#I'm sorry this is COMPLETELY UNBETAD except for the spellcheck on this computer sdhkjdhf

[fauveshumankaiju]

Jet Jaguar stops a crime

Nothing - no sound - except for the rumble of the patrol car's engine and the crunch of tires on gravel, as the station wagon headed down the street that demarcated downtown Monsuta from the beachfront. Gigan's head was pounding, and he squeezed his eyes shut as the wedge of pain pressed against the inside of his temple. He leaned his head against the window, cool from the night air.  There was hair in his mouth, and blood in his mouth, too.

The cop sitting behind the metal net hadn't spoken to him since he'd cuffed him and gallantly invited him into the back seat to take him down to the station. Gigan joked that he needed his frequent flier card stamped, since it would be the third time he'd spend the night in the closet-sized holding cell for getting into a fight during which Jet Jaguar appeared, like magic, to intervene in other people's business yet again. The cop couldn't take a hit worth a damn, but he had a wicked left hook and a police baton that really left a mark. Gigan used to mock him about it before they started grappling - buy me a drink first before you pull out the toys, big boy - but tonight they'd just gotten right down to it. Fights were always fast with Jet Jaguar, he didn't showboat like Goji and Gigan. All business, no play.

Do you ever take a night off? Iron your underwear? Darn your dickies? Gigan'd sneered. Then he'd gotten knocked out for, like, five seconds, with a club upside the head. He didn't even remember that Megalon'd been there when he came to.  He’d been left alone against fucking Goji, the human grain thresher. Megalon was a big guy, he'd grown up in Monsuta and he knew how to protect himself, Gigan knew, but still, it was always the two of them against Goji until Gigan had let himself get distracted by his favorite new toy.  And Megalon? he'd do whatever Gigan told him to. As usual. 

Gigan looked over at the seat next to him, empty, flashing as they passed by streetlamp outside.

"Did you see where Megalon went?"  He asked.  His mouth was flooded with thin coppery blood and stinging pain again. He'd bitten his cheek. "After you arrested me, you know."  Silence from the front seat.  Gigan exhaled through pursed lips. 

"Hey, it wasn't his fault. I dragged him into this shit. I just hope he didn't get piledrived back there. Do you ever get bothered knowing that Goji's better at keeping the peace round here than you ever will be? Huh?"

More silence. Oh, this was the game he was playing. Gigan was in a mood, though, and he was pretty good at getting what he wanted.

"What are you even here for, man? We never had any cops here when we needed them, now as soon as we're cleaning up our act they stick the most useless pig in the bunch here to slap us around. And you can't even do your job! You got taken out by fucking Megalon! If you meant business, you could have cleaned up this whole city by now! How many times have you taken me in then let me out with fucking community service? Jesus christ, when are you gonna suck it up and do something about all of us monsters, the villains, the ghetto, illiterate unworthy - the scum that you were sent here to put in jail so that you all can lead your perfect little bougie lives and forget about the people that got beaten down and left behind? But you're not gonna do that, are you?"

Still no comment. The heater in the front seat hissed quietly.

Gigan continued, leaning back into the chair vituperously. "You're too nice. No, you're too weak, Jaguar. You wanna get kittens down from trees and shit, eat donuts and get fat, get a nice cushy job where you can forget the guns and tasers and batons that keep you guys in power, but god forbid you actually have to get off your ass and use them. You're just going to keep letting Goji do your dirty work because you're too precious to do it yourself. You're never gonna get our town's respect. You're never gonna get her respect. You don't deserve it. But thank god, you can die alone and useless knowing that you got to be nice."

He let that hang in the air. His cheek was bleeding again, staining his gums with the taste of salt. Jet Jaguar moved, behind the metal screen, and Gigan saw him slowly adjust the mirror above him, fidgeting with it so that he and Gigan could see each other's eyes.  Gigan still had his visor on, glowing faintly in the night-time darkness, and he could just barely see the cop's face.  He shifted back into his seat, feeling anger and bitterness clawing at the inside of his chest.

"What?" He spat.

A moment.  Then, "Do you feel any better now?"

"No. I think you concussed me. I need to get medical attention."

Jet Jaguar's eyes flicked forward and he continued driving. Gigan licked the front of his teeth. "Did you hear me?"

"... Megalon's okay. Goji doesn't have a problem with him, she'll leave him alone."

"Don't fucking talk about Megalon."

"You asked, Gigan."

Gigan rolled his head back. The leather headrest was cool and tacky against his bare scalp. ".. Yeah."

"If you want, I'll call him and have him pick you up at the station if you can make bail."

"Doubt it."

