Warning: This chapter contains depictions of extreme, graphic violence as well as physical and emotional torture. Viewer discretion is advised.

Even as panic gripped him and he slipped away into the unknown of sleep he recognized the sensation before he even opened his eyes. It always seemed to come back to him. No matter what, this same setting, this same sensation, always returned to haunt him.

The blackness, the insufferably permanent silence of the void, the lack of spatial relativity. It was a wonder Gigan hadn't gone completely catatonic, of course, if he kept finding himself back here he wasn't sure it was out of the question.

Gigan knew better though, he suffered the darkness, but he did not fear it. The dark gnawed at the metal for eons, but Gigan had learned to shut it out. What made the dark miserable, what made him dread it, was what it held. In the worlds he had known, in the waking mind, there was nothing Gigan feared as much as that darkness. It was because of what it held; nothing at all. The isolation it brought, the end of the mere idea of living. Nothing is made into something by the lack of anything.

Of course, this wasn't the worlds he had seen. Gigan was here, alone and in this amorphous, treacherous dark. He feared the darkness here more than he feared that of the void. The emptiness was tearing, it stretched the mind and the body out over an infinite expanse until it ripped and tore to nothing. On the other hand, when the dark was but a mirror of yourself, a reflection of all you had seen.

That, that was when it was truly terrifying. Gigan had gotten used to the state of existing in plating and wires and surrounded by naught but ink and starlight.

The sound of cracking bone split the air like a whiplash that made Gigan stumble back.

Gigan would never get used to seeing what it was like before.

The scene before him was just familiar enough for him to relate, to understand it was real and that he had experienced it before.

Out of nothing emerged the scene, ground that seemed to flow, it appeared fuzzy and almost... liquid? Gigan didn't think it looked much like ground, but he knew it was inside, something he had seen before. The features of this "landscape" were much the same, he couldn't tell whether jutting masses sticking up from the ground were rocks, plants, trees, or living organisms. Mountains in the distance seemed more recognizable, but everything else was formless, the ground and sky were one and it seemed only occasionally that he could form a positive picture.

Gigan tried to move, but there was nothing to move. He could not feel, he had no body. He was here to watch, to experience, to pay for his mistakes.

Everything else was surreal, but as he observed the thing he wanted to look away from he realized just how vivid it was. He could see it. The coiled, tight, almost leathery outer-shelled skin wrapped around dark scales. Blazing golden scales ran from the neck down to the tip of the tail and weaved in between the green. Large, golden sail fins that crested along the back. Silvery protrusions from the arms and the head, almost metallic in texture but organic. The beak matched the protrusions in color, mired by similar mandibles on either side. in the center of the head was a singular, blaring red eye.

Seeing yourself would be strange to many, but to Gigan, it was crushing. It wasn't simply because he knew what he had lost, no, it was the other details.

Scales and scraps of the shell-like skin were flitted about, standing out from the distant and unrealized terrain. The protrusions, those favored weapons, were chipped or partially broken. Chunks of scales and flesh were missing from the tail and the legs while the body was traced with scars and gashes that cut into the gaps between scales or into exposed skin dotted with bite marks.

There was blood, so much blood. Covering the scales, the golden luster smothered by a mix of red, sandy soil and blood that congealed on the body or dripped onto the shapeless ground he couldn't remember.

It was coating his past self, who stood weary and exhausted, the only thing untouched was that singular, cyclops eye. It burned with hatred, with seething rage despite the state of the body. His past self was noticeably shorter than he was, though maybe that was just a trick of the formless scenery. He barely remembered what he looked like in relation to anything truly measurable.

Gigan had company, he noticed them even before he noticed himself, though that was because of the desire not to look at what had once been. They were nasty-looking creatures, reptilian and quadrupedal, and standing maybe about a fourth of his past self's height. They had cyan blue scales, with darker blue markings here and there in seemingly random patterns. The creatures had disproportionately large heads on shorter necks. Powerful but short legs, thick and strong, and with three claws raking and blurring into the fluid ground incomprehensibly. They had yellow eyes complemented with slit pupils, large nostrils, and a jaw full of razor-sharp teeth, short tusks jutting out to either side of the mouth with lashing tongues. Their bodies were thick and bulky, muscular and weighty and at the end of it all was a large tail that sprouted full blades like those of axes as if they were thorns on a vine.

