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Chapter Text

Marinette was the whisper between breaths, the gentle pause before dawn’s first light kissed the horizon. She was born in the midst of flour and sugar, not in the soft, quiet expectation of parenthood, but in the heat of an oven’s hum and the hurried footsteps of Sabine and Tom, building their bakery as if constructing a dream with their bare hands. Sabine had once called her a miracle, a word she had tossed lightly into the air like a prayer, before another emergency had torn through their lives—a rush of uncertainty that tasted like iron in the back of her throat.

Little Marinette learned early that silence was her refuge. She moved through her childhood like a shadow, folding into the corners, wrapping herself in independence like a too-large cloak. She would not trouble her parents, not burden them with the weight of her needs. They were tethered to the bakery—its rising dough, its sweet fragrances curling like tendrils around their lives—and she, too, was caught in that endless rhythm. She was self-sufficient out of necessity, as if the air she breathed carried the scent of responsibility, the heavy warmth of pastries mingling with the cold loneliness that clung to her skin.

But here’s how it goes—Marinette, three years old, her heart as wide as the sky and just as fragile, lost her teddy bear. Mr. Purple, soft and worn from her small hands, had slipped from her grasp. She could still hear it—the dull thud of fabric hitting pavement, the squeal of tires as they roared past, crushing her only source of comfort beneath their indifferent weight.

Her chest had ached with sobs that came like waves, rolling through her in endless torrents. Sabine had cradled her, whispering promises, "I’ll get you another one, my love. Another bear, I promise." But the words were like dust in the wind, and they did not heal the jagged tear in Marinette’s tiny heart. She waited, waited for the new bear, but days turned into weeks, and nothing came. And even when it did—months later, a replacement, plush and perfect—it did not fill the void. Mr. Purple was gone, and Marinette, though grateful, still dreamed of him, the bear she could never quite replace. 

And here’s how it goes—her fifth birthday, a day wrapped in bright paper and cake crumbs, filled with laughter that never quite reached her bones. Her favourite stuffed animal, a ladybug she clung to with the ferocity of a child terrified of losing again, vanished.

One moment, it had been pressed against her chest, its fabric warm from her hands, her fingers aching with the strength of her grip. The next, it was gone, like it had evaporated into thin air. She searched everywhere, tearing through her room in a frenzy, her breath catching in her throat, desperation clawing at her like unseen talons. But it was gone.

Weeks passed before they found it again. The ladybug had resurfaced, not in her room, nor in the bakery, but in the fountain at the edge of a park, submerged at the bottom of the water as if it had leapt from her grasp and tried to drown itself in the quiet, cold depths. When they pulled it from the fountain, it was soaked through, waterlogged and heavy, but untouched.

No rips, no tears—just as perfect as the day it had disappeared, except for the lingering scent of damp stone and the suffocating weight of water that clung to its fabric like grief. No one knew how it had ended up there. But Marinette, as she stared at the drowned toy, felt something stir inside her, something that tasted like fear and salt, a sensation that crawled beneath her skin and whispered of things lost and things returned, but never the same.

The fountain’s water had kissed the toy, and somehow, in the stillness of that silent, moonlit night, Marinette wondered if the toy had felt the water pressing against it, the same way she felt the world press against her, filling her lungs, weighing her down.

Here’s how it goes—Marinette was born fragile, like a flower that bloomed in the wrong season, petals too delicate for the storms that howled around her. Her body, small and soft, seemed always on the edge of collapse, a burden to her parents, a constant source of worry that weighed on their shoulders like sacks of flour too heavy to lift.

She spent her days in the bakery, a quiet ghost among the rising dough and the sugar-dusted counters, her fingers tracing the edges of pastries as though the warmth of them might anchor her to this world. She watched her parents from a distance, their backs bent with exhaustion, their love for her tethered to a life of endless struggle.

But here’s how it goes—sickness clung to her like an old curse, creeping into her bones without reason or warning. One day she would be fine, the next she would be burning from the inside out, fever like molten iron running through her veins. Her skin would stick to the sheets, soaked in a feverish sweat that clung like a second skin, heavy and suffocating.

The cotton of her pyjamas, wet and plastered to her back as her tiny chest heaved, trying to pull in air that felt like fire with each breath. Every swallow was a knife, sharp and relentless, and her throat felt raw, scraped by invisible hands. She would cry, but the tears weren’t for the fever. No, the tears were for the talent show she’d never see, the art she’d never show, the opportunities she’d always miss at the last moment. Each cough tore through her like a storm, shaking her thin frame until she could barely hold herself together. Her parents were always near, but always too far, their worry a distant hum in the haze of her sickness.

And here’s how it goes—Marinette was always clumsy, as if the world was made of tripwires only she could see. Her feet tangled with the earth, with the air, as though gravity itself was offended by her presence. It felt like something followed her, a shadow she couldn’t shake, a black cat slipping between her steps, tripping her with invisible claws. She could feel it, the weight of bad luck curling around her like smoke, too faint to touch but always there.

One summer, the heat thick in the air and her skin slick with sweat, she found herself climbing a tree to rescue a kitten, the little creature’s fearful eyes locked with hers. The bark was rough against her palms, splintering under her touch, but she climbed anyway, coaxing the kitten into her arms, its soft fur brushing her clammy skin. And then—snap. The sturdy branch beneath her gave way with a sickening crack, and she fell, the ground rushing up to meet her as the sky spun above. The impact came with a sharp, searing pain, her arm bending in a way it shouldn’t, the crack of bone echoing in the silence.

She walked home with the kitten tucked safely in her arms, her face streaked with tears, the pain radiating through her body in waves, but no one noticed. Her parents fussed for a moment, their hands fluttering over her like anxious birds, but the bakery called to them with the urgency of a fire. Something had gone wrong with an order—an emergency that stole their attention, leaving her alone in the corner, her arm throbbing with every heartbeat, trembling with the weight of her own agony. Hours passed before she was taken to the hospital, the pain a constant companion, gnawing at her insides like a ravenous beast. But at least the kitten was fine.

Here’s how it goes—it was her tenth birthday, and for once, the world seemed to offer her a gift. Her grandmother was coming to visit, her arms open and full of warmth, her presence a balm for Marinette’s bruised soul. But as the hours ticked by, something went wrong. Instead of meeting her at the bakery, Marinette met her grandmother in the cold, sterile light of the hospital.

There had been a car crash, the roads slick with rain and fate as cruel as ever. Marinette spent her birthday sitting in a hard plastic chair, her hands clenched into fists, the air thick with antiseptic. She watched the world blur through her tears, her heart twisting with the certainty that somehow, it was her fault. Her win in life had come at too high a price. She had wished too hard, hoped too deeply, and the universe had answered with tragedy.

The guilt sat heavy in her chest, a weight she couldn’t shake, as though her very existence brought misfortune to those she loved. And in the stillness of that hospital room, she felt the darkness of that invisible cat curling around her once more, silent, unseen, but always there, stalking her every step.

Here’s how it always goes—Marinette breathed out luck but it soured in her lungs, curling like smoke into something darker, something twisted at its core. The universe seemed to lay its hand upon her, offering moments of brilliance, of light, only to snatch them away just as quickly, leaving her standing in the shadow of what could have been.

Opportunities bloomed like wildflowers around her, but they wilted in her hands, crumbling to dust before she could ever grasp them. Miracles did happen, brief flashes of wonder, but they faded the moment they appeared, like shooting stars swallowed by the vast, uncaring sky. 

Marinette turned eleven, and for a moment, it seemed like the stars aligned just for her. Her parents, their lives tangled in the bakery’s relentless demands, somehow found space, a sliver of time carved out from the endless dough and the constant whirl of ovens. Their work was flourishing, winning awards, drawing more business than ever before—a success they could barely keep up with. But for once, for her, they planned to stop. They planned a visit to the zoo, a family day, something they hadn’t done in years.

But here’s how it goes—the bakery’s delivery van broke down, just like that, the universe flicking its wrist to remind her that she could never hold on to anything good for too long. A sudden emergency, a mechanical failure, a chain of events that pulled her parents away once more, away from her and into the endless cycle of fixing what was broken. Marinette was left standing there, alone with a sense of something’s wrong.

She spent the day with Alya instead, her best friend since toddlerhood, whose presence was warm and comforting, a balm against the sting of abandonment. Alya’s joy was infectious, her laughter ringing like bells as she pulled Marinette from exhibit to exhibit at the zoo.

But even as they wandered through the animal enclosures, past the smell of wet fur and damp hay, past the sounds of roaring lions and chattering monkeys, Marinette’s heart felt heavy. It was a day she was supposed to spend with her parents but it slipped through her fingers like everything else.   

Marinette was talented. Everyone said so. She could draw the world to life with just a piece of paper and a pencil, create designs from the ether, pulling beauty from the depths of her mind. Her fingers wove fabric into art, stitching together dreams with an effortless talent that defied her years. Her parents called her their miracle, the spark that ignited the bakery’s sudden success when she was born. But Marinette didn’t believe in miracles. She believed in curses. She was sure she wasn’t their blessing, but their omen.

Here’s the truth of the matter—Marinette’s life has always been a dance between fortune and despair, a tightrope strung between two worlds: one bathed in golden light, the other in endless shadow. She was both cursed and blessed, the unluckiest creature that ever dared to breathe luck. With every step, every breath, fortune whispered in her ear, a gift wrapped in barbed wire.

She carried it in her veins, this line of destiny that twisted through her like a serpent, coiling tighter with every passing year. And in her dreams, visions haunted her—the kind that burrowed deep into her mind, wrapping her in the cold grip of fate.

There was always the black cat. Its shadowy form lingered just behind her, its paws silent, its gaze a piercing green that shimmered with malice. It was there in the corners of her vision, just out of reach but close enough to feel its breath on her neck. It stalked her, relentless, as if her every joy was its prey.

And yet—there was power in her, too. There was fortune tangled in her very being, in the rise and fall of her chest, in the breath that whispered from her lips. Her dreams told of suffering, yes—of red-armoured girls standing on the edge of nineteen, their bodies consumed by flame as their eyes blazed with the fire of creation.

At the cusp of twelve, she sat alone at the dinner table, the silence a thick, oppressive thing that clung to her bones. The clinking of her fork against the plate was the only sound in the room, a hollow echo that bounced off empty walls. Her parents were downstairs, fighting to fix a malfunctioning oven that had broken down in the middle of a large catering order.

They were always somewhere else, always trying to mend what was broken. And Marinette was left alone with the empty chairs, the dinner she couldn’t taste, and the heavy weight of her thoughts. 

She had always thought that if she could just breathe deeply enough, if she could just find the right moment to hold her breath and wish, things might change. But the universe didn’t answer her prayers; it only whispered back in riddles, and Marinette was left to decipher the message written in every broken plan, every missed opportunity, every moment of joy turned sour. She was the black cat stalking her own steps and no matter how hard she tried, she could never outrun the shadow of it.

And so she sat, her body a still, aching thing as she ate her dinner in silence, staring at the empty seats as though they might speak back. But the seats said nothing. The universe said nothing. And Marinette, as always, was left to fill the silence with the sound of her own heart breaking.

For every miracle that bloomed in her hands, for every moment where the universe bent to her will, there was an equal and opposite disaster waiting to strike.

She was the unluckiest being to breathe luck.

Chapter Text

Adrien Agreste grew up in cold walls and soft hands—hands that never lingered, hands that barely brushed against his skin before they vanished, like a fleeting breeze through a cracked window. The softness was the only warmth he knew, and even that was laced with distance, with a hollow kind of tenderness.

He was cradled not by love but by the sharp edges of expectations, the invisible weight of his father's disappointment pressing down on his young shoulders, bending him as though he were Atlas, cursed to carry the world. But it wasn’t the world—it was something heavier, something far more crushing: the weight of being.

He grew beneath his father’s stern, impassive gaze, each glance a silent reprimand, a reminder of everything he was supposed to be but never quite was. His mother, with her quiet deferral, her soft sighs as she said, “He doesn’t mean it, love; he just wants the best for you,”.

Her love was like a ghost that haunted him—gentle but always distant, as if she were too fragile to hold him close, as if even her affection could shatter. When she did touch him, it was with the softness of rose petals brushing against bruises, her fingers trailing over his reddened yellow patched arms. It was love. Always fleeting. Always slipping away like sand through his fingers.

The mansion Adrien called home was nothing more than a gilded cage, walls towering high and cold, trapping him within their silent judgment. The vastness of the space echoed with emptiness, each step a hollow sound swallowed by the marble floors. His bedroom was pristine and perfect, a stage set for someone else’s life. He was the perfect son, the perfect face of his father’s brand, doll-faced and untouchable. He was nothing more than a reflection of what his father wanted him to be.

Each day was a procession of rituals—lessons upon lessons, etiquette drilled into his bones, posture corrected until his back was straight but his soul was bent. He was taught to move with grace, to smile with just the right amount of charm, to speak without saying anything of substance. He was a funeral pyre in the pages of a tragedy written for him long before he could understand the script.

He is three and alone, his small hands trembling as he touches the remnants of his father’s work—delicate designs torn and crumpled under his curious fingers. He only wanted to be seen, to be noticed in this hollow world of marble floors and too-high ceilings.

But his father’s hands, hard as iron, snatch him away, grip unyielding, as though punishing him for the sin of wanting. Adrien remembers the cold in his father’s eyes—eyes that never softened, never flickered with warmth, only narrowed into something sharper, something distant and unreachable.

He was dragged down the long, echoing halls of their mansion, the sound of his footsteps swallowed by the silence that surrounded him. The cold air clung to his skin as his father locked him in his room, the door shutting with a finality that echoed through his small body.