They stopped at an intersection. The rest of the street was completely deserted, illuminated by the ghostly red glow from the streetlight. The adrenaline was wearing off, and as it slipped out of his veins it took that inchoate anger with him, too. He was tired, now, aching all over. His head rang, his meat-arm was bruised, his prosthetic arm needed to be sanded down. 

"He must really care about you."

Gigan blinked. "Megalon?"

"Yeah."

"Mm."

"Good friend."

Gigan closed his eyes. "Don't talk about him."

"Why?"

"Because!" he snapped. "You don't - ugh!"

"I don't deserve too?" Jet Jaguar asked, softly and with no accusatory inflection. Like it was a normal thing to say.

Gigan pursed his lips. "You don't know how it is, man."

Silence from the front seat.

"You just don't. I don't either." Another moment, more rasping breaths. "He's good. He's a good person."

"Yeah?"

"Not like, not like - nice, you know. You're nice. He's good.  There's a difference." Gigan gesticulated, rattling the handcuffs. "The main difference being that he doesn't piss me off nearly as much as you do."

Jet Jaguar huffed in what Gigan thought might possibly be amusement. 

Gigan looked out the window, watching the telephone poles roll slowly past. The cop sure wasn't burning rubber on the way to the station tonight, was he? "I mean, he gets on my fucking nerves sometimes. He's not the brightest, book-wise - or street-wise, either, really. I dunno how he's survived this long with nothing going on up in the old skull. I guess he always found assholes like me to hang out with and keep him safe."

"It doesn't seem to me like you're keeping him safe."

"Hey, don't start with me," Gigan grumbled. "You're the one who beat us up."  

No response. "Sure, we were committing a crime, but come on."

Jet Jaguar didn't respond.

"Okay, yeah. I don't always keep him safe. But this is Monsuta, nobody's safe. Even the people that are supposed to keep us safe -" he gestured to Jet Jaguar, clinking his cuffs together "-are more worried about knocking us down than helping us up. You've got to be smart and tough and he's only kind of tough."

"He's good."

"N-yeah, I mean, he's a good person. I think he wants to do the right thing, he wants to help people, but that's not really possible here.  Not that I make it easy for him."  He thought for a moment, looking out the window at the streets he'd stalked through so many evenings. "I don't think I'm a good person, you know. Megalon, he wants to help people. He wants to do his thing at Seatopia and keep all his animals safe, I don't know, teach people about aquariums and shit and keep to himself. He doesn't want to hurt people. I just-" he sighed. "I'm not like that. I like hurting people. I'm a bad person. I don't always wanna be, even though it keeps me safe here it makes me feel like shit when I get him into trouble."  He tried to say it in a matter-of-fact tone, but it came out a little warbled, a little raw. He'd thought it plenty of times before; it was a mantra in his head, you're a bad person, you're a bad person, but he'd never said it out loud like he meant it.

"You don't sound happy about that," Jet Jaguar said conversationally after an awkward amount of time had passed.  Gigan blinked.

"What, should I be proud of the fact that I'm a monster that ruins everything in my life?"  He wiggled his prosthetic fingers weakly. "I can't even keep myself in one piece, man. I don't know why I keep trying to hold onto things, hold on to people, when I'm just going to destroy them eventually. Useless."

"Seems to me like a bad person wouldn't be worrying about whether or not they're a bad person, right?"

"Oh, fuck off it," Gigan sneered. 

"Just saying."

Gigan picked at one of the scratches across his prosthetic arm, worrying at the edge of a tear in the plastic. "I want." He took a breath, then started again. "I wish I could be better. I don't care about being nice, niceness never did anything for anyone. But I wish I could've been born a good person. A better one."

The car rolled to a stop. Gigan was still looking at the ceiling, wondering why the hell he was having a heart-to-heart with the police officer that knocked him out and arrested him (again) at three in the morning.  He looked out when he heard rustling. Time to get out and head to the cell for the night. Ah, he could already feel the metal bars of the cot there digging into his shoulders from under the wafer-thin mattress. Thank god there was only one cop in town, who only had enough time to arrest one person per night.

Jet Jaguar was looking at him, framed by the heavy metal mesh, barely visible in the low light. He looked tired, a little resigned.

They weren't at the police station, Gigan noted.

"Did you take me out here to kill me?" he asked, annoyed. They were by the beach; the concession stand was only a few yards away.

"You aren't born a good person, Gigan," Jet Jaguar said, with the tone of voice that an exhausted parent would use for their inconsolable baby. "It's not genetic, and it has nothing to do with where you grew up. Megalon grew up here - Mothra grew up here - and they're good people, Gigan, right down to the very core. And it's not because they were born that way."

Gigan wanted to interrupt, but something about the cop's tone - how it was sad and a little desperate instead of how preachy it usually was - quieted him.