Gigan vaguely recognized them, they had been a common thing back then. Some creations of the Tachyons sold off to the highest bidders across the universe. Though even of that he wasn't sure... it could have been the Cryogs or even the Xiliens as far as he knew. They all liked to tamper with nature so much it was often hard to differentiate between them. In the race for survival, conquest, and exploitation Gigan was merely one piece on the board, the players only moved them in different ways, and the results were the same.

Gigan watched mutely as they swayed eagerly in place and drooled hungrily, their saliva mixed with acidic green bile that emerged from their throats like a fountain and their fangs dripping the crimson, coppery liquids that could scarcely be defined as their own or his. Their maws were scarred, some split open almost up to their eye-sockets, cracked bones poked out periodically from chunks of mangled flesh. None of it seemed to bother them at all, they were ravenous, hyper-focused, and single-minded.

On the other hand, Gigan knew his past self was not. A warrior he had been, a warrior inside he might always be, but he was no beast. He wasn't a weapon, he wasn't a blade that could crash itself against rock and dull the edge until it was useless but still keep hacking away, even if he wanted to be and even if he had been made into one. His past self swayed and staggered, dizzy, light-headed, and feeling every twinge of pain from his wounds. Around him stood the corpses of many of the creatures, clearly the living ones weren't the first to try. Some are cut open in various ways, down the middle, across the back, or more. Some were entirely decapitated or cut in half, limbs and stumps laying about the corpses or half sunk in puddles of blood.

Gigan could cut as many down as he liked, but he wasn't like the beasts. Every tearing slash, every crack of his bone like sickles against their hide and their bone meant gashes, wounds, and bite marks that would further scar his flesh, weakening his mind and body as blood oozed and scales and skin went flying or hung loosely from the points of harm. All the while the creatures like vultures looked on, hungry and waiting for the moment to cut loose and tear into him until his demise.

They didn't have to wait long, for soon after Gigan could feel his past self's sense of disorientation, the painful and aching pains had dulled to distant but present threats as sensation seemed to slip away with his life fluids. The desperation and adrenaline of the battle for survival were all but muted as he weakly struggled to stay on firm footing, almost slipping a few times. Gigan's former being saw a creature to his front, circling and squeezing in tighter in a motion with the rest. His resolve returned, but the flesh did not strengthen. Gigan had wanted to live and fight, but all his body wanted to do was give in.

The creatures watched hungrily for every opportunity to strike, so when he finally took a step forward and he stumbled in frailty, all hell broke loose.

One of them snarled and roared before charging forward, it took his past personification a moment too long to realize the attack was from the side. Gigan screeched as the null pain was reignited as his nerves flared white hot while the lizard sunk its jaws in around his leg and tried to tear. Gigan was too strong to be torn apart, but there wasn't enough of his consciousness left to strike down the creature on his leg and also stop the one coming from the front.

So he swung at the creature on his leg, heavy and slow but still fierce and strong. The duller side of his sickle arms struck the creature, but the force was enough to crack its skull. Still, despite this, it kept hanging on. Gigan could only stand on one leg now as the rest came in against him, but he wouldn't go down; going down against these things was death. He half-felt half-watched in morbid recognition as he abandoned his leg to get mauled, still feeling the faint agony burning up his spine like a flame eating through a wick.

Gigan had to leave the creature to it's viscous devices to take a swing at the one coming from the front, breaking a strike across its face and sending it spinning aside mid-lunge. Gigan slipped, the weight and the stress on his leg too severe to stay upright entirely after making such a swing, he struggled to regain footing as a creature soared over his reduced stature, missing the intended target of his neck from behind and slamming into the amorphous earth with a growl of frustration.

Gigan knew another creature was coming; from the opposite side as the one on his leg. But, he had time to dispose of this one. He took a swing, a strike, and then just jabbed it wherever he could into the skull of the creature yet it refused to lose its grip on his limb. As the reptile on the opposite side closed in he had little choice but to spin himself around, roaring in agonizing pain as he dragged the creature's weight attached to his leg with him, and his muscle tore and threaded as a result.

The two creatures suddenly slammed together, sending the incoming attacker to the ground just long enough for the apparition of his history to smash into the skull of the one on his leg one last time, finally putting it down and making it release as he shoved it off as best he could. The leg, which had before been scarred and gashed from grazing strikes and light bites, was now completely torn. The tissue was barely recognizable, it was surprising it could still hold his weight, but he wasn't moving any time soon.