The darkness swallowed him whole. His room, suffocating, a cavern, its walls cold as tombstones. He cried, but the tears came like a flood that quickly dried up, leaving him empty, gasping for air. His sobs filled the silence for hours until even his voice gave out, the sound of his grief lost in the void.

He was alone—utterly, terrifyingly alone. The walls did not respond, did not echo his sadness. They stood silent and indifferent, just like the rest of the world outside. His mother came hours later, her steps too soft, her hands too late.

She let him out, murmuring apologies, her fingers brushing against his tear-streaked face, but there was no comfort in her touch. She admonished him softly, always with that same excuse, always with her eyes distant—green, hazy, like she wasn’t truly there. You know your father’s work is important. Why didn’t you stay put? The words settled into his bones like a weight, a reminder that in this world, his needs were always an afterthought, his existence always an inconvenience.

Adrien grew up alone, the mansion’s walls becoming his only constant companions. The air was always too still, too cold, like it had never been touched by laughter or joy. The silence stretched on endlessly, filling every crevice of his childhood, pressing down on him like a suffocating blanket.

He wandered through rooms that echoed with nothing but his own footsteps, hoping—aching—for something, for someone, to break through the unbearable quiet. At nine years old, the loneliness began to gnaw at him, a sharp ache in his chest that only grew more painful with each passing day.

He begged his parents to let him go to school, his voice small and pleading. I’m growing up now, he had said, his heart hammering with hope. I can handle it. I want to go outside. I want to be with other kids. But his father dismissed him with the same cold finality, instead putting him in fencing lessons and more photoshoots. More ways to shape him into the perfect image of a son, the perfect doll for his father’s empire. More ways to trap him in the gilded cage of their mansion.

Adrien turned twelve and tasted grief for the first time. His mother, the last fragile thread tethering him to warmth, to softness was ripped away. Her pale skin, the way her breath came in shallow, laboured gasps, the cough that rattled in her chest. But no one told him the truth. He was kept in the dark, hidden away from the hospital visits, from the whispered conversations behind closed doors. 

And then she disappeared, missing, like ash in the wind. And when she was gone, it was as though the last bit of colour in his world had drained away, leaving him alone in the cold, grey expanse of his life. 

Adrien was boundless in his grief, lost in it, drowning in it. It consumed him, swallowed him whole until there was nothing left but the ache, the terrible, gnawing emptiness where his mother’s love had once been. He could still remember the way her hands felt, so soft, so fleeting, like the last whisper of a dream before waking. And now, even that was gone, stolen from him without warning, without mercy.

He wandered the mansion in a daze, the silence pressing down on him harder than ever before. It felt like the walls themselves were mourning, their coldness now unbearable, their stillness a weight that crushed his chest. Every step he took felt like walking through water, heavy and slow, as though the air had thickened with sorrow.

He felt torn apart, ripped in two by the grief that coursed through his veins like poison. He wondered if this was what it meant to break, if this hollow, aching emptiness was all that was left of him now.

He wondered what it said about him, how unlovable he must be if even his mother, the one person who had ever shown him real tenderness, had been taken from him. Was it his fault? Was it something about him that made people leave, that made love too fragile to survive?

The questions gnawed at him in the quiet, the silence amplifying every doubt, every fear. He wondered if love was even worth it—if it was worth the agony that now sat like a stone in his chest.

Because if love meant feeling like this, then maybe it wasn’t worth it at all.

He is thirteen, drowning in the roar of cameras that flash like lightning, blinding him, disorienting him, stripping him bare for the world to devour. The paparazzi crowd around him, faceless and predatory, their questions sharp and invasive, cutting into him like knives. Where is your mother, Adrien? Have you heard from her? Is she ever coming back?

Their voices are a cacophony of demands, an assault on his frayed nerves, and he feels the weight of it all pressing down on him, suffocating. His throat tightens, and he swallows against the rising bile, his heart pounding as if it might break free from his chest.

His father’s orders are clear—do not engage, do not let them see the cracks in the façade, the cracks in you. So he stands there, a perfect mannequin, doll-like, his smile brittle and forced, hiding the churning sea of pain beneath his polished exterior.

His life is a prison of silken ties and marble floors, the walls of his mansion a fortress built not to protect him, but to cage him. Every movement he makes is calculated, restricted, as though invisible chains bind him tighter with each passing day.

He can no longer remember what it feels like to run freely, to feel the wind on his face, or to laugh without the weight of expectation strangling the sound in his throat— if he ever did. He is a puppet, his strings pulled by the cold hands of his father, by the distant memory of his mother, by the relentless scrutiny of the public.

He has become the perfect son, the perfect face of the Agreste brand, a boy sculpted from marble—beautiful, but lifeless. And in the quiet of his room, when the cameras are gone, when the mansion is still and the world outside feels like a distant dream, Adrien wonders if there is anything left of him at all.

He is thirteen at another fashion event. Paris is alive outside the walls, buzzing with life and colour and laughter that Adrien can hear but never touch. He is backstage, waiting, as always, for his turn to be displayed—like an accessory, a pretty prop in his father’s empire. And as he waits, his eyes wander, and he sees them—a family. A mother, a father, and a young boy, laughing as they playfully tease him.

The boy’s laughter is so bright, so full of joy, that it pierces through Adrien’s carefully constructed numbness. It stirs something bitter and sharp inside him, something that coils in his chest like a serpent, hissing with envy, with longing. The sight of them—the simplicity of their love, the way they touch each other so freely, so openly—it stings like salt in an open wound.

He is thirteen, and the bitterness is a wound that never heals, festering beneath the surface, unseen but always there. He watches the family until he can’t stand it anymore, until the envy burns so hot that it threatens to consume him, and then, for the first time, Adrien rebels.

He sneaks out into the city—wild with desperation, his heart pounding with the thrill of freedom and the fear of getting caught. The streets are alive with people, so many people, moving and talking and living, and for a brief moment, he is a part of it.

He feels the cool night air on his skin, smells the scent of fresh bread and rain-soaked stone, hears the distant hum of the city. It’s intoxicating, overwhelming, and for a fleeting second, Adrien feels almost alive.

But it doesn’t last. It never lasts. He is caught—of course he is caught—and the ride home with Nathalie and his bodyguard is suffocating. The air in the car is thick, oppressive, like the walls of his home closing in on him.

Nathalie says nothing, but her silence is heavy, her disapproval palpable. The minutes tick by, each one dragging out the dread that coils in Adrien’s stomach, making him nauseous. He tries to keep down the little food he was given earlier, but his body rebels, as though even it knows the punishment that awaits him.

His father will be waiting, cold and impassive, the master of the gilded cage that Adrien calls home. And Adrien thinks, as the mansion looms closer, that he has never hated anything more than he hates his father in this moment.

He is grounded. His social privileges—such as they were—are revoked for a month. No school, no friends, no Chloe. He is cut off from the world entirely, a bird with its wings shackled, trapped in the endless expanse of his home, where every room is a reminder of his isolation.

He wanders through within the grand walls of his room, there is no freedom here, only cold, empty spaces that echo with the absence of warmth. His father’s silence is the worst of all—more punishing than any words could ever be. It is a silence that chills Adrien to the bone, a silence that says you are not enough without ever needing to speak.

In the quiet of his room, Adrien feels the weight of his solitude more acutely than ever. The mansion feels like it’s closing in on him, the walls pressing closer and closer, until there’s no air left to breathe. He lies on his bed, staring at the ceiling, his body still, but inside he is screaming, clawing at the confines of his life, desperate for something—anything—to change.

But nothing changes. And Adrien wonders, as he stares at the darkened corners of his room, if this is what it feels like to disappear. If, one day, he will fade away completely, like a shadow swallowed by the night, until there’s nothing left of him but the perfect image his father has created. And the thought terrifies him.

Here’s the solemn truth: Adrien Agreste is isolation’s gift, a boy sculpted from marble and locked away behind the cold facade of perfection. He is stronger than Atlas, he learned to exist beneath the weight of his father’s world. His strength is a veneer, the polished surface of a life lived for others, and more fragile than the balance of the universe itself.

He is porcelain on the verge of shattering, the pressure of inevitability cracking his edges. The mansion hums with a silence that is suffocating, a silence that wraps around his throat like an invisible noose, tightening with each passing day.

The world outside is bright and full of life, but inside, the air feels stale, as if it’s been untouched by the warmth of human connection for too long. Every sound in his life is muffled, distant. The clatter of dishes, the faint sound of footsteps echoing down the long, empty halls, the mechanical whirr of cameras watching his every move.

His father’s voice, cold and sharp, cuts through the silence like a blade, always instructing, always correcting. There is no warmth in that voice, no room for tenderness. And his mother’s voice—when it came—is soft, so soft it barely reaches him, a whisper lost in the wind, a lullaby that never quite puts him to sleep.

Here’s the truth Adrien cannot escape: he is a monument to isolation, standing tall and alone, burdened by the inevitability of his life. He is trapped by expectations so heavy they crush the air from his lungs.

Stronger than Atlas, yes—but only because he has no choice. More fragile than the universe’s delicate balance—because all it takes is one crack, one tiny fracture, and the whole façade will come crashing down, leaving nothing but dust and silence in its wake.

Chapter Text

Fifteen-year-old Marinette stood at the precipice of greatness. She didn’t know it then, her life had split at the seams, and everything familiar was unraveling.

The stone monster, towering and monstrous, cast a shadow that swallowed her whole, its roar shaking the ground beneath her feet, echoing in her bones.

She had never felt so small, so utterly insignificant, as if her entire existence could be crushed beneath the weight of its hulking body.

Her breath caught in her throat, heart hammering in her chest, as the reality of her fragility became a glaring thing. The air tasted of dust and debris, thick with fear, and the screams of her classmates faded into the background like the distant hum of a storm.

She had lost Alya in the chaos, swallowed by the sea of panicked bodies, but somehow Marinette knew—Alya had gone to chase it, to confront the danger head-on.

That was Alya's way, brave and unflinching, even when faced with the impossible. But Marinette wasn’t built for this. Her hands trembled, slick with sweat, and she felt the cold creep of dread curling in her stomach.

She was fifteen when she first met a god, in the soft walls of her room.

Not in the way she had always imagined gods to be—glowing with power, voices like thunder, eyes like the sun—but in the shape of a tiny, ancient creature, with eyes so wide and hopeful it made Marinette’s heart ache to look at them.

Tikki, she called herself, with a voice that sounded like soft bells, like the last fading light of day.

“Marinette,”  Tikki said, with the kind of gentle optimism that seemed misplaced in the chaos, “you are meant for this. You have a destiny greater than you know.”

Destiny. The word lodged in Marinette’s throat, sharp and bitter, like a stone too big to swallow. Behind her eyes, a vision flashed—of a girl clad in red, her body encased in flame, her face unrecognisable beneath the weight of duty, burning under the crushing inevitability of sacrifice. Heroism had teeth, sharp and unforgiving, and Marinette could feel those teeth gnashing at her soul.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” she whispered, voice barely audible above the din of destruction around them.

Her heart clenched, heavy and full of doubt, because she was no hero, no saviour.

She was just a girl, a child.

Tikki’s eyes shimmered with a light too ancient, too wise, for the small body she inhabited. “You can,” she said, with a certainty that felt too pure to be real.

Marinette wanted to believe her, but all she could think of was whether this optimism was some cruel fate’s way of picking out flowers for her grave.

Was this the beginning of the end? Was she merely a placeholder, meant to hold the mantle of Ladybug until someone better came along?

Marinette's breath came in shallow bursts, her pulse erratic as she stared at Tikki, her mind swimming in the weight of everything she’d been told.

She couldn’t do this. She shouldn’t do this. But somehow, some piece of her, deep down, knew there was no turning back.

Temporary,  Marinette thought with a feral kind of desperation. She wanted this to be temporary—needed it to be.

Because the idea of forever, of endless responsibility, was a chain around her neck, dragging her deeper into waters she couldn’t swim.

Tikki hovered closer, her small presence impossibly comforting even as she said, “The Butterfly Miraculous is in play. He will send out his akumas, his champions. You are Ladybug now. You will call on your Lucky Charm, and it will guide you.”

The phrase hung in the air, vibrating against Marinette’s skin. Lucky Charm. Spots on. The words felt strangely familiar, like a half-forgotten dream whispering at the edges of her consciousness, begging to be remembered.

But all Marinette could hear, beneath Tikki's soft reassurances, were the echoes of burning screams—the crackle of flames as they climbed up her arms, licking her skin, tearing at her flesh. She had never felt such fear, such a primal, gut-wrenching terror that made her feel as if the ground had been ripped out from beneath her feet.

"You have a partner," Tikki continued, the words barely registering through the fog of Marinette’s panic. “He wields the Chat Miraculous. Only he can break the akumatized object, and only you can purify the akuma.”

Her partner. A black cat. Marinette’s mind swirled with the image of the monster in front of her, of her hands glowing with power she didn’t understand, of a boy with eyes like shadows and a smile that promised both mischief and mystery. But all of it felt too far away, too abstract, and the reality of what lay in front of her.

Marinette's legs wobbled, her knees weak beneath the crushing weight of the responsibility that had been thrust upon her. Her head spun, the world tilting dangerously around her.

And yet—yet—there was something. Something deep inside her, something buried beneath the fear and the doubt. Marinette didn’t know if it was courage or desperation, but it was enough.

She took a deep breath, the air sharp and metallic in her lungs, tasting of smoke and fear and something else—something electric.

And then, before she could talk herself out of it, she whispered the words that felt like they’d been waiting for her all along.

"Spots on.”

And just like that, everything changed.

