the brash (stupid) action of the West and its military vs. the Japanese acceptance (almost acquiescence) of restoring balance in nature by using Godzilla in this movie. interesting. I may be reading this wrong. I started Shogun and they make the glaring differences between Japan and Europeans LOUD on that show and I’m seeing it in Godzilla now too.
but I mean you see this in Japanese movies vs the American remakes lol so maybe I’m not crazy. Americans must have our happy ending and overcome our challenges and our movies come off childlike and stupid to others especially in context of us remaking other cultures’ movies. it’s rare to see us not to fight back. bc we never consider just acquiescing and living with the problem and not fighting it. and it’s not even Western to be like that bc the American Martyrs remake was absolutely unnecessary and the original French version was fine as is and is by far one of the bleakest movies I’ve ever seen. sometimes you can’t fight your way out.
I remember being shocked by American movies with bleak endings (when I was old enough to expand the selection of horror movies I was already watching from childhood) bc I was so used to seeing at least one person live or have some kind of win. the American optimism and arrogance frankly lol is just loud in a lot of movies.
SUMMARY: Morgan comes home, still reeling from Dani’s attack, where she is found by Mina.
“It’s never going to stop, is it?”
CONTAINS: panic attack
It was a little after ten by the time Morgan made it to her house and stepped out of the car and stood frozen in the middle of the walkway. She was fine. She had all her body parts and after three pointless detours around town, she convinced herself that there was no way the hunter girl had followed her home. She was fine. The windows glowed with warm light and the purple-white glare from the TV in the great room. She could imagine Deirdre carelessly tipping the delivery driver fifty dollars and Bex sorting out the food and Mina’s face when she got her sushi and the cringes and the small talk and the whole wonderful nothing of dinner at home in the kitchen. She was fine. Any minute now, she would shuffle forward and open the door and call out to them and Deirdre would know just how tight to hold her and she would be fine.
But Morgan’s feet would not bring her any closer to her front door. If she moved anywhere except down to her knees, it would be around the side, where she would pass the kitchen windows and the paper cartons strewn on the counters on her way to her garden, her studio, her shed. It was as if that girl’s hand was still around her throat, pinning her down, ready to cut her existence away. The night wind billowed, making the grass sing in whispers and reminding her how alone, how vulnerable she was, standing alone in the dark with her back turned to the street.
Morgan turned and marched around the side of the house until she was through the fence and staggering toward the back porch. Her chest burned, collapsing inward. There was no lung function to disrupt and so no hyperventilating to make her dizzy, her breath simply stuck in place and the fear boxed away in her spilled out of her in taut muscles and trembling hands. Morgan bent over, too tired to do anything but let her hurt take her, and opened her mouth to cry out. Only the faintest croak rattled out of her breathless lips. She clawed her throat, hearing the echoes of her own pleas in her ear, and sank to her knees at last, wheezing and whimpering all the way to the ground. She was fine. She was home. All she’d wanted was to be able to come home and now she was home, so everything was fine...
Mina had left the house early, claiming a late night swim before bed and managing to stave off any curiosity that Bex might have to stick around. All she really ended up doing is soaking, something that she probably could have done in the tub but wanted just a bit more space to do. She wasn’t even shifted much, just the patchy amount of scales broken out. She’d been about to get out anyway when she heard whimpering, crying. Pulling herself up, Mina proceeded towards the porch until she saw Morgan curling in on herself. “Morgan?” She’d never heard Morgan make that sound, and Mina didn’t know what to do. For a second, she just stood there, eyes wide, unsure of what she was supposed to do. But then Morgan started clawing at her throat, and Mina leapt forward. “Morgan!” She reached out, trying to pull Morgan’s hands away. “Hey, hey, Morgan. Can you hear me? Morgan? What happened? What’s wrong?” She looked for marks before she realized that she probably wouldn’t find any. Zombie healing took away most forms of outward harm. “Morgan, please, breathe. Please breathe. Please breathe.”
Morgan heard her name as if from inside the house, but her hands were being moved, she was being pulled again, and what if she wasn’t fast enough this time? She sat up and tried to pull away, her frightened cry coming out in broken squeaks. But it was only Mina. Morgan slumped, still shaking but no longer fighting, and at the girl’s bidding, her lungs opened and the sobs that had been trapped inside her spilled out. What had happened? The same thing that always happened. The same thing that would keep happening, until one day it stuck. Morgan tried to breathe. When she was alive, breathing had always been a dependable comfort, but the more she tried, the harder she shook and sobbed. Morgan couldn’t even lift her head to look at Mina. It felt wrong to throw this at her feet, to make her carry this with her, but she couldn’t even sit up on her own, how was she supposed to keep it together long enough to get inside? Morgan shook her head and prayed to the earth that Mina knew how ashamed she was, how much she didn’t want this for either of them.