Gigan felt pressure on his side as the claws of the creature who had at first been in front of him struck into his body with a full force charge, nearly knocking him over. It was only the force of the second and third creatures taking strikes at his stomach and his back simultaneously, offsetting the force of the initial strike but only magnifying the pain. Gigan couldn't even vocalize his displeasure, he was barely awake now, he was barely hanging on as his bones crunched under force and his flesh protested every movement.

But Gigan watched as his past self still kept swinging, kept striking and lashing out trying to get them off. It was all a blur as his memories became fuzzy, almost blending together, as he could feel pain, he could feel the crack of bones; his or theirs he didn't know. All he knew after that after he'd blacked out and almost gone on autopilot, was that he'd survived, barely, but he had.

The scene shifted.

These memories were more clear, and somehow even more horrifying. This time, Gigan wasn't an observer, he was resting in his own body. Everything was white hot, there were no fuzzy feelings, no doubts or second thoughts about what his body was feeding his brain.

What Gigan felt was pain. To call what Gigan felt pain was to call an ocean a puddle, it wasn't agony, it wasn't torture, or anything words could describe. Gigan felt something that could not be described; raw, visceral, primal, and pulsating pain that rocked every nerve, that consumed all thought and all feeling. He thrashed, he didn't want to thrash, but there was no choice with what he felt.

Gigan was strapped down by something, he could feel each piece of weight the battle he had recalled before had taken from him. Scales, bone, whole chunks of flesh. Everything and anything you could think of was damaged. Gigan could feel that his legs weren't whole, that they were half of what they had been before. His throat was patched over with something, but he could tell it was gashed, he couldn't vocalize anything at all. He was missing more than one rib, in fact, he thought almost all of his bones were broken or fractured or even missing entirely.

But worst of all, Gigan could only feel this.

Gigan couldn't see.

Gigan didn't know how he was alive, he couldn't understand it back when he had first been in this scenario and every time the nightmares had dug it back up and forced it back into his skull ever since. Gigan didn't know why, how or even if he had managed to survive the battle, he'd questioned if they'd brought him back to life many times. He wished he hadn't survived, many times then and many times since he just wanted to roll over and die.

Gigan wasn't even himself anymore, Gigan was a corpse strung together by machine-maker technology on life support. That was a hard pill to swallow, he only swallowed that this was the day the being that called itself Gigan died off and was replaced with a twisted doppelganger who just so happened to carry his memories.

Gigan wasn't a weapon before, he was nothing but one after this.

Gigan surged and struggled for hours, days, weeks, he didn't know. He didn't know if the dreams and memories distorted the time or if he was simply in that much sheer suffering that he couldn't recognize the flow of time. He thought then his torment was at its peak, that all of what he felt physical and all the revelation of his mangled body was the worst to happen to him.

Oh, how wrong he was then, how foolish he had been.

The machine makers couldn't lose their tool, their weapon. Gigan thought they would help him, make him better, after all, it was only common sense that they would save what they paid for, that they would want to keep their biggest asset. Of course, he was a weapon, and weapons don't feel pain. So they did make him 'better' they did 'help him' and they saved his life, but Gigan was twice the fool he had ever been if he thought he was anything but expendable.

So it went, Gigan got no anesthesia, nothing to lessen or dull the pains of surgery. Just when he thought he might find his pain bearable, they cut into his bones, sawed away at his body, tore chunks of flesh, and peeled away scorched, torn scales. They dug into his chest, let hot metal seal against bare skin and flesh. They did it because they knew he could take it, but Gigan never stopped thrashing until they tightened his restraints so hard it was likely to crush him if they were any tighter.

Gigan couldn't say a thing, his voice was gone, his voice he didn't even remember anymore. he couldn't cry in pain, he couldn't beg or plead or even make threats. He just had to endure what was happening for what seemed like an eternity. Tissue was torn, and bone was ground, rounded off, removed, or cut. He was conscious the whole time, no adrenaline saved him, and no relief for this pain was ever given. It was all still so vivid when he remembered it, he could never forget it, only push it down and hope it wallowed in the back corners of his mind.

So it was, after the torture and torment would end he knew what would come, he knew the day his true self had died and a metallic mockery with a soul as broken as his body had taken its place. It hadn't been all at once, of course. He had risen only partially mechanized, still unrecognizable but not the mess of machinery that he was now.

That had been much longer, much slower, much more forgettable. Each mission with something else lost, another flaw in his technique, something was replaced, something was added or removed. The worst part? Even after all the torment they put him through, Gigan could never resist, and probably wouldn't have resisted, until it was too late to save himself.