Adrien burst into his room, his fencing bag slipping from his shoulder and hitting the floor with a dull thud. His heart was still racing from his hasty escape from practice, but it wasn’t just the exertion or the rush that quickened his pulse. The monster—the stone monster—had been real. It moved through the streets like some nightmare from a storybook, crashing into buildings, sending people scattering. It felt absurd, comical even, but terrifying too.

His mind swirled with a thousand thoughts. What was that thing? A villain from the pages of a comic? How ridiculous, how maddening. And he knew exactly what would follow—his father, tightening his grip even further, locking Adrien behind even more walls.

With a sigh, Adrien ran a hand through his hair, his gaze falling on the neatly made bed. And there, sitting at the center like a bizarre invitation, was a small box. He froze. A box? His father never left anything like this for him, not in this way. His father’s gifts were sterile, proper, planned.

But this box—it was black, with deep red markings, like something ancient, almost sinister. Adrien approached it cautiously, the texture cold under his fingertips, as though it had been hidden away in darkness for years.

Nathalie wouldn’t have left him something like this, and the idea of a deranged fan crossed his mind.Should he call someone? Have it checked?

"Ehh," he muttered, curiosity outweighing caution. "My life couldn’t get any worse, nothing interesting ever happens anyway.”

With that, he popped the lid open.

It wasn’t a bomb. Inside the box, resting on velvet so dark it swallowed the light, was a ring.

Adrien frowned, reaching for it cautiously, but before his fingers could make contact, something leapt from the box—a blur of black and green, fast and chaotic, like a living shadow.

Adrien stumbled back, eyes wide as the creature flitted around his room, darting from corner to corner, leaving a faint trail of static in its wake. He blinked, still processing what had just happened. “What… what are you?”

The small creature floated lazily, yawning as if it had been disturbed from a nap. "Plagg," it said with a voice that dripped with disinterest, scratching behind one of its tiny ears. "And I’m a Kwami.”

“A Kwami?” Adrien echoed, utterly lost but intrigued.

Plagg rolled his eyes. "Yeah, yeah. Kwami. I give powers. You get to be a hero now. Lucky you."

He zipped around the room in a blur of black and green, as though he could barely be bothered to explain. “That,” he pointed vaguely toward the box with his tiny paw, “is the Black Cat Miraculous. It’s a ring. Put it on, and you get my powers.”

Adrien blinked, his mind racing to catch up. “Wait. Hero? Powers? Like... superpowers?” His heart began to race for a different reason now.

This wasn't just some strange prank—there was something real and alive about this moment, like the world was offering him an escape from the suffocating walls of his father’s mansion. A way out.

Plagg sighed, floating upside down like he was already bored of the conversation. "Yeah, yeah. You’ve got the whole ‘cataclysm’ thing. You know, destruction and chaos. Pretty fun. You’re welcome, by the way.”

Adrien stared at the ring. His hands twitched with anticipation, barely hearing Plagg's lazy explanation. “And how do I… transform?”

Plagg, still rummaging through Adrien’s stuff, half-heartedly waved a paw. "You say ‘claws out’, hey do you have any—“

“Claws out!” Adrien shouted, cutting Plagg off mid-sentence, his excitement bubbling over. He didn’t even think twice. The words flew from his mouth before he could stop them.

Swirling green energy wrapped around him, crackling with electricity, moving with a chaotic force that seemed to match the erratic beating of his heart.

His fencing uniform vanished, replaced by sleek, inky black fabric that clung to him. It was wild, rough in some places, artfully chaotic, like a painting that refused to stay within the lines.

His hands felt strange, lighter and stronger.  His suit, messy and wild, was accented with glowing green streaks, jagged and vibrant, pulsing with a life of their own. It wasn’t refined. It wasn’t elegant. It was free.

Adrien looked down at himself, wide-eyed, a grin spreading across his face. “This is… incredible!”

He caught sight of his reflection in the window—a sleek, black cat-like figure staring back at him. Black leather, green claws, and a slight glint of mischief in his own eyes.

He felt untethered, like the weight of his old life had melted away.

Adrien leaped out of the window, landing gracefully on the rooftop with feline precision. The wind whipped past him, cool against his new suit, and for the first time in his life, Adrien felt truly free.

No walls, no restrictions, no one telling him what he could or couldn’t do. He was no longer Adrien Agreste, model and son of Gabriel Agreste. He was, he was Chat Noir.

Her suit is simple—too simple, she thinks, as the designer within her recoils at the sight. The sleek red fabric clings to her skin, unadorned and practical, but lacking any sense of style or grace. It’s just a suit, and it feels wrong, like an unfinished sketch lacking the beauty of creation.

Marinette opens her mouth to remark on it, to question Tikki's choice, but when she turns, Tikki is gone.

The absence hits her like a cold gust of wind, and the fear, which had momentarily quieted, surges back, settling into her bones like an unwelcome guest.

A soft hum vibrates from her earrings, a warmth that spreads from her earlobes to her chest, down her arms, filling her with a strange, comforting energy.

It’s like being cradled by something unseen, and for a fleeting moment, she feels a sense of calm, a quiet in the storm.

The balcony stretches before her, a dizzying drop, the city sprawling beneath her like an open canvas.

Marinette steels herself, clutching the yoyo with trembling hands, feeling its weight like a foreign object—awkward, unfamiliar.

She throws it out, her heart leaping with it. The string latches instinctively onto something out of sight, yanking her forward with a force that steals her breath.

She is flying, but it is not graceful. She flails, clutching the string for dear life, her legs kicking out into the air as if they could ground her in a sky that feels too vast, too overwhelming.

Eventually, somehow, she finds a rhythm, her body adjusting to the impossible swing of the yoyo. Her instincts take over, and she feels herself relax slightly, her mind focusing on the task at hand.

She swoops low, guiding herself through the chaos below, where terrified civilians scream and scramble. She saves a few, the instinct to protect overriding her fear.

Then she meets him, a boy with golden hair that glints like sunlight, and eyes that gleam green, too vivid and alive, like a cat stalking through the night.

His suit is sleek and chaotic, more fluid than her own. There’s something wild about him, an artful chaos in the way he moves, unbound by anything but his own whim.

His grin is carefree, reckless, as if the weight of the world rests lightly on his shoulders. "Chat Noir," he says with a wink, his voice teasing. "You must be the partner I was promised. Lucky me.”

She fumbled with her yoyo, the string slipping through her fingers as she tried to find her voice. "L-Ladybug," she finally stammered, her tongue tripping over the syllables like a child on stilts. "And… I wouldn't say lucky."

He raised a brow. "Oh? Not impressed by the hero standing before you? Or are you just… shy?" His grin widened, teasing, the kind of smile that dared her to keep up.

She narrowed her eyes, willing the heat in her cheeks to cool. "Shy? Hardly. Just wondering if you're more cat or show-off.”

"Both," Chat Noir replied, without missing a beat. "But I assure you, my charm is all part of the package. Comes with the whiskers.”

Before she could muster a retort, her yoyo slipped from her fingers and, with a comedic sort of inevitability, smacked him square on the forehead.

His eyes widened in surprise for half a second before he burst into laughter, not offended in the slightest. "Ah, we’re off to a smashing start, aren’t we?”

Mortified, she scrambled to grab the yoyo, her words tumbling out in a breathless rush. "I didn’t mean—“

"Relax, Bug," he cut her off, still chuckling. "I like a girl who’s willing to knock some sense into me. Besides," he twirled his baton with a practiced ease, "I've got a thick skull.”

Ladybug finally managed to hold the yoyo properly, taking a breath to steady herself. "We’re supposed to be fighting that thing," she said, nodding toward Stoneheart, who was smashing cars as if they were made of paper.

"Right, right." Chat Noir waved a hand dismissively with nonchalance that made her grit her teeth. "Fight the villain, save Paris. I know. But, hey," he added with another wink, "don’t be too shy to ask for help when you need it, partner.”

With that, he bounds off toward the Akuma—Stoneheart—with the ease of someone born for this life.

For a moment, envy claws at Marinette’s insides, sharp and biting. He moves with grace and power, leaping into the fray with reckless abandon, while she trails behind, feeling small and unsteady. Is this what being a hero is supposed to feel like?

She shakes that thought off, tightening her grip on her yoyo and follows.

Chat Noir is already locked in battle, his strikes swift and brutal, but there’s something about his recklessness that sends a chill down her spine.

She nearly shouts at him to be careful, her voice strangled by the lump in her throat.

And then she does scream when Stoneheart’s massive hand swats him aside like a toy, flinging him into a wall with a sickening thud that makes her heart lurch.

The world seems to freeze for a second, her breath catching painfully in her chest, but Chat Noir is already back on his feet, laughing it off, another quip slipping from his lips as he charges once more into the chaos.

But Marinette’s focus drifts, her gaze snapping to the monster’s path, and horror floods her veins. Stoneheart is heading toward the school. Her school.

The ground shakes beneath her, and she turns to see a civilian—a child, no more than eight years old—frozen in terror, directly in the path of Stoneheart’s next crushing step.

The scream rips from her throat, raw and primal, her hand shooting forward, desperate to reach the boy. No.

A shield appears in front of him, glowing and bright, protecting the child as Stoneheart’s massive foot crashes down, mere inches from where he stood.

The boy scurries away, safe, but Marinette can barely process it, her breath ragged and her body trembling. The effort of summoning that shield leaves her drained, exhaustion settling into her limbs like lead, her muscles aching with every movement.

In the echos of her soul, she hears the echoes of a battle—red armour clashing against steel, swords ringing, the cries of the fallen filling her mind with visions of old wars and ancient burdens.

She can almost feel the weight of history pressing down on her, the heavy mantle of responsibility crushing her shoulders.

But there is no time to dwell. Stoneheart is moving, and she has no choice but to follow, her yoyo swinging once more, carrying her forward.

Chat Noir's lips curve in a lopsided grin as he raises his hand, fingers curling with anticipation. “Cataclysm!” he calls, and at the mere touch of his fingers, the goal post disintegrates into ash, crumbling into nothing.

Marinette can’t help the fascination that lights her eyes, watching the metal dissolve as if consumed by invisible fire.

Yet when Chat Noir turns his hand towards Stoneheart, she slaps a hand to her face, groaning in disbelief. "Seriously?! Did your kwami even explain how your powers work?”

Chat Noir pauses, pouting. "I’ll have you know, I’m very well-informed... on most things.”

“Clearly not this one,” she mutters, pulling out her yo-yo as her Lucky Charm materialises in a flash of scarlet light. She stares at the item in her hands—a wetsuit.

For a heartbeat, the absurdity of it sinks in. Is my life some cosmic joke? she thinks. What could she possibly do with a wetsuit against a stone monster? 

"A wetsuit?" Chat peers over her shoulder, eyebrows raised. “How's that supposed to help us?"

But there's no time to dwell on the irony as Chat Noir points out the obvious: they don’t even know where the akuma is hidden.

And then it strikes her—a small detail that had gnawed at the back of her mind. Stoneheart’s right fist remains closed, clenched tight as if guarding something precious. “His hand,” she breathes. “The akuma—it’s in his fist.”

“Wow, detective work at its finest!” Chat claps his hands sarcastically but grins. “What’s the wetsuit for? Going to swim up there?”

Ignoring his joke, she ties the ends of the wetsuit together, a plan forming in her mind as ridiculous as the object in her hands.

With quick hands, she knots a water hose into the neck of the suit, the whole thing coming together in a chaotic rush of desperation and ingenuity.

Turning to Chat Noir, her voice steady despite her racing heart, she says, “Trust me.”

He smirks, eyebrows raising. "Trust you? Sure. But what are we doing—“

Without waiting for his reply, she wraps her yo-yo around his legs and throws him toward Stoneheart with all the strength she can muster.

Her breath hitches as she watches, praying her wild idea will work.

Stoneheart catches Chat Noir in his massive left fist, squeezing him in a bone-crushing grip. Marinette barely has time to wince before she hurls herself toward the monster, wetsuit in hand, taunting him with words she barely hears herself speak.

Stoneheart catches her too, just as she planned, his enormous hand closing around her—but in that moment, something shifts.

The crumpled note he had been guarding so fiercely—a purple stone now—slips from his grasp, falling to the ground.

“Alya, now!” Marinette screams, her voice raw with urgency. The hiss of water fills the air as the wetsuit inflates, swelling with liquid and forcing Stoneheart’s hand open, releasing his iron grip.

Marinette, dizzy and drenched in cold sweat, scrambles toward the stone.

Her fingers wrap around it, but a surge of panic slams into her. I can’t break this, she remembers  with a jolt. Only Chat Noir can.

Her head snaps toward him, and she winces as she sees him thrown by Stoneheart, his body crashing against the ground like a ragdoll.

Apologies are already tumbling from her lips, words she doesn't have time to say, as she throws the stone to him. “Chat Noir!” she yells, her voice fraying at the edges.

He catches it, breathless, and with one decisive strike, his power shatters the object into pieces. The akuma, dark and malignant, flutters free, its black wings slicing through the air.

The battle ends as Ivan replaces Stoneheart’s crumbling form, confused, disoriented, his hands trembling as the last vestiges of the akuma’s control fade away.

Ladybug approaches him, the weight of the fight still pressing heavily on her chest, but there’s a flicker of pride now, a small sense of accomplishment warming the exhaustion in her bones.

She offers Ivan words of comfort, but her heart isn’t fully in it—she’s too overwhelmed by everything, too aware of the mantle now resting on her shoulders.

Alya, recording it all with a fierce gleam in her eye, and Marinette can’t help the wave of exasperation that crashes over her.

Alya asks for their names, her camera thrust forward, and Marinette swallows hard. “Ladybug,” she says, the name feeling foreign, heavy with expectation and history, as though it belongs to someone else entirely. She feels the mantle settle on her like a cloak woven from centuries of forgotten heroes, the weight unbearable.

