Godzilla 1954 Vignette · 11:44pm Feb 12th, 2021

So I wrote this this morning. Don't quite know why. Singular Point's recently revealed Godzilla design put me in mind of the 1954 movie, and I ended up whipping up this.

Through the murky waters of Tokyo Bay and through the clouded glass of his diving helmet, Daisuke Serizawa saw him.
He was shrouded in the shadows of the deep, but he could see his form well enough. A large, dinosaurian body, over a hundred feet tall if he was standing, his back topped with jagged, maple-like spines, two pale eyes staring at him as he approached. He was laying on his side, almost like a cat. Streams of bubbles rose from his gills.
He did nothing. Made no noise or movement. He just looked at Serizawa with his great pale eyes.
Serizawa had been fearful of him before, but now a new kind of unsettled feeling fell over him. Why wasn’t he moving? He clearly knew he was there; why the stillness?
He continued forward, feeling the weight of his burden between his gloved hands, the oxygen line stretching behind his back. He was only fifty feet away from him now. He knelt to the sea floor and moved to set the Oxygen Destroyer down.
Still Gojira made no movement.
Serizawa paused. Why? he thought. Why didn’t he do something? Serizawa was a human, the species Gojira had been shown to loathe; didn’t he know that he was the enemy? Did he not know that this was his death that he carried in his hands?
Then Serizawa looked up at him again, and through the waters he could see him more clearly now.
His skin wasn’t merely black. It was charred. Scorched. The flesh behind the claws on his hands had been seared almost to the bone. His great back spines were twisted and warped, as though someone had melted them and left them to cool. His pale eyes were almost completely whited out, and Serizawa wondered if he could even see with them at all.
And as he stared into those great pale eyes, Serizawa suddenly understood him. More than the military, more than even Dr. Yamane, more than anyone else on the planet, Serizawa understood.
This had been an innocent creature once. Perhaps once upon a time he’d played and fought with others of his kind, hunting and traveling through his island home. Perhaps he’d had siblings. Perhaps he’d even had a mate, or offspring of his own.
But then war had come to the Pacific. It had killed and maimed and destroyed, as it did all things. And then when the Bomb had come…
As he continued to meet Gojira’s gaze, everything became clear. The ships. Odo Island. Tokyo. The chaos and destruction. It all made sense now.
Daisuke Serizawa understood what Gojira had been trying to say.
Please.