Gigan would ultimately always blame himself. His pride, his weakness, his carelessness, and his foolish and arrogant fantasies of being the strongest.

They had all led Gigan to nothing but a grave wrapped in minerals and foils and tangled up in the wires inside.

Gigan couldn't even scream as he was removed from the pain of the past, but removed from his flesh, and shoved right back into the prison of the present.

Nobody could hear him in the void anyway.

After the past memories, the trauma and the loss of them for him to recall, it should have been cathartic for there to be nothing for Gigan to look at.

But somehow nothing scared Gigan more. His sight returned, now bathed in red as he remembered. But there was nothing to look at, only distant starlight on and on in an endless pattern of light already out of all possible reach.

Gigan could hear again, he could hear better than ever with the audio reverberating in his mechanical skull; relayed by the audio sensors. But there was nothing to hear, no sounds to glean, no air for it to travel through.

But somehow the void that left him cold and isolated wasn't what terrified him. It made him numb, it made him hopeless, but it didn't terrify them. It terrified him to go back, but to be there was to lose terror along with everything else. No, what terrified him were the stars.

The stars were there, like always, but they were...

Wrong.

That was an understatement, the stars did not burn as bright, distant lights but like candles or torches in the corners of a not-so-large dark room. He knew they were stars, he had spent enough time amongst them to know they could not be anything else.

But the stars didn't bleed.

So these did, they roiled as their light seemed to stretch and drip and ooze across some non-existent, infinite parallel surface long off in the void, stretching and crawling and reaching in all directions. Their starlight, burning white, orange, red, and blue soon lost all color as they bled and seemed to fade away into husks and join the void around them.

For a moment that is what Gigan thought would happen, that even the stars would leave him and he would be truly alone in the void. But he couldn't have been more wrong.

In their dying moments, while they bled their light and life and faded into nothing, the stars around him refused. Then he could see them again, they were so bright it was almost blinding. They burned and seared and they only seemed to bleed their newfound strength more. Normally he was protected from the endless solar radiation and the scorching, uninterrupted travel of photons by the confines of his metal shell. But this burned, oh he could feel it burn into the flesh beneath the metal as if it weren't there, as if it were nothing.

The stars burned gold, he never knew stars could do that.

They were barely stars anymore, that was only too clear as the pains got worse and it felt like all of his body was being burned away, pain pounding and thrumming in waves like maddening drums out of rhythm with his heartbeat. The stars twisted and writhed in their golden fury and soon what had once been pinpricks of light grew ever larger. They crackled with golden fire that seemed to reach for him, shining golden solar flares seemingly lashing at him like snakes.

Their flames intertwined, they began to meld and merge and the flames and the starlight began to become one, golden mass of incinerating but brilliant light and heat surrounding him and burning him. Soon his whole world was nothing but a brilliant mess of golden flames that turned the void of nothing into the radiant and flaming ball of visceral energy that now consumed everything.

Gigan had felt such tremendous pain, but this wasn't a pain of the body, all this, he knew, was of the spirit. His mind burned much like his vision with the everlasting golden flames that danced harmlessly across his body while his mind felt torn. He couldn't describe it, it wasn't pain or any kind of sensation he could describe. Yet, he knew it all the same. Anger, confusion, disgust, sadness, and nothingness formed together into a new emotion he couldn't describe, an emotion not his own. It was like a poisonous golden flame that simmered and shifted to an electrical, magnetic force driving his whole mind around it.

He knew it, why did he know this? It wasn't his, the feeling wasn't his, why did he know it?

The golden flames hissed like snakes and snarled like beasts, just like those lizards who had torn him apart, and within there was an artificial, trained, almost mechanical tone that reminded him of his own distorted voice. It was a voice, it was calling to him, calling to him in that language of that emotion he knew wasn't his own. The gold flashes in his eyes and the fire around bowed and danced to the hideous song of agony and malevolence that it seemed to sing.

There should have been no understanding of this tone, no reasoning was to be found in all of its unharmonious, bellowing calls. The sounds strung together as one that seemed only just in sync, as one, but so separate and so tumultuous. But he didn't, he understood it, for he had been made to, he had accepted being made to understand it and each scorching syllable was as painfully clear as his thoughts, rattling in space and time and mind, through air and steel and flesh and soul.

They were ranting, railing, and crying incoherently and lashing out with those almost nuclear, primordial sounds of everlasting agony baked together with unending fury. Gigan couldn't tell if it was at anyone in particular at first, they all spoke barely in unison even as the golden flames constricted tighter and tighter, coiling and keeping and crushing at whatever they could find.