Hours later, when she finally makes it home, the adrenaline leaves her in a flood, and her body collapses under the weight of exhaustion.

The bed swallows her whole, her limbs trembling, her mind reeling from the enormity of what she’s done. Relief mingles with guilt, twisting inside her until sleep overtakes her in a fitful wave.

The next day, Marinette wakes to a nightmare made real.

Breaking news flashes across the TV, the screen filled with reports of chaos in the city. Her heart stops as the camera zooms in on the streets, swarming with Stonehearts—an entire army of stone monsters wreaking havoc.

Her breath catches painfully in her chest, her vision blurring as the realisation sinks in like a blade to her gut. She didn’t purify the akuma—her mistake had multiplied it. Her failure had caused this.

Guilt crushes her like a weight too heavy to bear. “I can’t do this,” she whispers, her voice cracking under the pressure.

Tikki hovers nearby, her voice small but firm. “Marinette, it’s ok. You made a mistake but you can fix this.”

But Marinette shakes her head, her throat tight with guilt. “No, I’m done. I’m... I’m not Ladybug.

Tikki flutters in front of her, eyes wide with panic. “No! You are Ladybug! Please, don't give up!”

Her hands tremble as she removes the earrings, cutting off Tikki’s protests with a sharp finality.

The power, the legacy, feels like a death sentence hanging over her head. I’m not meant for this, she thinks bitterly. She’s not a hero. She’s just a girl.

Alya doesn’t answer her calls. School is canceled. The world is falling apart, and Marinette feels like the ground has opened beneath her, dragging her down into an endless abyss. Worthless. Broken. Lost.

Minuets slip by and she has to fix it. She can’t just walk away, not with the city falling apart because of her. So, with a sigh that feels like her last breath, she slips the earrings back on. The weight of the mantle presses against her once more, an ancient, suffocating burden.

“Just this once,” She tells Tikki who simply watches her all too knowing eyes.

She is a part of something much bigger than herself, a legacy of heroism and sacrifice, a lineage stained with suffering. She tells herself it’s temporary, that she’ll find someone else to carry this, but the words taste like an empty promise.

The transformation feels different this time—her suit more intricate, the magic more potent. As she swings through the city, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, the wind bites at her face, but it only makes her grip the yo-yo tighter. Her strength is greater, her resolve sharper, but the weight of her mistakes pulls at her like an anchor.

She meets Chat Noir, guilt still sticking to the back of her throat like tar, as they journey to the Eiffel Tower. The wind howls atop the Eiffel Tower, a fierce and untamed force, whipping against Marinette's face, biting into her skin with a cold sharpness that echoes the chaos below.

The city sprawls beneath her like a battlefield, the cacophony of sirens and screams merging with the dull roar of her own heart in her ears. Stoneheart’s towering form is a grotesque monument to her failure, his stone fists tight with rage, with hatred. And then there’s Chloé, falling—a blur of blonde hair and panicked eyes plummeting through the air like a comet.

For a moment, time halts, the world suspended in the terrifying silence of her hesitation. Her breath catches in her throat, her body frozen with the weight of fear, of inadequacy. But then, something ancient stirs in her—a pulse of magic, of destiny—and she moves.

Her yo-yo snaps out like lightning, cutting through the air as she dives, her body propelled by sheer instinct. The world rushes back in a chaotic blur as she catches Chloé, the impact sending a shudder through her bones.

Chloé’s terror radiates from her, palpable, clinging to Ladybug’s skin like a second layer, heavy and suffocating. The smell of sweat, of fear, hangs thick in the air between them.

As the ground approaches, she pulls them both up, her muscles straining, the cords of her yo-yo taut and trembling. The moment they land, Chloé crumbles, shaking, her breath ragged with fear, but Ladybug doesn’t have time to comfort her.

The world is unraveling, spiralling into madness.

The police are there, their guns trained on Stoneheart, their faces hardened with determination and mistrust. Roger Raincomprix steps forward, his voice sharp and condescending. "Step aside, kid. This isn’t your playground. Let the professionals handle it before you get someone else hurt.”

Doubt floods her—an icy wave crashing over the fragile dam of her confidence. The weight of every failure, every misstep, presses against her chest, threatening to crush her. What if they’re right? What if she’s just a girl playing dress-up in a legacy too vast for her to understand?

"We’ll take it from here," Roger said, his voice impatient now. "You’ve done enough.”

She took a shaky step back, her resolve faltering.

But then, a soft voice breaks through the din—Chat Noir. He’s beside her, his presence grounding her like an anchor in a storm even as he frowns at Roger, brows furrowed as irritation lines the planes of his face.

His words are simple but warm, like sunlight breaking through dark clouds. “Without you, Chloé wouldn’t be here right now,” he says, his eyes vivid with sincerity, the green burning bright against the chaos.

"You saved her," Chat continued, his voice warm and filled with a kind of quiet conviction. "And we're gonna save everyone else too.”

Ladybug hesitated, still unsure. "But what if—“

He interrupted, stepping closer, his gaze unwavering. "We were chosen for a reason, Ladybug. You and me. There’s no one else who can do this." He glanced toward the police, then back at her, his tone serious. "They don’t understand what we’re up against. You gotta fight magic with magic.”

She blinked, absorbing his words.

He smiled, but it wasn’t the cheeky grin he’d shown yesterday. This one was soft, encouraging. "We’re the only ones who can do it. That’s why we’re here, why you were chosen."

His belief in her is like a lifeline, pulling her out of the depths of her own self-doubt. She clings to it, drawing strength from the warmth in his voice, from the certainty in his gaze.

He believes in her, even when she doesn’t.

Before she can respond, a rumble shakes the air. Stoneheart coughs, and with a grotesque heave, he spits out a swarm of akumas. The air around them thickens with dark wings, the stench of something ancient and corrupt filling the space.

He appears, his face—a twisted mockery of authority—made of the writhing swarm. He says his name is HwakMoth, his voice slithering into the air, cold and commanding, “Do you think your little victories will hold meaning when the end comes? Do you think you can stave off the inevitable with a few clever tricks? Heroes... you are nothing but children pretending to wield power you can never truly understand.” His voice drops to a low, serpentine hiss, each word striking like a venomous lash. "You cannot stop me. You cannot win. Every battle you fight simply prolongs the suffering of those around you. How long will you let this city burn because of your stubbornness? How long until you fall beneath the weight of your failures?”

The city holds its breath. Marinette’s blood pounds in her veins, a dizzying pulse of anger, of defiance. She lifts her chin, staring into HawkMoth’s face with a fury that burns hotter than her fear. 

Because Chat Noir was right.

They were chosen for a reason.

She takes a step forward, her presence radiating defiance, she feels the battlecries of warriors standing against armies, the mantle bears heavy yet guides her for the very first time since putting on the earrings. ”We’re not just heroes because we fight you. We’re heroes because we choose to fight, because no matter how many times we fall, no matter how many doubts we have, we rise again." Her voice builds with each word, a crescendo of righteous fury. "Power isn’t in the weapons we wield or the victories we claim. It’s in our hearts. In our ability to keep going, no matter how many times you try to break us. It’s in the people we protect.“

She holds his gaze, unwavering. "You can’t reverse the roles, HawkMoth. We’re the heroes, and you... you’re nothing but a shadow clinging to a broken dream. You want our Miraculouses? Then come and try to take them." The yo-yo flashes in her hand, snapping through the air like a comet's tail. "But know this: as long as we stand, Paris will never be yours."

Her yo-yo flashes out, a crack of light and motion, slicing through the swarm and silencing HawkMoth’s grotesque visage. It’s a small victory, but it fills her with a fire she didn’t know she had, a strength that feels like it could ignite the very sky.

Stoneheart roars, his rage shaking the tower beneath their feet. He summons his army, and in an instant, they are surrounded. The stone monsters close in, their heavy footsteps vibrating through the steel, their breath like hot wind carrying the scent of destruction.

Marinette’s mind races, the weight of every life at stake pressing down on her, the heat of the battle searing her skin.

And then she sees her—a girl trembling in fear, perched precariously on the edge of the tower. Mylène. Stoneheart’s heart. Marinette’s plan forms in the space of a heartbeat, desperate and reckless.

She throws herself into action, her movements fluid but laced with urgency. Her yo-yo snaps out, pulling Mylène to her, and she wraps her in a protective embrace, whispering soft words of comfort, of strength. Mylène’s fear is obvious, her tears hot against Marinette’s skin, but she holds her tighter, grounding her, drawing her into the plan.

Her Lucky Charm appears—a parachute—and the irony isn’t lost on her, but there’s no time for doubt. She calls out to Chat Noir, their movements synchronised by something deeper than words.

Together, they bring Mylène and Stoneheart together, their kiss soft and hesitant, but powerful enough to break the hold of the akuma. As they fall, the world slows again, the air thick with the scent of stone and sweat, the sound of hearts beating in unison.

Chat Noir saves Ivan, his touch breaking the akumatized object, the dark magic dissolving into the air. Marinette catches Mylène, her heart still pounding, the parachute flying behind them as she throws her yoyo out, purifying light consumes the akuma, and it transforms into a white butterfly.

The city feels quieter now, the chaos retreating, leaving only the distant hum of life returning to normal. Her body feels like a battlefield, her mind a storm of guilt and relief, of triumph and regret. As Mylène reads Ivan’s song aloud, as they hug, Marinette watches, a smile touching her lips. 

“They’re made for each other, aren’t they?” she murmurs, her voice soft as the evening breeze.

Chat Noir’s reply drifts like a whisper, “Like us too,”

“Not in a million years, kitty.” A laugh escapes her lips, unbidden, airy, like the last breath of a dream before waking. 

He grins, unfazed. "You'll come around.”

The beep of her earrings cuts through the moment. With a sigh, she glances at him. “Time’s up.”

“Until next time, m’lady,” Chat Noir says, bowing dramatically.

With a quiet promise, she parts from him, the city stretching below like an endless sea of lights. As she soars, the thrill of victory still hums in her veins, though weariness begins to settle deep in her bones, gnawing at her like a distant echo.

She barely makes it home, collapsing onto her bed with the weight of exhaustion pressing her deeper into the mattress. Tikki curls around a pile of macarons, sweet and innocent, but Marinette’s mind is far from rest.

She’s obsessively scrolling through news reports, her eyes tracing every detail of the damage, every article about the destruction she couldn’t prevent. The guilt gnaws at her, festering like a wound that refuses to heal.

The smell of smoke clings to her skin, the memory of fire and chaos burned into her mind. Creation, she thinks bitterly, what good am I? They still died.

Her voice is barely a whisper, cracked and raw. “Tikki... Is there anything that can fix this? Something that can undo everything?”

Tikki hesitates, the air around her suddenly heavy, thick with the weight of something unspoken. Marinette catches it—that pause—and her heart lurches. She presses, her voice sharper now, desperate. The question hangs between them, dangerous, laden with the weight of a choice that feels inevitable.

She stands on the edge of something vast, something unknowable. The distant screams of past heroes, of lives lost, echo in the corners of her mind, and she can feel the phantom fire licking at her bound hands. Push, they whisper. Step into the fire.

Marinette’s breath catches in her throat. She knows, deep down, that the choice she makes now will change her life irrevocably. It will burn away everything she was, leaving only the ashes of what she will become.

And yet, with a trembling hand, she reaches out, ready to push.

The precipice stretches before her, a drop into eternity, and she leaps.

Adrien had never felt this alive. He paced back and forth in his room, his hands gesturing wildly, still buzzing with the adrenaline of his first transformation as Cat Noir. He couldn’t stop grinning, his words spilling out faster than his thoughts could catch up.

“I mean, I was really out there! No security guards, no schedules, no fences or locked gates! Just... just me, running on rooftops and jumping between buildings like it was nothing! I didn’t have to be perfect, I didn’t have to... to behave. I just got to be free!” He breathed deeply, almost as if he was taking in fresh air for the first time. "I don't think I've ever felt air like that before. Wow, it feels so nice just breathing for once!”

As Adrien continued talking, Plagg hovered lazily nearby, nibbling on a large chunk of camembert as his bright green eyes followed Adrien’s excited movements.

He watched as Adrien rambled on, pacing the length of his room, practically bouncing from wall to wall like an overenthusiastic puppy let off its leash for the first time.

“...and then I vaulted over this gap! It was huge! I mean, like, bigger than the length of a car! And the wind, it was just—oh, man—it was like nothing could touch me.”

Adrien kept talking, his voice a little too eager, the words coming out in rushed waves, as if he hadn’t spoken to anyone in days—maybe weeks.

There was an almost boyish innocence to the way he kept going, like a kid with too much to say, spilling every thought in his head all at once.

Plagg tilted his head, nibbling another piece of cheese. "Uh... kid?”

Adrien didn’t notice. He was still going. “I could’ve stayed out there forever, you know? Just running, moving, breathing. I didn’t have to look over my shoulder, or worry about being late for a photoshoot, or what my father would say. It was just me, Plagg. It felt—" Adrien paused, his voice catching slightly. “—real.”

Plagg floated closer, blinking lazily. Adrien's excitement was... endearing, but also a little sad. There was something off about the way he talked, the way he poured out his words like he hadn’t had anyone to listen in a long time.

Plagg finally cut in, more gently this time. "Kid... you gonna eat dinner or something?”

Adrien blinked, his excitement momentarily interrupted. “Dinner?” he echoed, as if the word was unfamiliar to him. Then he shook his head. “No, I’m not allowed. I’m on a strict diet.”