At last, in a voice warped with tears, she said, “There was a hunter. On campus. S-she knew...I didn’t tell her anything, I’d never seen her, she just knew. What I am. I was j-just leaving the building. I just wanted to come home...” She shivered and shrank inward, hating the plaintive sound of her voice, how she couldn’t seem to stop begging.
There was that moment when Mina almost panicked because of course she shouldn’t have just reached out and touched Morgan like that without asking, but then Morgan slumped forward, and Mina grabbed her under the arms and hugged her, held her, as she cried. This was terrifying. She’d never seen Morgan this upset. Morgan was so strong, always, in Mina’s eyes. She’d never watched Morgan break like this and shatter in so many places. Swallowing tightly, Mina attempted to soothe the older woman, remembering how Morgan had comforted her before. She could do this. This was something that she could do.
“There’s a slayer on campus?” she asked. She wondered if it was the same slayer, Bex’s slayer, the one that saved her from the vampire. This wasn’t fair. There couldn’t be a slayer out there that saved one of Mina’s favorite people while hurting another one. That wasn’t fair. “It’s okay. It’s okay. She won’t come here. She’s not going to come here.” She moved them a bit, tried to keep Morgan from caving in. “She won’t come here, but, if she does, Deirdre and I won’t let anything happen to you. Okay? We won’t. It’s not happening.”
Morgan didn’t have the strength to tell Mina she was sorry for crying on her, that this wasn’t her job, that she wanted to protect her too, and if she could just get inside and see the warm lights from the great room, she might finally feel safe. The only thing she could manage between repeating some variation of what she’d already said was more cries, until her voice buckled. Then she quieted and forced her eyes open to look at the world around her while her body continued to release its panic. Thousands of blades of grass, one freshwater pool fostering plant life, one nix who had done so much for her that she would never be able to repay, two steps to the front porch. Three clouds in the sky, one moon, ten constellations she’d made up with Deirdre. She went around like that, counting the chimes that tinkled in the wind, the rustles from night bugs, the points of pressure from Mina’s grasp that she could actually feel, until the rest of her quieted and she only felt dull and hollow.
“I almost made it out on my own. I bought myself time, and then I didn’t,” she mumbled. “If it wasn’t for the fucking face-stealer, I wouldn’t...I wouldn’t…” Be here. With Mina. With anything. “I don’t want it to be your job to protect me. I don’t want the last thing I hear to be someone telling me I stopped existing the moment I died. That I deserve to be executed.” She breathed, chest shaking. “Did your dad’s friends ever tell you stories about people like me?”
“There’s really no way to prepare for something like this,” Mina said. “I’m just glad you made it out.” Her eyes widened. “There was a face-stealer, too?” Okay, alright. One problem at a time. She took a deep breath. “You’re here. You’re here. You’re here.” Mina didn’t know what she’d do if Morgan wasn’t here, if the slayer had succeeded. Would she have gone after a slayer, a human, to avenge a zombie? Would she really do that? Would she so firmly disregard her training in that way? Yes. The voice in the back of her head was tiny, but it was hers, and it was honest. She would. She would. She didn’t want to think on that too hard, didn’t want to think on the fact that she couldn’t avenge her father’s murder but would Morgan’s in a heartbeat. She didn’t want to know what that meant. Maybe it meant that she was as much of a monster as she’d always believed. Maybe it meant something else.
“It’s not my job to protect you. I want to. There’s a difference.” Mina knew this. This was about more than duty. She pulled away a bit, trying to look Morgan in the eye. “My dad’s friends were wrong. My dad was wrong. If they’d met you, they’d know that. He would know that.” The words didn’t sit well. Then, quieter, “I’ve seen zombies before.” She knew how to take down zombies, too. She’d never had to, didn’t want to, but she had the knowledge. That’s what happened when your dad wanted to be able to take one whatever, whenever, for however much was offered.
Morgan could only meet Mina’s eyes for a few moments before becoming too embarrassed of how broken she looked. “I tried to tell her…” she swallowed thickly. “To explain that I wasn’t what she thought I was. That I was a person. It was the first thing I tried…” And if it had accomplished anything at all, it had just made the slayer even more determined to kill her. It was too important to the rationalization bedtime stories some hunters told themselves. Of course they needed to stamp out any challenge they heard to that. Of course they’d try to double down. Morgan shivered, and decided to let Mina keep her own illusions; at least those were full of hope. “Were they starving, like the ones you see on TV, the zombies you saw? Or were they...like me?”
“Sometimes, they can’t hear,” Mina said, quietly. “Or they-- they-- they don’t want to hear. They don’t want-- They can’t-- To think of you as a person,” To think of myself as a person, “Is for them to completely rewrite everything that they know, that they were taught, and it’s not possible for some people because if they slowed down and they listened and they heard, they would know that you’re good and a person and that you’re not going to hurt them.” And some zombies were bad because not everyone could be a Morgan and try to live alternatively and eat animal brains cooked like a person. Not everyone did that. It was hard to explain that, especially to someone who always wanted to see the worst. How readily Mina had just… accepted Morgan as Morgan. How readily she’d accepted that Morgan could be a person, that Ari could be a person. Deirdre. They were people, and she knew that now, and maybe there was a part of her that had always wanted to see supernaturals as people but just didn’t know how. Still didn’t know how, sometimes.