The molten gold, the flames of the end, and the songs of three poured into his very mind without filtration, consent, or conceptualization of his mechanical body or even his flesh. They got louder and louder and Gigan thought his skull would explode as the flames closed around him, coiling in more and more and the energy seemed to be ready to burst from his skull like a volcano and erupt into the flames around him.

Then, silence.

With a drawling snarl the voices, raging without tone or purpose or any sort of inflection, settled into low simmers and growls. The flames stopped raging, they merely burned and smoldered in contempt, the hold on him never loosened but it stopped tightening. The silence was somehow even more unnerving because he knew they would never stop unless their attention was drawn. They wouldn't let anything smother their rage unless it interested them. Their attention had to be drawn away from their own hate, and the only one to draw it here was him.

Swirling in the flames that now stilled themselves came lightning and life. The destructive forces around him were slowly shaped into something resembling life, swirling with fire and living lightning that arched through the burning flames and formed the structure of the things like bones. The burning mass pulled itself along the electricity until it could form things so real they could almost look organic.

Fangs, scales, necks, and eyes. Eyes, eyes that weren't all that dissimilar from their original color even though they were merely apparitions of flame. Those eyes were like supernovas he'd seen so much, burning, exploding with power, and visceral and primal rage that eclipsed and eviscerated all in their wake.

Like a supernova, those eyes burned and tore everything away with energy incomparable.

Eyes.

Two.

Four.

Six.

Three pairs of eyes. Always three, no more, no less. Three was the sacred number, the unbreakable value that was as cold and unchanging as the laws of the universe.

Gigan knew from the very beginning there would never be any less than two, he doubted there could be zero, and as long as there was one, there would always be three.

Gigan had only learned a comparatively short time ago in his seemingly endless existence that there could never be more. There could never be a fourth.

The hiss of the fire and the crackle of the lightning melded together into voices, warbled and frothing and incomprehensible as sounds. But those voices didn't speak sounds, they spoke power and emotion as raw and pure as could be. It only now occurred to him how similar they were to the Goddess, how they spoke without sound, only Mothra's was soothing, natural, and fluent.

The song sung deep into his mind now was as much ash and cinder as the flames that oiled around him, it burned into his mind without love, only rage and a epoch of pain.

"Foolish little traitor!"

Gigan remembered that tone, that same pain, and heat, repeatedly thrust into his mind over and over and allowed bore into his skull by the torrent of lightning and the commands of three voices alongside promises that would forever go unanswered. This same fire had torn through his mind many times before, lightning backing its flames, pure power to tear down any resistance.

Gigan stared up at the shape of three developing necks, three burning pairs of eyes, teeth and scales, and tongues of fire that became a restless inferno, all wildly lashing out, anger and eagerness to burn away the focus of their attention, but still keeping together in their intent. Wild and different, unified in intent. Gigan didn't know a mass of flame and storm could be so accurate.

Gigan was scared, he wanted to run-

"We found you!"

Suddenly there was an infinitely powerful force against him, around him. The strangling flames around him squeezed tight, crushing him in their grasp. At first, there was nothing, but as he was wrapped up in the scorching embrace of the raging abyss he began to feel it. Metal melted, flesh seared and sizzled, electricity coursed through metal and down his spine and his entire being was wracked in agony.

As his body burned his mind seared in revolt against itself, torturous thoughts and endless visions, memories within memories and experiences that weren't his own forced onto his already fragile psyche, a lifetime longer than his own by far impressed on him all at once. Some fragment of theirs deep inside him resonated at their call and as his body was burned away, digging up his pains and memories and fusing the two sides of being together into one symphony of agony. He tried to fight back, but they only pressed in on his fragile mind even harder.

Gigan was scared, he wanted Mothra-

"Let us in!"

Gigan's mind split wide open and then forced itself back together, every life experience flashing by in an instant, new combinations of memories and thoughts, and feelings forced into his mind. The experiences burned together, fusing and melding and becoming one mass of misery that overshadowed even the destruction of his body. As he was enduring the pain of a thousand eons of torment the flames packed tighter around him and the metal melted into what remained of his flesh, he could feel molten metal pouring down his throat and eating through his skin.

