Chapter Text
Maddie slumped tiredly against the kitchen counter, an ice pack numbing her fingers and face. It’d been a rough week, to say the least, and her injuries weren’t nearly as faded as she’d hoped they’d be by now. But nope, the bruises remained dark, the cuts weren’t fully scabbed over, and the bandages wrapped firmly from her elbow to palm on her left arm were still wholly necessary.
She had wanted to put off their return to the house until she didn’t look so beat up, but with the way everything had worked out, her choices were either here or the hospital, and Maddie had never and would never like being in a hospital.
So home it was. Where she was alone, for the moment.
There was no telling how the mini-Titans would react to her injuries, but her gut told her it probably wouldn’t be as simple as them ignoring the bruises and such. They could be protective little brats, which last time they’d had reason to be, they’d reverted to protective enormous brats, which… yeah. She didn’t need that happening again.
Peeling herself away from the counter, Maddie limped toward the living room, leaving her ice pack behind. She could turn a movie on and maybe even drift off, enjoy the peace before any Titans, mini or otherwise, arrived and saw her condition.
She only made it a few steps when the familiar sound of skittering claws on tile reached her ears.
Maddie sighed as four mini-Titans rounded the hallway corner and came to an abrupt halt at the sight of her, the ground-based ones practically tripping over each other as they did. Only Mothra avoided the collision.
Godzilla’s eyes immediately took on the sort of blazing, narrowed quality that reduced a man to trembling pleas for mercy only a few months ago. Barb was always a lot harder to read without vocalizations, but she had a particular way of gnashing her hooked mouth that spoke of genuine fury. It was seldom seen, as Barb was generally a pretty agreeable Titan, all things considered, but there was no mistaking the gesture now. And with how many fights Godzilla and Kong had gotten into over the months since Kong’s arrival, Maddie was very familiar with Kong’s down-to-fight posture.
Mothra, by all accounts, didn’t seem to have reacted at all, other than stopping to remain in place above the others. But Maddie knew better. If you knew what to look for, and Maddie did, then you would see the faintest shimmer of light across her wings—it was just hard to tell during the day. Basically, with few exceptions, Mothra’s wings only lit up when she was either very happy or absolutely ready to tear someone apart.
Maddie sighed again, louder and with a great slumping of her shoulders.
“I’m fine,” she told them, entirely uselessly since there was a zero percent chance of any of them believing her. Unlike humans, who mostly had the decency to pretend like she was as fine as she claimed, Titans didn’t accept that sort of lie.
Part of Maddie didn’t want to move, because then they would see her limp, but her knees kinda felt ready to give out on her if she didn’t sit down soon, and collapsing on the spot would be the absolute worst thing she could do in front of the Titans right now.
She turned away from their tense little forms and couldn’t contain her wince at the pain shooting up her left leg when she took a step. She could already hear Godzilla’s spines humming with radiation.
It was with zero elegance and only minimal control that Maddie flopped down onto the couch. Her back throbbed at the rough treatment, but her leg thanked her. She grabbed the remote and started looking for something to serve as background noise.
Within seconds of her settling against the cushions, her four visitors were slotting themselves into place around her. Notably, not a single one so much as leaned too heavily against her.
Mothra took up a perch on the back of the couch, right by Maddie’s shoulder. She could feel soft warmth against the side of her neck.
Barb leapt up onto the couch and paced restlessly for a few minutes, chittering and creaking her anger. Kong sat on her left side, and though he remained quiet, he stared with an almost uncomfortable intensity at the wounds marring Maddie’s face.
Godzilla remained on the floor, standing with his spines fiercely glowing. His tail lashed around behind him, only to periodically curl loosely around one or both of Maddie’s ankles. He seemed to be examining the room, as if expecting to find the guilty party hidden in some corner.
Only after she lowered the volume and set the remote aside to let The Fellowship of the Ring play out quietly in the background did Maddie turn her attention to her little bodyguards.
