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2025-04-06
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A Name

Summary:

In a usual fight with a kaiju, Godzilla does something surprising to even himself. When his actions go differently than expected, what thoughts are summoned to the memorable king, and how will he battle them out?

Notes:

I got this idea suddenly and had to make it, as I really wanted to write an inhuman POV, really return to my roots! As you'll probably notice, my love for em dashes is still present, along with my usual love for angst and *~thinking~*.

Please have a good time! Let's go!

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

Work Text:

Godzilla always felt the earth itself rejected his presence. The gravity that weighed upon his bones — so different from the gentle cradle of the ocean. The air that dried his nostrils and burned his eyes — nothing water remained here, where fire and storm should rule. The humans-things that crumbled underfoot — some days he wondered, head rested upon the ocean floors, what had happened to the proper and strong temples they had built for him.

Permission to rule was not given by the earth, however, but by claw and fang — by blood spilt and heads severed. Today again, he asserted his dominion over all, emerging from the ocean as a font of power — sinew and pure force evident in his form as he stood at his full height.

The kaiju — no, the subject of his — screeched and retreated at the sight of him, as it should. It wore a red carapace that clacked and thumped against its body as it ran, pincers low and long, gangly tail high as it moved on many thin legs. Such armor would be pleasurable to chew on, Godzilla felt, if his stomach and tongue hadn’t withered from non-use a millennium ago. Perhaps he could restore the habit.

A million tiny eyes fixated on him, their presence near physical on his hide. Humans. Worshippers. One meant both. They stayed closer these days, braver perhaps, or maybe having lost the instinct that demanded their small feet flee to caves and caverns and crevices. They would not get in his way today, the collective gazes emanated fear and respect, the only proper greeting for a king such as himself.

A greeting forgotten by the subject before him as it rose to its full height, carapace opening like stony wings as it stunk of adrenaline and musky steam. A scent and display of defiance. His nostrils flared, sunspots of white-hot flares sparking between and under his scales, filling the air with a burning smell. He would accept the challenge, as he always did. 

A hiss of air escaped his challenger’s body as it expelled something like a roar, one that blew the color off the surrounding formations in a hurricane-level blast. Godzilla heard it. Heard the name.

Not a name as in a collection of sounds and consonants and vowels that indicated a unique being. Those constructs — foreign as the cold of space — did not exist in his world of earth-shaking conquest, of humming cacophonies that shuddered deep into his ear drums and beat at his brain with emotion and instinct. He felt the individuality and pride of the beast before him like it was his own. The sound — a simple roar to human ears — swarmed under his skin, coiling around his ribcage point by point, and pat-pat-patted against the muscles of his heart. Nothing in this world would ever utter this noise ever again, would ever dare to try and shake his frame in this manner. He felt it as a name.

Godzilla took a deep breath into his bellows of a chest. His lungs and heart, the only organs that functioned as they did millions of years ago, pumped with rushing blood. He roared.

His name was not a simple roar, not like this defiant yet weak thing whose head would always remain below his. His name was the authority he wore like a second skin, his predatory eyes that had found glory in fallen foes time and time again. Most of all, his name was the flashes of eye-drawing blue that rumbled neck to tail on his body, humming with a power that laid only with gods. The bringer of life and death. The king. Godzilla.

There was no more posturing, no more declarations to be made.

Godzilla charged, thundering over the stony ground, head low and arms forward to grab and pin. All bowed from his path, the monuments of humans shouldered aside like simple twigs, concrete floor splintered and turned from his feet. He screamed over the distance between them, jerking his head to smash into his challenger. Impact. A gasp.

It scrambled at his face as they rushed back, pointed claws scrabbling and bouncing off the hard points of Godzilla’s face, and roared again — high-pitched, wobbling, good.

He gave it no quarter, stomping hard to root himself as he whirled and flung it into a tall human-thing. The crash of glass almost covered the snap of its carapace, but Godzilla heard it, eyes crinkling. Better.

The human-thing moaned in stony agony as his opponent pulled itself out of the molded mass, leaning as it lurched free. There was another sound, not the crackling of broken armor, or the crumbling of stone, this one was high and tinny to his ears.

Flashes of colored pelts and hair. Another tinny squeak. Humans.

Humans were in the near collapsing ruins.

He could see them.

He didn’t see them often — though perhaps it was more accurate to say they did not enter his notice. They were much too small. Much too fragile. Much too foolish to remain underfoot when he arrived. In this way, he doesn’t understand why those colorful pelts catch his eyes today, his attention drawn away momentarily to gaze upon them. Perhaps it was a simple manner that they were close enough to be seen today, or their screams loud enough to attempt to pierce his thick scales. Perhaps still it was that he saw them clinging to the edge of their crumbling monument, and thought the fall was a short distance onto his head. Moving there would not expend much energy, so he thought he might as well. When the human-thing started to fall in earnest, he shoved his opponent aside and lunged under, where stone peppered his skull like a light rain, beating the rubble away to catch the falling humans. The fall was a short one, the distance his eyelid traveled when he blinked. 

Short, he believed in a body larger than anything.

Godzilla waited a few prolonged seconds, expecting cries of injury and terror — signs of life for smaller beings like this — but found quiet upon his scales. Most small sounds had difficulty finding purchase on his body, struggling to penetrate even his first layer of scales, much less tremble against his organs — but a struggle of sound was not what he sensed, but pure silence. Then, the faintest sensation, creeping through the valleys of his scales and settling in their furrows. A liquid warmth that emanated a faint iron scent. Their “short” fall had reduced his rescued humans to blood upon his body, already fading as his thick scales started to absorb the protein, sustenance by any other name.