It hurt, it hurt more than ripped to shreds in battle, it somehow hurt more than being torn apart and pieced back together. It hurt more than anything he had ever experienced and it wasn't stopping oh please someone makes it stop-

Gigan was scared, he wanted someone to help he needed someone to save him not again-

"M-Mothhh-"

No sooner had Gigan tried than a flaming set of tails wrapped their way around his throat, already weak and almost destroyed, and squeezed down, metal snapping under their aggressive motion, squeezing and crushing it until the metal pierced through the flesh inside and met in the middle. He thrashed against the strangling sensation, against the tails and the flaming coils.

"Don't do that."

The anger was always there, but there was a bitterness that had been swallowed up by such fury before, the more "even" tone that they would normally take still sounded enamored with endless rage. They growled lowly at him, they squeezed tighter, the flames reduced him to nothing, and the visions and the forced coalescing of thoughts only got worse, mentally and physically Gigan gave in and stopped thrashing, stopped moving, almost stopped thinking.

"We missed you."

Gigan could feel the overly fake sweetness forced into those words in his head as if they were almost mocking him, but even underneath this the flame of their wrath burned away in each psychic syllable, each small sound punctuated with a knowing and loathing hiss of disdain. They growled, lowly and almost possessively, the pain reaching its climax as the raging nightmarish inferno of physical pain and psychological torture threatened to finally consume him.

"Never leave again."

Those were the last things Gigan heard, Gigan felt and Gigan was able to understand before he felt the sudden pressure and agonizing pain of three sets of jaws burrow into what remained of him, lightning and volcanic miasma claiming whatever was left of his body and mind as he was torn apart in their merciless embrace.

Beneath the pain and the rage Gigan could still hear the cries of anguish.

Gigan awoke with a metallic screech splitting the air.

All the terror aside he couldn't appreciate enough how nice it was to know there was real air.

His scythes caught the rock and earth and tore it asunder as he flailed, still trying desperately to fight against a phantom force that didn't exist. Gigan still panicked, he still swung and thrashed and lashed out at whatever he could before he even got his sight back. Everything he felt he hit repeatedly until he was certain it would have been reduced to nothing but atoms.

Gigan didn't know how long he swung at whatever he could hit, bashing and slicing and terrorizing the landscape around him without a shred of hesitation. The reasonable side of him would like to trust his mechanical systems in assuming it wasn't but a few seconds, but the part inside that had been so viciously mauled moments earlier would insist it had been hours.

Honestly, by the time Gigan finished his tirade, he didn't know which to believe.

Large markings dotted the rocky area, chasms, and trenches mixed with holes and cracks, slashes and stabs having torn trees, grass, and earth apart.

It was only after Gigan had finally made sure there were no golden scales around, no fangs like sickles and horns like spears, and none of those eyes like dying stars, that he realized he was shaking. How long had it been since his body had been able to display such fear? As he was in control of the machinery now and not the other way around his own biological intentions could overwrite some of those controlling functions, things designed to increase efficiency.

Gigan couldn't appreciate how happy he would have been otherwise because he still couldn't get that burning out of his metallic skull. Even after he had made sure there would be no three heads trying to tear away at him and scorch him into dust he still couldn't relax his anxiety, he couldn't make himself stop shaking even if he wanted to.

It took a while before Gigan realized he had been frozen on the spot, shaking and blanking out for what must have been ages. He slowly took a step back, examining what he had done to what he assumed to be his caretaker's home... a small sense of guilt welled up in him, but it was snuffed out by the immense fear that remained and an even greater sense of longing.

He wanted Mothra. Mothra could help him. Mothra could fix him.

So Gigan stumbled backward to where he had been, where he had forgotten why he didn't sleep. He promised he'd never make the mistake again, never let himself fall asleep again. He'd wait here, very much awake and safe from them. He could tell himself they weren't real all he wanted because they were real because they had been real.

He told himself they were probably dead, that all of what he knew so far pointed to them being dead. He doesn't know if he likes that thought or not.

But in the corners of his mind, he could hear the echoing song of three intertwined as one, he could hear his doubts and he somehow knew that they would never end.

For now, Gigan didn't want to know they were dead, Gigan didn't want to think about anything associated with them if he could.

Gigan just wanted Mothra to be here. Gigan didn't want to be alone anymore.

Sooooooo, did you miss me?

I'll hedge my bets the majority of you were thinking I'd abandoned this story to die in the ditch of most fanfiction, but not today! This chapter took a lot of work and I continued to rewrite it over and over, unhappy with the flow and progression and the transition between the different nightmare sequences. I also know this chapter was exceptionally dark and graphic which makes me question the rating a lot, if any of you think it should return to being M please comment on it.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed it and have a wonderful day/night wherever you are!