Plagg’s chewing slowed. The casual way Adrien said it, like it was a fact of life, made something cold settle in Plagg’s chest.

The kid’s face still wore that wide grin, but there was an edge to it now. The kind of edge that came from years of being told what to do, when to do it, and how to behave.

Plagg sighed deeply, floating down to eye-level with Adrien. "Strict diet, huh?”

“Yeah,” Adrien shrugged. “My dad has me on one. For modeling and stuff. I don’t usually eat after six.”

Plagg stared at him for a long moment, then slowly floated over to the hunk of cheese he’d been snacking on, holding it out toward Adrien. “Here,” he said, almost casually. “Have some cheese.”

Adrien blinked, looking at the offered cheese like it was an alien object. “I—I can’t. I mean, I’m not supposed to.”

Plagg waved the cheese at him, insistently. “Come on. One bite won’t kill you.”

Adrien hesitated, then took the smallest bite possible. He chewed slowly, unsure, and when Plagg glared he took another, slightly bigger bite.

Plagg watched him for a few seconds, chewing thoughtfully on his own cheese. “You know,” he grumbled, more to himself than to Adrien, “it’s always the kids. Why do so many people mess up their kids?”

Adrien blinked in confusion, still chewing. “What?”

“Nothing.” Plagg sighed again, this time more dramatically, floating back over to Adrien’s bed.

“Alright, kid. You’ve had your excitement for the night. Time for bed.”

Adrien frowned, baffled. “What? I’m not tired! I just—”

“Bed,” Plagg interrupted, crossing his tiny arms. “Trust me, you need it. And besides, I’m tired of hearing you talk about how great it was to breathe air.”

Adrien opened his mouth to protest but realised he didn’t actually know what else to say. And to his surprise, now that the rush was fading, he did feel a little tired.

Slowly, he sat down on the bed, still confused by Plagg’s sudden insistence.

Plagg floated above him, watching with a sigh. “Man, you’re like a puppy or something. Alright, alright, I’ll help you out.” He drifted down onto the bed beside Adrien, his tiny body settling into the pillow with an exaggerated stretch.

Adrien raised an eyebrow. “What are you doing?”

“Relaxing. You should try it sometime.”

Adrien chuckled awkwardly but didn’t argue. He pulled the covers over himself, the thrill of his night slowly giving way to the comforting weight of sleep.

But just before he closed his eyes, Plagg’s voice broke the silence.

“Wanna hear a story?”

Adrien blinked, surprised. “A... story?”

“Yeah, sure. Why not?” Plagg smirked, a mischievous glint in his eyes. “Ever heard about the time I accidentally destroyed the dinosaurs?”

Adrien’s eyes widened. “Wait, what?”

Plagg settled deeper into the pillow, smirking lazily. “Long time ago. I was playing around with this tiny little thing called Cataclysm, and uh... let’s just say, things got a little out of hand.”

Adrien couldn’t help but laugh, a light, genuine sound that he hadn’t made in what felt like years. “You’re joking, right?”

Plagg grinned. “Nope. I’m serious. Dinosaurs were overrated anyway.”

Adrien shook his head, a bemused smile growing on his face.

Plagg continued, his voice softer now. “So, there I was, causing a little chaos... and boom. Meteor showers. Not really my fault, you know. It was the fish cult’s fault.”

As Plagg rambled on about his ancient exploits, Adrien’s eyes grew heavier. The warmth of his bed, the soft drone of Plagg’s voice, and the lingering feeling of freedom from earlier in the night wrapped around him like a cocoon.

Before long, Adrien’s breathing slowed, and he drifted into a peaceful sleep.

Tikki’s voice is gentle, but the truth behind it thrums with the ancient force of creation, with the unbearable burden she must now carry. “It’s not just creating, Marinette,” Tikki says, her words trembling with an ache centuries old. “It’s about balance. It’s about sacrifice.” The world tilts, and Marinette’s head rings, the sound sharp like glass cracking, like a clock ticking down its final seconds.

She feels it then—the puzzle pieces of her life clicking into place with an almost cruel finality.

All her life, she had danced between luck and misfortune, a living contradiction, a girl who made miracles happen.

But what was the cost? The question is a storm inside her, the weight of it threatening to drown her as the air thickens, oppressive.

Tikki’s response comes in a whisper, but it feels like thunder in her chest. “You.” 

The word lingers in the space between them, hanging heavy like the last breath before the fall. Her heart pounds, each beat a hammer against her ribs, as if trying to escape the inevitable.

You. She is the price.

She casts the cure in spite of  Tikki’s  protests. 

She casts the cure with trembling hands, the magic surging through her like molten gold. Something in her screams, and from the depths of her being, a thousand voices scream back.

The light explodes around her, a billion shimmering ladybugs scattering into the wind, healing Paris, healing the damage.

But not her.

It’s a phantom pain at first, but it swells until it becomes real, visceral, her leg buckling beneath her as though it has been cleaved in two. She gasps, the sharp, metallic taste of blood on her tongue, though her skin remains unbroken. The world spins around her, cruel and indifferent, as her body betrays her, wracked with a pain that should not exist, but does.

Each breath is a struggle, the air thick with the scent of earth after rain, sharp and heavy, mixing with the coppery tang of her own pain. The world spins, a violent tilt that leaves her disoriented, her head pounding as though it’s been slammed against concrete. Her vision blurs; she’s caught between worlds, between life and something darker, colder.

Her skin ripples. The smooth, unmarked surface becomes a canvas of cuts and bruises, angry welts that burn as they appear. There’s a tightness in her abdomen, a coiling pain that feels like something inside her is ripping apart. She can’t scream—the air is gone from her lungs, her voice strangled by the crushing weight that presses down on her, relentless and merciless.

And then, the world goes dark. She feels it—her heart, a stuttering beat, slowing... stopping. Time collapses. She’s not sure if she’s alive or dead. There’s no breath, no sound, just an unbearable stillness as though the universe has forgotten her.

Her bones feel like they’re cracking under the pressure, her body folding in on itself as the pain grows unbearable, infinite. The sensation of glass shattering fills her ears, deafening, as if her very soul is fracturing.

Her ribs snap with a sickening crunch, her neck twisting in a way that it shouldn’t, and for a split second, she feels the snap—a sharp, brutal break, and then—

Her heart restarts. The pain comes crashing back, worse, sharper, more grotesque.

She feels herself die. Over and over. Heart stopping, starting, over and over. Did she die? Did she return? She’s trapped in a loop of torment, her body giving out and reviving in the same breath, torn between life and death, both and neither.

And still, through the unbearable agony, through the thousand deaths she’s lived in these seconds, she knows—this is the cost.

This is the price for creation, for healing the world. The universe demands balance, and it’s taking her, piece by piece.

She lies there, a broken thing, her body screaming in ways it never has before, in ways it should never have to.

There’s a stillness now, but inside her, something is irrevocably shattered. She knows she should move, she has to move, but her limbs are heavy, leaden, unresponsive.

She de-transforms, Tikki collapses on her cheek, a small heap of light and warmth against her cheek, but even that comfort feels distant, blurred, like the edges of a world no longer hers.

Marinette’s vision swims, the colours of the city bleeding together into a watercolour haze, every sharp line and familiar shape dissolving in the rising fog of her agony.

Tikki’s voice reaches her, but it is faint, a murmur lost in the storm raging within her. The words blur, slip through her fingers like water.

She tries to focus, tries to grasp onto something—anything—but the pain swallows everything. It is a living thing, crawling through her veins, gnawing at her bones, a fire that burns without flame.

Her throat is raw, burning with the effort to keep from screaming, but the scream is there, clawing at the back of her mind, threatening to tear her apart. She stays there, unmoving, because the very idea of rising feels impossible.

Every step is agony as she forces herself to stand, to leave the rooftop. Her muscles scream, and every breath is jagged, tearing through her chest like shards of glass. She stumbles down from the balcony, nearly falling down the stair.

She finds her parents lost in the rush of the bakery, the clang of pans and the steady hum of voices filling the space. Her mother’s kiss is featherlight, absentminded, a brush of warmth against her cheek that fades too quickly. 

Marinette’s voice cracks when she tells them, “I fell really bad.” She takes the card for the doctor, nodding like it matters, like anything could fix what’s wrong.

Her father’s voice is a faint echo, lost in the haze of her thoughts. “Be careful, sweetheart. Don’t overdo it.” His words are kind. Marinette doesn’t feel comforted.

The journey to the hospital stretches endlessly before her. he drags her body forward, her muscles stiff and unyielding, each movement a new form of torment.

The pain flares hot and sharp in her leg, and her ribs scream with every breath she takes, as though they’re splintering deeper into her flesh.

Her head throbs, a heavy, pulsing ache that drowns out everything else. It feels like she’s trapped in a dream, floating, drifting—but there is no comfort here, only the sickening sense that she’s sinking, sinking deeper into something she cannot escape.

The world spins and tilts, nausea rising like bile in her throat. She retches on the sidewalk, her stomach lurching as she bends forward, the acid burning her throat as it escapes.

The acid burns, scorching her nose and mouth, the taste sour and bitter, clinging to her tongue as she wipes at her lips with a trembling hand. The world spins, and for a moment, she thinks she might collapse right there, on the cold, uncaring concrete.

But she doesn't. She presses on, though the weight of the city feels like it’s crushing her beneath it, pressing her deeper into the earth with every step.

Its familiar kind of miserable, and for a moment she thinks she’s seven, retching into a porcelain sink alone and feverish but she’s not seven.

She’s fifteen, taking on the pain and deaths of many, paying a price even as she felt haunted by the scales of balance throughout her entire life.

At the hospital, they ask questions she can’t answer. The nurse’s voice is soft, gentle, but Marinette can’t focus on the words. The scans show what she already knows—broken ribs, bruised organs, a body wrecked by accidents that never happened.

“Were you hit by something heavy?” the doctor asks, his frown deepening as he looks over her injuries. She avoids his eyes, her fingers clenched tight in the hospital sheets.

She lies to them. Tells them she fell. Tells them she’s clumsy. Tells them anything but the truth. Because she cannot tell them the truth.

The night is long and silent. The sterile white ceiling above her is blank, cold, and unfeeling. Her leg, encased in a stiff brace, throbs with a steady, dull ache, but it’s nothing compared to the hollow agony in her chest.

Her ribs, wrapped tightly, feel like a cage that’s both containing her and suffocating her all at once. Every breath is a war, shallow and ragged, her lungs straining against the bandages, against the weight of the world pressing down on her. The painkillers dull the edges, but the grief—the grief—seeps through.

The beeping of the machines is the only sound, a rhythmic reminder that her heart still beats, though it feels like it shouldn’t. Her parents don’t visit, they think it’s minor, just a fall. Just a clumsy girl. She’s alone.

Her tears come, slow and silent at first, but they gather force like a storm. They burn hot tracks down her cheeks, mingling with the salt of her skin and the bitter taste of helplessness that coats her tongue.

She bites down on her lip until the coppery tang of blood mixes with the tears. She wants to scream, to let the pain rip out of her throat like a feral beast, but her body is too broken, too tired. The scream stays trapped inside her, clawing at her ribs.

When the hospital finally quiets, when the hum of life fades into the background, Tikki emerges. She’s small, delicate, a weight on Marinette’s chest that feels both comforting and unbearably heavy.

“I’m sorry,” Marinette whispers, her voice cracked and raw. The tears come, hot and endless, spilling over her bruised cheeks, staining the rough pillows beneath her. “I didn’t know it would be this hard.”

Tikki says nothing. She presses her small head against Marinette’s tear-streaked cheek, her silence louder than any words could be.

Marinette knows, in the deepest parts of herself, that Tikki has seen this before—seen heroes break under the weight of their own power, seen them crumble and bleed for a world that doesn’t even know their name. 

The tears come faster now, pouring out of her like a flood, an unstoppable torrent of grief, pain, and fear. Her body trembles with the force of it, the sobs wracking her frail frame until the ache in her ribs is unbearable.

She cries for what she will face, for the weight of the city on her shoulders. She cries for the price of creation, the price she now knows is her.

Marinette dreams that night, standing in a field of fallen heroes, their bodies scattered like broken dolls, their faces twisted in agony. Flames lick at their corpses, devouring them, turning them to ash.

She can feel the heat of the fire against her skin, but it doesn’t warm her—it chills her to the bone. The heroes' faces blur, but she knows—she knows—that one day, she will join them. Her body will lie among theirs. She will burn, and the world will forget her, just as it forgot them.

Her future is written in fire and ash.

Tikki watches her with sad, knowing eyes. “You won’t die like that,” Tikki says softly, but the words feel hollow, empty. Marinette knows the truth now—the cost of creation is too high, too heavy, and it will consume her, one way or another.

The hospital room is still, but the weight of her destiny presses down on her like a suffocating fog. She closes her eyes and lets the tears fall again, because she doesn’t know what else to do. This is the cycle of creation and destruction, of life and death.

In the sterile quiet of the hospital, Marinette dreams of dying.

Chapter Text

Marinette clings to the suit like a lifeline, the black and red fabric a second skin, binding her broken body together. It pushes her body to repair itself, knitting bones, sealing cuts, soothing burns—all at a pace far beyond what is humanly possible.

Hours stretch into an eternity beneath the veil of night, Paris a silent witness to her fragile rebirth.

Transformed, she feels the weight of her injuries dissolve into the background—like a distant echo of a scream, still there but far enough to be ignored.

The stabbing agony in her body fades to a dull throb, and the tightness in her chest, that unbearable constriction, loosens ever so slightly. The pain remains, but it is a ghost, haunting her body but not possessing it.

When Marinette asks when Hawkmoth might attack again, Tikki explains, one evening, her eyes, round and full of quiet wisdom, glisten with empathy as she speaks.