Mina looked at Morgan, looked away. “They looked like you.” There’d been one man, and Mina would have never known what he was if it wasn’t for the slayer with them letting them know he was a draugr. He was old and young at the same time. He looked so tired. When they’d cornered him, Mina had looked away. She almost always looked away. “They just looked like people, but we were told they were dangerous people, and they needed to be-- So they were.”
Morgan knew what Mina was going to say before she even began. How many dinners in Texas had gone quiet when she brought up the hate crimes in Montrose or the attempts to give places the right to turn away queer couples from their apartment complexes and churches and schools and bakeries. If there was ever a real person in those discussions, and not just some hateful, fear-stricken idea, it wouldn’t be so easy. They might have to feel like a bad person. They might have to regret half their whole life in one go. And in a world that nurtured so little forgiveness, they couldn’t handle that, could they?
And with how Mina was brought up, with how her father had made her promise to be like him on pain of death, she wasn’t surprised that Mina had helped kill zombies like her, who died frightened, alone, and in so much despair. She nodded, accepting this, and sank a little further. “...It’s never going to stop, is it? It doesn’t even matter to them that I hate what human brains do to me, that I didn’t choose this, that I don’t even want to hurt anyone, much less…” She breathed deep, her breath still trembling with sobs waiting to burst. Then again. Then again. When she spoke again, her voice was firm. “Will you teach me? How to fight like them? Because I don’t want this either. I don’t want to spend the rest of my existence waiting for someone to find me and break me like I’m an abomination from hell, like I’m a thing made to be crushed. I need to be able to do better the next time this happens. I need to know I can make it home. You offered to show me once: no holding back, for either of us. Do you still mean that?”
Was it ever going to stop? Mina didn’t know. She didn’t think so, and she hated that. “They don’t-- They don’t know. They just don’t know. They don’t want to know.” She breathed in with Morgan, swallowing down bile. None of the people that she grew up with would see Morgan as a person. None of them. She wouldn’t have, over a year ago. She didn’t know what she would have done, if she’d known Morgan as a zombie before she knew her as a human. She might have found a slayer to deal with the situation. She might have never listened to Morgan about anything that she’d tried to tell Mina about supernaturals and life and just being a person. She probably still wouldn’t believe that she was a person. She took a deep breath. “I’ll teach you. I’m not losing you to people who don’t understand and refuse to listen.” She squeezed Morgan’s hand tightly. “There’s no learning to fight like them. You can’t. They were made to fight you.”
Mina’d had to learn that from wardens. She could mimic them all she wanted, but that wasn’t teaching her to fight them, just like them. “You have to learn to fight them.” She didn’t know how to fight back, only to hold her ground until she could escape. It looked like they’d both be teaching each other something. “But I did mean it. No holding back. You’re going to learn how to make sure you can always make it home.” Maybe she was damning herself, teaching a supernatural how to fight back against hunters. Maybe this was the ultimate step in the wrong direction. Maybe she didn’t care.
Morgan squeezed Mina’s hand in turn. Fight them. It didn’t sound so just-in-caseies like that. There was nowhere to hide what she wanted, how many Good Little Zombie rules she’d be breaking, how much she would be disappointing Remmy, or how much of the world she wanted to believe in might crumble away.
Gold lamplight splashed into the yard. Morgan flinched, whimpering, then she lifted her gaze to the windows. There was Bex in her pajamas, her hand still on the master switch, gaping with fear. She said a word and out of the shadows stepped Deirdre. Morgan let go of Mina’s hand to reach for her and toppled against the nix instead, too overwhelmed to remember how to balance. Deirdre was in her black robe, the one Morgan had gotten for her because it had bats and tombstones on the inside, and her hair looked damp from her shower. She was so beautiful in the most ordinary way, Morgan started to cry all over again, thinking of her swallowed by eternal nothing alongside the girls she loved so much.
Bex and Deirdre ran for the nearest door and as they knocked past each other and dashed into the garden, Morgan realized how much they looked like they’d known each other for so much longer, like they belonged in the house together.
“The hunters think I was made to fight them. Maybe I can prove them right,” she rasped, her eyes still on Bex and Deirdre, coming closer and calling her name. She swallowed thickly and hid her last words in Mina’s shoulder, audible only to the two of them. “Meet me at seven, just after sunrise. No holding back.”
Then she was surrounded, hands all over her face, bodies pressed against her back, familiar voices mixing into worried noise, and the only thing Morgan wanted more than the power to cut down anything that would take her away from this (all she loved, all she had, all that could be) was the power to hold everyone close to her at once and carry them safe inside.