She reached up to Mothra with her less injured arm, letting the Queen nuzzle against her band-aid spotted hand. Her other was offered to Kong, who gently took it and traced the edges of the bandages with a featherlight touch. There weren’t many humans who would’ve believed a Titan, miniature or not, could be capable of such care.
Barb cautiously pressed the flat of her head against Maddie’s leg, and when Maddie showed no signs of pain, she tucked her limbs beneath herself to better lean her face against Maddie’s soft pajama pants.
When Maddie finally spoke, she made sure Godzilla was looking straight back at her. “It wasn’t a person, or a group,” she started with, because of all the Titans, Godzilla had been the most affected by her kidnapping, and she needed him to know it hadn’t almost happened again. “It was just a car accident, okay?”
He stared at her, and as she often did at times like this, she wished there was a way for her to understand him. Godzilla circled around her legs and very gently head-butted her bruise-less knee. He’d kept track of which side she’d favored, then, while she was limping.
“Car accidents happen all the time. Ours—we weren’t even the worst off.”
The collision was over so quickly that even now, days later, she was no closer to understanding what exactly had happened. It was quite literally a blur in her memory. There’d been a lot of cars involved though, and she meant what she’d said: she’d been able to walk away from the wreck, limping though she was.
Some people hadn’t. Some people had been dead before the first ambulances had begun to show up.
Their car had rolled, maybe several times, and she knew that because she’d been hanging upside down when everything had fallen still. Her left side was one big web of bruises, thanks to the way she’d been thrown into the door, and her knee was strained because of it.
A mixture of glass and their unsecured belongings had been tossed through the air, which was where the cuts and bruises came from. The man who’d been driving her and her dad was the worst off between the three of them, since the car that hit them had impacted partially into the driver’s side door.
They’d gotten lucky. Really lucky. She’d be left with a few scars, but there was nothing life-threatening about her injuries. Her neck was still pretty sore from the whiplash, but the nurses at the hospital had reassured her after a few tests that there would be no lasting damage. Even her concussion was minor. The nurses hadn’t been able to do much after patching her up, though she’d have to get her stitches removed soon.
Her left arm carried her worst injury. She hadn’t even felt the gashes spanning the space between her elbow and wrist and creeping onto her palm until her dad had wrapped a spare t-shirt around them to try and stop the bleeding. Then it’d hurt like hell, even through the shock she’d been feeling.
She explained it all to the Titans, going over each injury and making sure to emphasize how well each was healing. Godzilla didn’t look entirely convinced. And if the King wasn’t accepting her insistence that she was fine, then the others took their cues from him.
Maddie hadn’t caught on until after she’d nodded off a little toward the end of the movie. When she’d startled awake again, she’d found Kong now sitting on her uninjured side her with her cell phone in one hand and the takeout menu for a nearby pizza place in the other.
“Thanks,” she said with a little yawn, “but I was gonna make—” And before she could even follow through with the thought of getting up to prepare dinner, the four Titans shifted slightly, but just enough.
Barb's front legs were carefully stretched over Maddie’s left thigh, not quite touching as the little talons on the ends hooked into the fabric covering her opposite leg. Godzilla, still on the floor, pointedly leaned against her right shin, pinning her even less subtly than Barb. Mothra, still perched on the couch back, simply extended her own front legs to press gently against her shoulders.
Kong offered Maddie her cell phone. She sighed fondly and accepted it.
After placing her order and adding instructions to just leave the pizza on the front porch—correctly guessing she’d been forbidden from the leaving the couch entirely—Maddie watched in amusement as the Titans coordinated themselves.
They never left her alone, instead rotating through their tasks as Godzilla retrieved a blanket from her bedroom, Barb invaded the fridge and returned with a bottle of water and a tupperware full of blackberries that Maddie hadn’t even known they had, Mothra turned off the bright overhead lights in favor of using softer lamps around the room, and Kong acquired the pizza once it arrived.
A couple napkins fluttered down on top of Maddie’s head, curtesy of Mothra, as they all settled back in their places, the pizza box resting across Maddie’s uninjured thigh and Kong’s knee.
“And you even made sure I only need to use one hand,” Maddie observed as Barb crouched over her bandaged arm. “You’re all ridiculous.”