“The rebound,” Tikki begins gently, “from breaking the champion’s connection to their object and purifying it—it creates a backlash. The energy it takes to purify an Akuma isn’t just ours. It’s shared. When we sever the connection, Hawkmoth feels it too.”

Her breath, shallow and hesitant, feels different in the suit—controlled, even though the ache still clings to her bones like a shadow.

The cool night air rushes past her as she moves, whispering against her skin, and for a moment, she feels alive in a way she hasn't since the battle.

She can work with this.

The city beneath her glows softly, a maze of cobblestone streets and ancient rooftops bathed in moonlight, but it is no longer the Paris of her childhood.

Now, it is a hunting ground, a battlefield, where shadows creep at every corner, and her every step is laced with fear.

She moves cautiously, silently, her feet skimming over the rooftops, the light click of her yo-yo the only sound as she grips it tightly. The familiar scent of stone and rain-soaked earth fills her senses, grounding her in the darkness.

Her eyes are wide, darting nervously, like a cornered animal waiting for the inevitable strike. Every flicker of a distant shadow, every rustle of the wind sends a jolt of panic through her heart, tightening her throat.

She glances over her shoulder, half-expecting Hawk Moth’s unseen hand to reach out from the darkness and drag her down. Her fear is cavernous beast, whispering that she is not ready for this—not yet, not ever.

But still, she presses forward, because there is no other choice.

The streets are empty below, an eerie quiet hanging in the air as the city sleeps. But Marinette is awake, her heart pounding in time with her footsteps as she moves from rooftop to rooftop, her hands trembling slightly on her yo-yo.

She’s clumsy at first—nearly tripping over her own feet, misjudging the distance between buildings. She stumbles, her breath catching in her throat, her fingers clutching the yo-yo with a white-knuckled grip.

But she forces herself to keep going, even when her legs feel shaky, even when the panic threatens to pull her under.

Her movements slowly become smoother, her body adjusting to the rhythm of the suit, to the flow of the city beneath her.

She lets herself trust the yo-yo, lets the tension in her shoulders melt away as she releases it, watching as it swings and catches, pulling her forward.

She feels the rush of the wind against her face, cool and sharp, and for a moment, she’s weightless—soaring above the world, the rooftops a blur beneath her. Her heart races, but not from fear this time.

It’s the thrill of flight, of freedom, of a fleeting moment where she is not just surviving—she is alive.

The phantom pain lingers at the edges of her awareness, but it no longer consumes her. It is just another sensation now, one she can tuck away as she focuses on the task ahead.

Her fingers work deftly, flicking her yo-yo through the air, testing its weight, exploring its functions. It becomes an extension of herself—her only weapon, her only shield.

She twirls it in the air, the string a line in the darkness, and with every flick of her wrist, she starts to understand its power. 

There is a moment—just before dawn, when the sky is painted in shades of deep blue and violet—that she stands on the edge of a rooftop and looks down at the city below.

Her breath comes in short, shallow bursts, her heart pounding in her chest, but for the first time in what feels like forever, she doesn’t feel afraid.

She feels powerful.

The suit hums against her skin, the magic thrumming in her veins. She is Ladybug. And though the weight of that mantle is suffocating, though the burden threatens to crush her every time she wears it, she knows she cannot take it off.

Not now, not ever. Not when she is one of the few who can cast the cure. 

On the far side of Paris, Adrien stands in his father’s office, his porcelain face betraying no cracks, yet something beneath it trembles.

His posture, always so immaculate, like a statue sculpted for public adoration. Gabriel’s presence is unyielding, his eyes as lifeless as winter frost, boring into Adrien’s soul with the cruelty of silence.

It had taken all of Adrien’s courage to force his way into this space—this fortress of white walls and marble floors, where nothing seemed to breathe. Plagg shifts slightly in Adrien’s shirt pocket, careful not to make any noise, but Adrien feels the small nudge and it steadies him.

The office smells faintly of polished wood and leather, overlaid with the bitter scent of his father’s cologne, and for the first time in what feels like forever, Adrien’s voice breaks the stillness that clings to the room like a shroud.

His words come out soft but steady, pushing through the tension that suffocates the air. "Father, I’ve been thinking… I—I want to go to school.”

Gabriel’s hand pauses mid-reach over a design, but he doesn’t look up right away. The silence stretches painfully, like a taut string ready to snap. When Gabriel finally lifts his gaze, his eyes are as cold and unreadable as polished stone.

“School?” Gabriel says, his face impassive, with thinly veiled contempt.

Adrien clasps his hands behind his back, his fingers digging into his palms. “Yes. It’s—it’s important for me to be around other people my age. I know my responsibilities here, but school… it could help me. I need to feel—“

He hesitates, the words tasting unfamiliar on his tongue. "—more grounded. I want to have a life outside of photoshoots and lessons.” There’s a gentle pressure from within his shirt, a small nuzzle from Plagg.

Gabriel leans back slightly, his fingers lacing together, his expression carefully controlled. He studies Adrien, the kind that makes Adrien’s skin itch with a need to run, to escape this crushing weight of disapproval.

“Grounded?" The word is like a razor’s edge, cutting through Adrien’s carefully chosen reasoning.

A faint, humourless smile pulls at the corner of Gabriel’s mouth, but there’s no warmth in it. Adrien straightens his posture, his pulse quickening.

"Grounded in what? You are already grounded, Adrien—in reality. In responsibility. Your place is here, focused on your future. Not wasting time on childish distractions like school.”

Adrien’s chest tightens, his throat dry, but he stands firm. He’s been preparing for this conversation for weeks, rehearsing every word in his mind.

"Father, I’m not asking to abandon anything. I’ll still do everything you need me to do here. But school—it could help me connect with my fans. They’re all kids my age. They go to school, they have friends, they live normal lives… I don’t know how to relate to them when I’ve never had that. I don’t… feel normal.” He says, a plea laced with desperation.

Gabriel’s expression darkens the moment the word “normal” slips out of Adrien’s mouth. His hands slowly lower to his desk, his eyes narrowing. When he speaks again, his voice is low, measured, but it’s laced with a quiet intensity that sends a chill down Adrien’s spine.

"Normal? You think being ‘normal’ will make you better?”

He rises from his chair with a slow, deliberate motion, his towering figure casting a long shadow across the room.

Adrien instinctively takes a small step back, but catches himself, forcing his feet to stay planted. Gabriel walks around the desk, stopping just in front of Adrien.

"I didn’t sacrifice everything so you could blend into the crowd, unnoticed, unremarkable. I didn’t raise you to be like everyone else.”

Adrien swallows hard, his heart thudding in his chest. He feels his resolve slipping, but he can’t stop now.

He lifts his chin slightly, his voice quieter now, but there’s a tremor of defiance beneath the surface. "No, but you didn’t raise me to be invisible either. I want to live, Father. Not just exist in this… this cage.”

Gabriel’s eyes flash with something—anger, perhaps, or cold fury—but he doesn’t raise his voice.

Instead, he leans in closer, his face inches from Adrien’s. His tone, soft but menacing, is worse than shouting. “You think this is a cage?”

Adrien’s breath catches in his throat. He’s struck by how quiet the room has become, as though even the air itself is afraid to move. Plagg, tucked safely against his heart, gives a small reassuring tap even as he vibrates with rage.

When Adrien speaks, his voice breaks just the slightest, “Everything I do is controlled. Every move I make, every word I say—it’s all monitored, for you, for the brand. I just need… a little more room to breathe.”

Gabriel’s face remains impassive, but the temperature in the room seems to drop. He straightens up, folding his arms across his chest, his gaze fixed on Adrien like a hawk watching its prey.

"You need to breathe? You think that being out there, with those people, will set you free? You are mine, Adrien. Your life is tied to this family. To this brand. You don’t get to play with ‘normal.’”

Adrien bites the inside of his cheek, trying to hold back the rising frustration. He knew this would be hard, but he didn’t expect it to feel so suffocating.

"Father, I need to be part of the real world if I’m going to represent it. How am I supposed to be the face of the Agreste brand if I don’t understand the people I’m supposed to reach? How am I supposed to be strong if I’m never given the chance to stand on my own?”

Gabriel’s jaw tightens, the lines on his face hardening. There’s a long pause, and for a moment, Adrien wonders if he’s pushed too far.

But Gabriel doesn’t explode. Instead, his voice becomes eerily calm, calculated. "You want to go to school, Adrien? Fine.”

Adrien blinks, caught off guard. His relief is brief, as Gabriel steps even closer, his voice lowering to a deadly whisper. "But understand this—it’s not freedom. It’s a test. And if you fail, if you get distracted, if I see any sign of weakness, it will end. Immediately.”

"I understand.”

Gabriel’s eyes bore into him for another long, suffocating moment. Then, as though the conversation is beneath him now, Gabriel turns his back and walks toward his desk.

"Nathalie will make the arrangements. But remember this, Adrien—everything you do reflects on me. On this family. Don’t make me regret this decision.”

Adrien stands frozen for a second, the weight of Gabriel’s words settling heavily on his shoulders. "I won’t.”

Gabriel doesn’t acknowledge the response. He’s already dismissed him, his attention back on the work in front of him. Adrien turns toward the door and leaves, his steps heavy but measured.

As soon as the door clicks shut behind him, Adrien slouches against the wall outside, feeling the rush of pent-up tension finally release. Plagg slips out of his shirt pocket, hovering near his shoulder.

"That was rough, huh?”

Adrien lets out a shaky breath, his hand coming up to rub his eyes.

"It always is.”

Plagg floats closer, his small face filled with concern as he nudges Adrien’s cheek gently, softly purring.

That night, Adrien lies awake, the ghost of his father’s voice still curling around his throat like a noose. The cold from his father’s office lingers, sinking into his bones, wrapping around his chest until his breath feels shallow. Plagg snores against his pillow and he feels strangely comforted by it.

He has Chat noir. It will be fine.

The next day, Paris feels lighter under the morning sun, though it doesn’t touch the heaviness Adrien carries. He arrives at school with a smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes, his stride quick and careful.

The chatter of classmates, the gleam of backpacks hanging loosely over slouched shoulders—it’s all unfamiliar, like stepping into a dream that doesn’t quite fit.

His clothes, crisp and tailored, his hair perfectly arranged—everything about him is flawless, yet he feels like a misplaced ornament in this chaotic world of laughter and unpolished joy.

The school hallway is alive with the sound of sneakers squeaking against linoleum, the crinkling of papers, and the light scent of soap and teenage sweat.

He wants to melt into it, to let go of the cold perfection that defines his every breath.

But no matter how much he smiles, how kind his words are, there’s always a gap—a distance he can’t seem to cross. He moves like a prince among his peers, distant, untouchable.

“Adrien! Over here!” Chloé’s voice cuts through the noise, shrill and possessive, her hand clasping onto his arm with the kind of entitlement that makes his stomach tighten. Her perfume is overwhelming, sweet and cloying, and her constant hovering only makes the other students retreat further from him.

Adrien Agreste, the golden boy, but never just Adrien. He doesn’t belong here, doesn’t fit into the rhythm of normal life. He is admired, but he is alone.

And then there’s Nino. Casual, relaxed Nino, with his cap slung backwards, a grin on his face that feels like sunshine after a storm. His presence is warm, easy. He doesn’t expect anything from Adrien—no performances, no perfection.

He just exists, sitting beside him with a kind of laid-back patience, tapping his fingers rhythmically on the desk as if time and space were his to command.

“Hey, dude,” Nino says, his voice laced with genuine friendliness, pulling Adrien from the icy shell he’s wrapped himself in. “First day? Huh, You nervous?” Adrien blinks, surprised by the friendliness.

“Uh…yes.” Adrien’s response is awkward, stilted—words that are too formal, too rehearsed. “I haven’t... been to school before, I was homeschooled growing up.”

But Nino doesn’t seem to mind. He asks about music, about games, about life in a way that doesn’t feel like an interrogation.

His laughter is infectious, bright, and for a moment, Adrien feels it sink into his skin, thawing the coldness that clings to him like a second skin.

There’s a pause—a beat—and then Adrien says something about liking music, about wanting to try more things.

His words are slow, unsure, but Nino nods, leaning back in his chair as if this is the most normal conversation in the world. And maybe, in this moment, it is. 

Marinette sat on the other side of the classroom, a ghost breathing in her place. Every breath felt wrong, shallow and tight, as if her ribs were still crushed beneath the phantom pressure of a brutal grip.

She couldn’t forget the sensation—the snapping of her neck, the suffocating collapse of her lungs as her bones cracked like brittle twigs.

The world around her was a blur, colours too bright, sounds too sharp. The chatter of her classmates felt distant, as if filtered through water, their laughter an unsettling contrast to the torment swirling inside her.

She remembers the spirit of that red-armoured girl, the one that haunted her childhood, burning—flames licking at her skin, consuming her like a funeral pyre.

She had saved Paris, but the cost still throbbed in her chest. Her heartbeat felt out of sync with the world around her. It was too fast, too fragile, a metronome ticking toward some unseen end. Alya’s voice cut through the fog, soft and concerned.

“Marinette, you don’t look well. I think you should go home.” Alya’s words, warm with care.

She couldn’t explain it, couldn’t find the words to say how her body still ached, not just from the bruises and fractures hidden beneath her clothes. How could she admit to her best friend that she had died?

“I’m fine,” Marinette lied, her voice too steady, too rehearsed. She smiled, the kind of smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes, a mask so well-practiced it felt like part of her skin.

Alya frowned but didn’t push further, though her eyes lingered with unspoken concern.

The school day dragged on in a haze. Teachers spoke, but the words never landed. The classroom was filled with the scent of chalk dust and old books.

