your own direction. My blessing on you simply protects you from things like entangling destinies, prophecies, things like that. You can't be railroaded, not by 'higher powers.' This certainly wasn't something I'd foreseen when I gave that egg a nudge."
I'm… not entirely sure how I worked it out, but conclusions clicked together, and my fists suddenly clenched. "Wait. Are you saying Godzilla, the first one, came to New York because of you? Do you know how many people died?"
His face became grave. "Yes, I do, Niko. I also know how many are alive, and are not enslaved body and soul to a race of alien conquerors because of that. I cannot see every outcome from the choices I make, and so I need to choose, and hope, much as humans do. I just have slightly clearer sight than they do. But if the first Godzilla hadn't been born, the second would never have come to be. And while the Leviathan would not have been discovered and raised, Sopler, Hoffman, and Preloran would have made their way up eventually, and signaled to the rest of the fleet. And without Godzilla, without HEAT… I do not believe we would have won."
Ugh. Not to mention all the people who'd have been killed by things like Crustaceous Rex and the King Cobra, or the baby Loch Ness Monster being still at the mercy of Dr. Trevor. All right, I still didn't like it, but I could see his point. He was powerful, he wasn't omnipotent. Sometimes all you could do was take your best shot and hope it didn't do too much damage in the meantime.
I sighed. "Okay, I get it. So… are you sticking around?"
"Of course! I own the building, so if you know anyone who needs an apartment, send them my way. I charge very reasonable rent. And of course, how could I leave after reconnecting with my godson?" He grinned at me. "I'm pretty sure I have pictures of your mother dressed as Graine Mhaille for Halloween in 1967, if you care to see them."
A sudden growl from my stomach answered for me. "Uh… That sounds great, but… can I get an order of chicken and dumplings to go with it?"
"Of course. And another mug of coffee? The refills are also free."
"That sounds perfect."
Maybe things were finally looking up after all.
Owari