The smile she was fighting probably negated any insult she might otherwise have tried to convey, which was confirmed by the way Godzilla puffed up with pride.
She found a new movie to watch, The Iron Giant, an old favorite of hers, and picked up a slice of warm pizza, which would never not be excellent comfort food.
By the time she was tired enough to sleep, the pizza was entirely eaten, with help from the bottomless pits she called mini-Titans, and the movie had long since ended. For a moment, it seemed like her self-appointed babysitters wouldn’t let her up to go to her bedroom.
“I am not spending the night on the couch like this,” Maddie said with finality. She’d wake up even more stiff and cramped than usual if she tried to sleep sitting up.
She was generously allowed up, though they all kept a close eye on her as she limped down the hallway. Sitting on the toilet seat made brushing her teeth bearable, and it was with great relief that Maddie double checked the time and found she could take more pain relieving pills.
In a rare act of cooperation, Godzilla and Kong appeared to have worked together to build a truly impressive nest of pillows and blankets on her mattress, Mothra perched on Barb as they watched from nearby.
“Worrywarts,” Maddie declared. “Worrywarts, all of you. They never would’ve let me leave the hospital if I was in any danger. I’m not dying, I’m just in pain.”
She got the feeling that didn’t actually make any of them feel better. If anything, the little chirps Mothra was making in response sounding distressingly close to crying. Careful to avoid moving too quickly or in a way her body would protest, Maddie lowered herself into the nest and, to make up for upsetting them, held still while pillows and blankets were dragged about to better surround her.
It admittedly felt a little strange to have Titans around without them using her as their pillow, though she appreciated their steadfast avoidance of her injuries.
Maddie remained awake as the others relaxed into slumber, stuck waiting for the medication to kick in at least a little. Despite the darkness, it didn’t take long for her to realize Godzilla wasn’t actually sleeping.
Shifting a pillow or two around, she managed to raise her unscathed arm in invitation. Silently, Godzilla wiggled closer to tuck himself against her side.
It was weird to think about it sometimes, that this affectionate little guy was, in reality, capable of leveling cities. That, once upon a time in the not-too-distant past, a lot of people considered him the bad guy. It was hard to reconcile the fierce, laser-breathing Titan King with the two-and-a-half foot tall mini-Titan currently staring at her with sad eyes.
“It’s gonna take more than a car crash to do me in, G,” Maddie whispered. She could only cross her fingers and hope she wouldn’t be made a liar about that someday. “I didn’t survive San Francisco, Jonah, Ghidorah, the battle of Boston, a dangerous tropical storm, and being kidnapped to go out like that.”
Godzilla got as close to a whine as his naturally deeper vocalizations allowed, and buried his snout against her torso.
“Hey, c’mon. I’m tougher than I look.”
He peeked up at her with one eye. Her best guess had always been that reminders of her own delicate mortality upset him. A lot. And that was why threats to her life were treated with extreme prejudice. Based on past experiences of the aftermath of such instances, she’d be lucky if any of them allowed her to even leave her room tomorrow.
Overprotective much? she thought. They were just lucky they were too adorable to really annoy her or anything.
“I wish I knew why, though,” she absently muttered. “Why me? Or maybe you don’t have a reason at all. Maybe I was just in the right place at the right time.” They were questions she’d probably never get a full answer to, but she’d accepted that a long time ago, when the number of Titans she interacted with was much smaller than it was now.
Godzilla snuffled and closed his visible eye. The achey feeling throughout her whole body had lessened greatly, the drugs doing their job, so Maddie flicked Godzilla’s nearest jagged spine and said, “Goodnight, you silly lizard.”
(Some time later, long after her bruises healed and the limp vanished and she had no more need for bandages anywhere, Mothra would offer herself up as a form of transportation. Though not a wholly logical answer for things like grocery shopping, Maddie would accept trips to Castle Bravo and back. There was never any proof of Godzilla asking his Queen to do such a thing, but Maddie knew better.
That satisfied look in his eyes said it all.)