Marinette's hands trembled beneath her desk, her knuckles pale and taut as she clenched her fists to keep from shaking. Her chest still felt wrong, too tight, as if the ghost of that crushing weight still pressed against her.

When the bell rang, signalling the end of the day, Marinette stayed behind. The room emptied, but she lingered, staring blankly at the chalkboard as if it could offer her some kind of escape.

Alya hesitated at the door, her brow furrowed with worry. “I can wait for you,” she offered, but Marinette shook her head.

Marinette barely registered her surroundings as she left for her club meeting, the words of her classmates slipping out of one ear.

She went on autopilot, her mind clouded, drifting through the motions without really being there. Tikki pressed gently against her bag, a warmth that anchored her, small but comforting.

Outside, the sky had darkened, thick with swollen clouds, and rain fell in heavy sheets. It smelled like earth and pavement, the familiar scent of a Parisian storm. The cold air bit at Marinette’s skin, a welcome distraction from the burning in her chest.

As she stared at the rain, unsure of what to do without an umbrella, she spotted Adrien standing under the school’s overhang, waiting for his driver.

He noticed her too. There was a brief moment of hesitation, but then, he approached. His steps were careful, as if unsure whether to intrude.

“Marinette, right?” he said, stepping closer. His voice was soft, careful. “You’re going to catch a cold. Let me walk you home.”

She hesitated, her instinct to refuse bubbling up, but her body betrayed her, too tired to argue. The rain was making her shiver violently now, and she wasn’t sure if she could make it home on her own.

“Sure... thanks,” she replied, stepping under the umbrella beside him. He beamed, as though she offered him his greatest wish.

They walked in silence, the only sound the rhythmic patter of rain against the umbrella and the occasional splash of their shoes on wet pavement.

The world around them smelled of rain-soaked stone and damp earth, the air cool and crisp in her lungs.

Adrien’s presence was calming, in that moment, he didn’t seem untouchable. He was just… a boy. His steps were unsure, his words halting, but there was kindness in his every action, a tenderness that made Marinette look at him differently.

She glanced at him from the corner of her eye, catching the way his brow furrowed in concentration as he tried to hold the umbrella steady over her.

By the time they reached her doorstep, the rain had lightened to a soft drizzle, the sky above them a blanket of dark grey. Marinette paused, turning to face Adrien.

She was exhausted and still aching in places she couldn’t name, but for the first time since the battle, she felt… comforted.

“Thank you,” she whispered, her voice small but sincere.

Adrien smiled, a real, gentle smile that softened the sharpness of his perfect features. “Anytime,” he said, and there was a warmth in his voice that made Marinette’s heart flutter, just for a moment.

As she watched him walk away, the umbrella bobbing slightly with each step, Marinette thought to herself, Maybe he’s not that bad after all.

Marinette wakes, the dawn spilling in like a wound cut open, bleeding light too harsh for the tender haze of her mind.

Already, the day tastes of iron and ash, a bitter promise that she knows all too well. Her eyelids are heavy, swollen with the residue of a dream that clings like cobwebs to her soul.

A girl—brave, oh so brave—draped in crimson armour, standing before an inferno that screamed of annihilation. The fire kissed her skin, licked at her with ravenous tongues, but still, she did not scream. 

And Marinette feels it—that heat, sharp and biting, a phantom searing its claws across her ribs, as if the dream had crawled inside her chest and left marks that won't heal.

Was it the dream, or was it the bruise?

Her ribs still ache, a dull throb that pulses with every breath, every beat of her heart, as if something is gnawing at her from the inside out.

She pulls herself from the bed, the sheets tangled around her legs like chains, she  made her usual descent—only to misjudge the step, her body tipping forward. 

Her hand shoots out, grasping the edge of the bed with a desperation that speaks of repetition—a reflex carved into her bones like an ancient inscription.

Her alarm mocks her again with its silence. It didn’t ring—of course it didn’t—and time is already slipping through her fingers like sand, gritty and coarse, impossible to grasp.

She stumbles forward, swift-footed yet clumsy, as if the very floor beneath her conspires against her. The black cat slithers between her legs, invisible yet felt, its claws catching at her ankles with each step.

Her balance wavers, her heart lurches in her chest as she nearly tumbles headlong down the ladder, saved only by that same desperate grip—clawing, always clawing.

Outside, the air smells faintly of rain, though the sky is bright and sunlit—another promise unkept. She rushes into the streets, the pulse of the city an erratic heartbeat in her ears, her breath short, chest tight.

The ground is slick with shadows, and her feet slip on them, barely catching herself before the world tilts again.

The screech of tires, the low growl of a car inches from her skin. Her body jerks back, breath a knife in her throat as the vehicle howls past.

Her mouth tastes of metal, the day is still young, and already it devours her.

When Marinette arrives finally at class, the weight of the day already clings to her like wet fabric. She reaches into her bag, pulling out her homework, only to find it ruined—smeared ink, pages crumpled as if they had been gnawed at by invisible teeth. 

She had expected this, she checks again to make sure— yes, the backup is on her tablet. At lunch, she hurries to the library, each step a frantic plea for reprieve, but the world has already decided to unravel at her feet.

The printer sputters and dies, spitting out only blank sheets where her efforts should have been. Her hands tighten into fists, knuckles pale as her breath falls in shallow gasps.

It's not just frustration—it’s a simmering rage, an ancient anger, one that claws up her throat like a tidal wave.

She’s adrift, lost in the wine-dark ocean of her own cursed life. Tikki peeks from her purse, small and worried, her eyes reflecting the same despair Marinette feels.

The thought dawns on her again, today is a bad day. When school ends, sky rumbles, a low growl in the heavens that contradicts the clear skies promised not long ago.

Thunder rolls like a cosmic judgment, as though the universe itself has turned its gaze on her, scowling with disdain. It always knows when to strike—when to unravel her day thread by thread.

Her phone dies in her hand, the battery drained in an instant despite the full charge just hours before. The screen flickers and fades, a black void staring back at her, and with it, the last of her patience crumbles to dust.

The crux of the matter is this: Marinette has known since childhood that she is cursed. The universe does not simply dislike her—it hates her. She has felt it in every misstep, every accident, every tiny betrayal of fate.

She was never meant to exist, an unplanned arrival in a world that did not have room for her. She was born in a time of hardship, when the bakery struggled to rise.

She’s always known, deep in the marrow of her bones, that her existence is a wound the universe is trying to heal by casting her out, by pushing her down, by erasing her.

By the time she returns to her room, the sky has opened up, drenching her in rain that feels more like tears.

She stands there, soaked to the skin, her clothes clinging to her like the weight of the ocean itself. She is a drowned thing, her body heavy, sagging under the relentless pressure of her cursed fate.

With slow, numb fingers, she peels off her soaked clothes, skin cold and clammy like sea sponges that had soaked in the sorrow of the day.

Her bandages are a mess, the bruises beneath them aching with a dull, persistent throb. She forces herself to rewrap them, her fingers fumbling, clumsy with exhaustion.

The rough texture of the bandages scrapes against her raw skin, but she doesn’t wince. She’s beyond feeling, beyond caring. Yes, today was a bad day.

The night clings to him like a second skin—Chat Noir, a phantom slinking between rooftops, barely more than a ripple in the veil of shadows.

The moon, pale and trembling, watches his every movement.  His feet glide over the cold stone, not quite touching, not quite earthbound.

There is a wild abandon in his limbs, a recklessness that pulses beneath his skin, a predator’s rhythm humming in his bones.

In these hours, when the world sleeps but the dark keeps its secrets close, he becomes something more than human, more than flesh and bone.

He is the shadow between breaths, the whisper before dawn.

His acid-green eyes cut through the ink of the night, sharp and bright as a cat’s gaze, seeing into corners even the stars fear to touch.

Every sound, every distant footstep, every rustle of wind against tattered alleyways, hums louder in his ears than his own heartbeat.

Freedom, raw and intoxicating, surges through his veins, the weight of his daytime self forgotten—an echo lost to the darkness.

But then, there is a shift—a tremor in the quiet. A sound, soft but wrong. His heightened senses catch it, a whimper carried on the breeze like a fractured note in a broken melody.

His muscles tense, instinct taking over, and he moves, fluid and swift, not a man but a living night. He drops into the alley, where the air itself seems to choke under the weight of decay.

The stench of dampness and acrid rot rises from the mouldy dumpsters, a sour breath that clings to his lungs. The walls press in tight, wet with cold sweat. The space is too small for what it holds—too small for the violence that coils there.

The girl is young—too young for the terror that stains her eyes, too young for the bruises fear has left under her skin. She sits hunched, her breath coming in shallow bursts, every inhale tainted by the stale air of the alley.

Her hands tremble against the rough ground, nails digging into the grime like they might find some escape buried beneath the dirt.

But there is none. Her eyes flicker, wide, searching, drowning.

The man looms above her, his shadow distorting against the alley walls like some grotesque beast, heavy and bloated.

His hand grips her jeans, fingers digging into the denim with sickening intent, his other hand gleaming with the dull edge of a knife. His breath is thick with something foul, rancid.

Chat Noir’s gaze locks on the man, and in that moment, he is no longer a figure hidden in shadow. A predator’s snarl coils deep within him, hot and primal, and his body responds with a sharp, fluid grace.

There is no thought, no plan—only the cold, raw instinct that takes over, pushing him forward like the inevitability of a falling blade. His movements are too fast to be seen, too silent to be heard.

He becomes a ripple of night, less human and more feline, more shadow than form. His body bends and twists with unnatural agility, a blur of sleek muscle and intent.

The knife in the man’s hand flashes, but it is already too late—Chat Noir is upon him, a storm made flesh.

His foot lashes out, not with precision but with desperation, a kick driven by something darker than instinct. The moment the man crumples to the ground, it feels like the world has cracked open, and something vile spills out.

The man falls in a way that shouldn’t make sense, his body twisted, the sound of bone meeting stone ringing out in a hollow thud that vibrates in Adrien’s skull.

There’s a flicker—a black wisp of something—magic, darkness, fate itself perhaps, curling around the man’s body, pulling him into its cold embrace.

The walls seem to sigh, the dumpsters groan under the weight of a violence they have witnessed too many times before. The smell of rot and mildew clings to his nostrils, the damp earth beneath his boots squelching like the breath of some unseen beast.

Behind him, the girl’s sobs cut through the night like a knife, jagged and raw. They shatter the brief silence, splintering against his eardrums, and he winces as if struck.

But his attention is elsewhere—his mind fixates on the man at his feet, on the unnatural fall, the impossible way his body collapsed under the weight of nothing at all. How?

He should check on the girl, comfort her, but instead, he stands rooted, staring at the unmoving form, his mind gnawing on the impossible.

Finally, he turns, his gaze falling on the girl. She is trembling, a fragile thing in the dark, her face streaked with dirt and tears, her body a small, crumpled silhouette against the looming walls.

He walks her home, makes silly jokes until she laughs. Until the brittleness of her eyes fades into something much lighter.

He makes her promise to never go out this late at night and she does so readily, waving goodbye with a slight brightness that wasn’t there.

Adrien can feel the weight of the city beneath his feet—the ancient bones of Paris, the catacombs yawning open like the mouth of some beast, hungry and endless.

He wonders what ghosts haunt this part of the city.

He glances at the girl as she disappears into the shadows, her small figure swallowed by the city’s guts. He knows, as he turns to leave, that he will come back. Not to her, specifically, but to these alleys, to these streets.

When he finally gets home, the quiet presses in around him like the weight of the night itself.

The mansion feels cold, too large, too hollow, as though every room swallows sound and emotion alike, leaving nothing but stillness.

Plagg, as usual, floats nearby, nibbling on a piece of cheese, though he watches Adrien with an uncharacteristic seriousness in his ancient eyes.

Adrien collapses onto the edge of his bed, head hanging low, trying to make sense of the strange mix of emotions twisting inside him. Guilt, frustration, accomplishment, a strange sense of wonder..

Adrien’s thoughts flicker back to the alleyway, to the moment the man fell, the way the knife tumbled unnaturally from his grasp, and the eerie shadow that had seemed to wrap itself around the man’s body like something alive. A dark tendril of something... other.

“Plagg,” Adrien says, his voice quieter now, but sharper, more focused. “That thing that happened in the alley, when the man fell... That wasn’t just a coincidence, was it?”

Plagg’s eyes glint with a knowing, mischievous light. “Ahh, so you noticed, huh?” 

Adrien nods, the memory still fresh, vivid in his mind.

Plagg grins, his sharp teeth glinting in the dim light of the room. “That, my dear kitten, is a lesser form of misfortune. Didn’t think you’d tap into that so soon, but... well, guess the night had other plans.”

Adrien’s heart skips a beat. “Misfortune? You mean I... caused it?”

Plagg nods, hovering closer, his small form casting a long shadow against the wall. “It’s not exactly something you can control—at least, not yet. It’s just a little nudge. You can create bad luck for others.”

“Does it... happen often?” Adrien asks, eyes wide.

Plagg shrugs, floating lazily. “Depends on you. The more you understand your power, the more control you’ll have over it. But misfortune is tricky—it’s not always clean, and it doesn’t always feel right. Sometimes it helps, sometimes... well, it can leave a mess behind.”

He glances at Adrien with a knowing look. “You’re learning, kid.”

Adrien lies awake that night, a quiet promise carved into his heart—from that night on, Adrien becomes a creature of the dark.

Patrolling the alleyways, slipping through the streets of Paris under the weight of the moon’s cold gaze.

Days had passed, but for Marinette, it felt as though time crawled slowly, each hour heavier than the last. Her legs were better now, less like stone pillars weighing her down, though the ache still lingered—a dull, familiar throb beneath her skin. 