Something new entered his notice. In all their screaming, he had not managed to separate one distinct voice among them. Not a single name was learned from the bodies fading into him like water draining into the earth.

Those few seconds passed like molasses to him, but his regretful enemy was still scrambling to its claws when he looked sidelong at it. His head felt boiling hot, steam bursting from his nostrils as he lunged, claws outstretched.

It screamed when he laid into it, raining down brutal blows — back, head, any limb he could break — and clawing its carapace open further. Its meat was red and soft on the inside, pulsating with air every scream it made. Good for tearing.

Its screaming became a squeal. The high-pitched sound blew the scales off his forearms and snout, but he did not care — he only grew hotter.

He seized it tight, their thrashing collapsing several other human-things before Godzilla shifted and pinned it beneath him, snarling in its face. Hot, boiling hot. His spine was ready to sear out of his body, the energy deep within him roaring from his tail-tip to skull, gathering at the crown of his throat. It was almost a relief to finally let it loose, the atomic blast bubbling even behind his eyes as he unloaded the beam into the kaiju’s head, a bright white consuming his vision as its gibbering cut short.

He understood it was dead even before his vision cleared, blinking away the steam that smoked from his softer membranes. Its body, still clutched in his claws sans a head — a smoking crater being the only proof it had ever existed — snapped and popped in a way that should have been most satisfying to Godzilla. Instead, he found himself growling, smashing the body into the ground again, another time, and snapping up a piece of its shell in his jaws. A habit was best indulged during times of stress.

Like his opponent had, the urge to roar into the skies and declare his presence spluttered and died in his throat, gone before he could even consider it. The death of another of his kind, a usual occurrence by his claws, seemed distant and unimportant. An event his subjects needed no announcement of. They would know. He would remember.

He gnawed hard on the carapace, more for the texture that scraped his fangs than the faint taste of the sea on his dead tongue. The death of his opponent was usual, yes, but he for the life of him could not determine why the long-absorbed blood on his skin lingered in mind instead. A lost warmth. Cut off screams. They had melded together into nothing, and now were nothing in his flesh. The carapace snapped in his jaws, pouring new scent into his mouth. Blood and seawater. 

Godzilla released a long breath, smelling the salt on his skin. His scent, he himself, was unaltered. Even the dirt he picked up on his forays onto the surface would soon be washed away in the depths of the ocean. He rarely smelled of blood, his body and atomic blast too powerful to allow base life survival in his presence. Even so, he was surprised that he could sense no signs of the meat that had decorated his skull. Not even the faintest whiff of death. Meat, blood, bone — all must have evaporated when he annihilated the kaiju. 

He was no longer dirty with the flesh of his ill-fated rescue — but even still, he was not…clean.

He turned and plodded towards the edge of the land, lingering as the tongue of the sea licked his claws. If he slept, he would no longer need to think of these matters. Matters that entered his mind and called new thoughts like a stone pitching bubbles when it fell into the waters. He would rest easy. Return to his life. This was a comforting thought among all his not-clean thoughts. 

However, for some reason, he allowed the thoughts to dwell. In a sense, he simply could not allow himself to run from a battle, not even from himself. 

A human’s metal-thing fluttered up beside his head, flump-flump-flumping in a careful manner as a tiny human leaned out. He could not hear the tinny voice from here, but the metal wings sent little tremors into his eardrums. He could not say it was unique. There were many different types of these metal-things, he had found, but their cries did not have the quality of living-things. He needed not remember them.

He wondered if he jerked his head, just a hair to the side, and knocked it from the skies like he had jumped under the falling humans — would he hear a proper scream from the human within, singular and unique? Would he remember it — this was the wrong thought, he felt — would anything else remember it, besides himself?

He breathed over the metal-thing, and watched as it wobbled, steadying and hovering away. He would not remember this particular thing.

Would he remember the things — humans — that decorated his scales, however? He did not know. He would not remember a kaiju that fell from the heavens and crashed into the dirt, draining all that was into the earth, silent and unheard. Even something like him, if his flesh and blood disappeared into the hungry earth, would never be seen again yet remain unremembered. A fate he would not — could not — accept.

Not death, no, his death would come. One day, when the soil under his feet shriveled and was consumed by the oceans once more, maybe then he would die. Perhaps the seas would boil by another’s will and he would die. Perhaps his body would fail him one fatal time and he would die — his throat ripped, heart gouged, neck severed, it did not matter to him. Perhaps still he would find his Queen — the way the sun sang as it fell over her wings the truest memory he would ever have — and find her willing to give him death after a long life. He would die.

The sunspots under his skin returned. Fueled by the meat he absorbed, he did not know, nor did he care, but he burned. His eyes threatened to steam once more. Godzilla stood tall, his spines flickering a familiar challenge. The blue light danced along his scales, escaped into the air as sparkling particles — defiant to gravity and the pull of the earth’s core. In the clearest way, this was him. Something that would even challenge the earth.

He still felt the presence of many eyes on him. Good. They would see.

He would die, but the earth could not have him. He would not disappear beneath the crust of dirt, reduced to meat and offal. His name would spread through the waves of the ocean, through every tip and branch of greenery, even through the skies. 

When thunderstorms racked the earth and lightning cracked and roared through the clouds, when the ocean heaved itself upon the land and washed away all under its belly, when the sky fell with rain heavy enough to crush and maim — he would be known. As if the world itself could not forget him, screaming out his name. Its fallen king. Godzilla.

Notes:

Godzilla is one of my loves, so we can probably expect to see him again one day!

I'm almost always writing or thinking up situations to write, but I am in college so I cannot say when I'll have more, I'll hope to get more time soon!

I respond to all comments (which I love!)