"You make choices every day, little choices, big, life-changing choices, and you have two options. You can to the good thing, or the less good thing. You get to decide what rules you use to tell which one's good and which one's less good, the golden rule, some kind of religious scripture, but you get a choice, and the good one's almost always harder. Good people are just the people that look at that choice and decide to do the thing that's a little more good and a little less easy, or less pleasant, or less remunerative. And you keep doing that over and over until you don't have any more choices. Most of those choices aren't ever going to count for anything, but if you practice with the little things - recycling your coffee cup, that kind of thing - then the big hard good choices are easier. That's all it is. Choices. Making the good choice as much as you can."

He turned back to the steering wheel. "Birth doesn't have anything to do with it, thank god. You've got your choices, Gigan, you can choose the better thing whenever you want. Any time you're ready to start.

Gigan rubbed his eye. His hand came away with a streak of motor oil.  "Hate that, chief."

"It's the truth." The cop turned back around and undid the latch to the door of the screen separating the two of them and leaned into the back seat, grunting with exertion.

"Seriously, are you gonna kill me?"

"Nope." He held up his little key so that Gigan could see it glinting red in the light from his visor. "Hands."  Gigan presented his handcuffs, holding them up so that Jet Jaguar could fumble for the keyhole in the darkness and unlock them with a deafening click.

"What's this?" Gigan asked. Everyone in Monsuta knew that gifts like this didn't come without a price, especially from cops. Jet Jaguar took the handcuffs and maneuvered himself back into the front seat, still facing Gigan like he was peering through a little window.

"This would be your third felony physical assault on a police officer. You'll be tried in the state court instead of the local one this time, and I can tell you, they don't look very kind at all on violence against the force. You're looking down the barrel of 10 to 15, more, if they decide to make an example out of you for your preexisting record. There's nothing any of us could do to stop it if you got booked for it tonight."

Gigan looked out the window. He vaguely remembered being warned about the three strikes policy last time he was brought in, but he was too worked up about Megalon leaving his precious Suzuki in the middle of the road when he'd gotten arrested that he didn't pay much attention to it.

"... Yeah, that sounds about right."

Jet Jaguar sighed. "See, this is my choice. Jail's not going to do anything good for you. It'll make me feel a hell of a lot better, but really, you didn't do 10 to 15 years' worth of damage to me. You might hurt other people in the future, but.. I don't know." He shook his head. "It'd be a lot easier to put you in jail and forget about you. It's what I'm supposed to do. But I don't know if it's a good thing to do. I think - and I'm not trying to be your youth pastor or anything - I think you could give the whole being a good person thing one more real, good try. It'd be a lot better for the world to have you out here trying than in jail, failing."

There was a click as Jet Jaguar unlocked the cars' doors.

"So go on, get out. I need to go home and ice my head."

Gigan gave him a long look, clenching his sore jaw, torn between spitting this aching, condescending pity back in his face, and taking what scraps of decency he'd been thrown and running with it. He deserved to go down. He'd committed enough crimes to warrant jail, definitely. It'd be an honorable way to go, in Monsuta, put in jail for the rest of your life for punching too many cops. But that would be the easy choice. Easy to give up, because bad people could never change and it wasn't worth the extra few weeks he'd scrape by with before he got his third strike. Easy to accept that petty thievery and violence was the best that his life was going to come to; honestly, who expected any better from him? Not Gigan, that's for sure. 

Would it be the good choice to make, though?

Oh, for fuck's sake, he was already starting to think like Jet Jaguar. You beat a guy up a couple of times...

He leaned over and snapped the car handle defiantly, heaving up a leg to kick the door open and lurching out into the cool night air. Jet Jaguar had driven them up to the curb on the beach - Gigan could see Goji's house from here, the lights inside flickering in the distance, Monsuta spread out beyond Jet Jaguar's patrol car. He slammed the door closed after himself.

"Hey," Jet Jaguar said collegially, rolling down the window an inch and peering out. He was smiling. "Have a good night. And don't do anything Megalon wouldn't."

The cop rolled up the window and started the car, rolling off down the driveway and back onto the street. Gigan watched him go, not entirely willing to believe that he wasn't going to turn  right around and pick him back up again once Jet Jaguar realized what he'd done. But he didn't, and Gigan was left out on the beach next to the darkened concession stand, listening to the waves lapping at the shore.

Megalon would be making his way back to his apartment now, if he wasn't back already, Gigan thought. Probably waiting for Gigan to call him from the holding cell asking for bail again. He thought of his open, eager face and his soft broad shoulders, his soft broad decency, and suddenly wanted to bury himself in the fuzzy lining of his oversized jacket.  Don't do anything Megalon wouldn't.

Okay, he thought. I think I can do that.  Okay.