The pain worsened with her attempts to learn self-defense through videos in her room. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't get her movements right, and every misstep sent fresh waves of discomfort through her body.

Tikki urged her to rest, yet taught Marinette how to throw a punch in the same breath. Frustrated with her lack of progress, Marinette eventually signed up for self-defense classes, but she'd have to wait until she was fully healed to begin.

Though the suit had sped up her recovery, no one knew that. So, she kept the casts on, but left the crutches behind.

She moved with more ease, but there was a stiffness to her gait, a cautiousness in every step. And babysitting—babysitting was a mistake. Manon was a whirlwind, a bundle of endless energy that spun around her like a hurricane.

Marinette's breath came in ragged sighs, her muscles screaming with every bend and lift as she chased the little girl through the apartment.

She longed for the quiet, for a moment where the noise in her head and the pain in her body could settle.

But Manon, with her wide eyes and chattering mouth, had no pause, no stillness. Marinette felt her patience slipping away, her body teetering on the edge of exhaustion. She wished, so desperately, that she had said no.

A knock at the door interrupted her train of thought and, oh, there’s her salvation, a reprieve, and she threw herself into Alya’s arms without hesitation.

Alya caught her easily, laughing that deep, carefree laugh of hers, the sound like sunlight breaking through storm clouds, warm and bright.

Alya had always been like this— a storm when they first met, wild and uncontainable, but underneath the wind and the rush, there was a calm harbour, a steady place Marinette could always anchor herself to.

“Don’t worry, girl, I got this,” Alya said with a wink, already moving to where Manon was creating chaos in the living room.

In seconds, Alya had the little girl distracted, spinning some fanciful story that had her hanging onto every word, her energy redirected into wide-eyed wonder instead of destruction.

Marinette exhaled, the tension in her shoulders releasing all at once. Finally, she could breathe.

They decided to take Manon to the park, the day clear and bathed in a soft sunlight that felt like it was trying to soothe Marinette’s aching soul.

The air smelled faintly of blooming flowers and freshly cut grass, a fragrance that settled like a balm over her, loosening the tightness in her chest.

As they strolled along the gravel paths, Manon darted between them, her small hands grasping for balloons as they passed. Marinette allowed herself to relax into the moment, just for a while. 

Adrien, standing by the fountain, his golden hair catching the light like a halo, his perfect posture as rigid as ever. He was in the middle of a photoshoot, his face locked in that practiced, distant expression the world knew so well.

But when he spotted Marinette and Alya, something shifted. His face softened, the mask slipping just a little, and he grinned—just a small, crooked smile, not the dazzling, professional one he showed the cameras.

It was warmer, more real, and it made Marinette’s  own smile spread across her face, unbidden, her cheeks dimpling as she watched him. She waved back.   

In the distance, Marinette catches sight of the KIDZ+ contest finale playing on a large screen in the park.

The crowd watches intently as Mireille is crowned the winner with a staggering 82% of the vote. Aurore’s face flickers onto the screen, devastated and heartbroken, before she storms off the stage.

Marinette sighs and then nearly yelps as she trips over a stray toy, barely managing to avoid hitting her head on a nearby bench. Tikki mutters nervously, her agitation growing with each stumble.

Marinette can’t help but notice how much more upset Tikki’s been lately, especially whenever she mentions her string of bad luck.

Alya and Manon had already moved ahead, lost in some grand adventure Alya was weaving, the sound of their laughter mixing with the distant hum of the city.

Marinette watched them go, her heart light for a moment, until—

The world breaks apart.

The sky churns a deep violet, streaked with sickly green lightning that snakes through the air like venomous whips.

The lightning that split the heavens as if the very sky were tearing at the seams, bleeding strange, unnatural hues into the fabric of the world.

Each crackle, each venomous whip of light feels like the sky is unraveling, the air crackling with the sound of a universe on the edge of collapse.

The wind isn’t just howling; it roars like a beast made of centuries-old rage, shaking the very bones of the earth.

Trees buckle under the weight of it, bent and twisted like the fragile limbs of forgotten statues, their leaves shredded and cast into the maelstrom like offerings to a vengeful god. 

The shift was sudden, a creeping cold that spread through the park like a shadow. Marinette felt it first, a prickle of ice along her skin, the hairs on the back of her neck rising as the temperature plummeted.

Acrid, metallic ordours clings to the walls of her throat with steel claws. Everything is on edge. Every crack of thunder is a threat, every gust of wind a scream.

Debris becomes shrapnel—broken signs, shattered glass, torn branches—all propelled through the streets like forgotten memories, sharp and cutting. 

The temperature shifts violently, as though the storm itself cannot decide whether it wishes to burn or freeze.

One moment, the air bites, freezing the blood beneath her skin, ice creeping over every surface, snapping at the edges of buildings and sidewalks, a cold so sharp it feels like it's cutting through flesh.

The next, the air thickens with oppressive heat, waves of it rising from the pavement as though the ground itself is smouldering.

It feels as if the city is being boiled alive, caught in the grip of some infernal cycle, doomed to swing between extremes—never finding balance, only chaos.

The storm is alive.

It consumes.

It drains the city’s lifeblood like a leech. The electricity in the air is suffocating, crackling just beneath the surface of her skin, and then—darkness.

She gasps, ducking her head and covering her ears as the streetlights flicker once, twice, then explode in showers of sparks.

She can hear the sound of the city dying, the distant hum of life growing quieter, like a heartbeat slowing to its final, inevitable stop.

She wonders if this is what the end feels like—this slow, suffocating descent into nothingness, where the sky collapses, and the ground melts beneath your feet.

There is no escape from this storm. It is a manifestation of something far greater—fear given flesh, rage made manifest. It twists everything it touches, warps the senses.

The air tastes of ash and loss, acerb on her tongue. The sounds of destruction is deafening, yet there is a silence beneath it, an emptiness that gnaws at the edges of her mind, whispering of ruin.

She thinks of the red-armoured girl burning, her body a pyre, flames licking at her scarred skin, mouth set in defiant silence. That girl, lit like a torch in the night, body littered with a sacrifice offered to a world that never looked back, never cared.

Her mind twists, begging to know, how are you so brave?

Because for a moment, she waits—for the storm to devour her whole.

And then she sees, the storm wrapping itself around the carousel like a serpent coiling, its breath freezing the air. Ice blooms across the vibrant painted horses, solidifying joy in a deathly grip.

Alya and Manon are trapped within, frozen mid-flight, their fear palpable as frost crawls up the windows of their enclosure like skeletal fingers.

They press against the glass, faces pale and wide-eyed, but there’s no escape.

She runs, slipping into the rhythm she knew all too well. She ducked behind a tree, her breath coming fast, the cold biting into her skin, and with a whispered word, she transformed.

Ladybug emerged from the shadows, the world still spinning in chaos around her, but her focus narrowed. She ran, faster now, her body moving with a grace and strength that felt foreign and yet so completely hers.

She spotted the carousel, where Alya and Manon were trapped, ice creeping up around them in jagged spikes. The sight of it—the people she loved in danger—lit a fire in her marrows, pushing her forward with renewed determination.

Her yo-yo snapped out, a blur of red and black, wrapping around the ice with precision. She pulled once, twice, her muscles straining, but the ice was too smooth, too slick, and her yo-yo slipped free with a sharp crack.

Ladybug’s heart is a knot of tension as she glances back at Alya and Manon, huddled together beneath the ice-rimmed carousel.

Manon’s wide eyes shimmer with fear, her small body trembling against Alya’s protective hold.

Ladybug forces a smile, her lips tight, her voice warm yet strained. “It’ll be over soon, I promise,” she says, the words sounding hollow even to her own ears.

She watches Alya whisper comforting words, distracting Manon with whispered stories, her bravery as fierce as any hero’s.

Ladybug takes her chance and slips into the storm, her every breath laced with the weight of what’s to come.

The wind howls with a ferocity that feels almost personal, as if it knows her, as if it has sought her out from the depths of the storm’s rage to break her apart piece by piece.

Ladybug summons her shield, glowing and bright. but this time, something is wrong. A sharp, searing pain shoots through her fingers, twisting up her arm like an electric current made of fire and ice.

Her grip tightens in response, knuckles white, her breath catching in her throat. For a moment, her body betrays her—her hand goes numb, her resolve faltering.

She can feel the weight of it settling in her chest like a stone, pressing harder with each breath. Creation magic—it’s not infinite, it never was.

There is always a cost. She hears it now, a whisper that echoes through her very bones, crawling under her skin, sinking deep into the marrow.

Everything has a price. The thought pulses through her, as sharp as the pain, leaving her teeth aching, as though they’ve been boiled from within.

When she finally spots Stormy Weather amidst the chaos, she moves instinctively, shielding the civilians caught in the storm’s destructive path.

Her shield forms again and again, a shimmering wall of light standing between life and death. But with every pulse of magic, with every surge of protection, her body weakens.

Her hands tremble as the numbness spreads, creeping up her arms, making each movement feel like she’s dragging herself through wet concrete.

Her legs buckle beneath her, threatening to collapse entirely, yet she presses on. Debris rains down from the sky like the bones of the city being torn apart and cast aside.

Buildings groan and shudder, then collapse under the onslaught of ice and wind, falling in slow, tragic arcs, bowing to an inevitable end.

She watches a man fall beneath a shattered sign, barely breathing, his body too still, as though the storm has stolen even the rhythm of his heart.

Nearby, a car, flipped by the force of the wind, spins wildly, its momentum carrying it straight toward a group of screaming pedestrians. Without thinking, she throws up her shield once more, her body moving before her mind can register the cost.

The car slams against her barrier with a deafening crash, and the force of it drives her to her knees. Her arms shake, the strain unbearable, her vision swimming as the world tilts on its axis.

She gasps for breath, but the air feels like tar. The pain is everywhere now—her hands, her legs, her chest—each breath feels like it’s cutting her open from the inside.

Her eyes catch movement—a flash of light—and she turns just in time to see a woman struck by a jagged bolt of lightning.

The smell of burning flesh fills the air, thick and acrid, clawing at the back of her throat. The woman falls, her body smoking, unmoving. Paramedics rush to her, but Ladybug knows.

The storm has taken her. There is no saving her now. The world seems to slow around her, every sound muffled by the weight of that realisation.

Trees fall in the distance, their trunks splitting with a deafening crack, crushing the park benches, the playgrounds. The storm is consuming everything, and she is only one thread against a gale.

She has always fought the odds, but now, as the magic takes its toll, she can feel her body failing her.

Her muscles scream with the effort of standing, of summoning the strength to protect the city one more time.

Each action drains her, saps the very essence from her, and the word sacrifice burn itself into her the skin of her flesh.

The storm doesn’t care.

It roars louder, as though mocking her efforts, as though it knows that with every shield she raises, she is burning herself out. The weight of her previous sacrifices presses down on her like a mantle made of iron.

She feels the strain in every limb, the ache deep in her bones as if her very essence is being pulled apart, stretched too thin. Her body aches with the remnants of every price she’s paid before.

She was always so willing to bear it but now, with the storm’s fury bearing down on her, she wonders if she has anything left to give. The world around her feels distant, like a fading dream.

The sky is heavens made fire and ash. Her vision blurs, her body swaying under the weight of it all. She knows she cannot stop, knows that the city depends on her.

Everything has a price. The words echo again, sinking into the hollow space between her ribs. She closes her eyes for a moment, just to breathe, just to feel something other than the pain.

The shield she keeps summoning hums with a flickering, unstable energy, a ghost of what it once was, as if her own life force is dwindling with every pulse of magic.

She is desperate now—she can feel it in the tremble of her limbs, in the jagged beat of her heart that feels too fast, too wild, as though her body is trying to outrun its own breaking point.

And all around her, the storm is growing. It feeds, ravenous and insatiable, a chained beast given power, on the world itself—on the joy and laughter of the people it traps in its icy jaws.

Stormy Weather’s presence is a night that devours light, pulling happiness from the air, stripping life from the earth.

The clouds hang low, bruised and swollen, like the sky itself is sagging under the weight of her anger, threatening to collapse upon them all.

Lightning flickers in her wake, an extension of her will—when she points, it strikes like a vengeful finger from the heavens, and when she frowns, the freezing rain comes down in sheets, hard and merciless, like the sky is trying to drown the earth in its sorrow.

Each time Stormy Weather’s emotions flare, the storm responds in kind. The storm is alive, Ladybug realises, not just a manifestation, but a living, breathing entity, bound to its master’s whims.

And its anger is unpredictable, growing wilder with every minute.

Then, Chat Noir arrives.

He is different, she thinks, his is grin is sharp, a wild thing with fangs, and he moves like a tempest made flesh —a reckless disregard for the destruction swirling around them.

He leaps into the fray, his staff twirling, eyes locked on Stormy Weather. A hunger that lines the muscles of his body as he throws himself at the enemy without hesitation, a new power crackling at his fingertips, bending the storm to his will—only, the storm does not bend.

It breaks.

The power is chaos incarnate, a dark twin to creation, and with every reckless swing, Chat Noir sends shockwaves of instability through the already frenzied storm.

Lightning now spirals erratically, ripping through the sky in jagged bursts. It strikes randomly, indiscriminately, setting rooftops ablaze, their flames roaring into the night like beacons of chaos.

The air smells of charred wood and burning plastic, thick and acrid, clinging to her skin in a chokehold.

Ladybug’s voice rises above the cacophony, sharp and commanding, but it is tinged with panic now, a note of desperation she can’t quite swallow.

“Chat Noir, stop!” She screams, but he doesn’t hear her. Or worse, he doesn’t care.

He’s lost in the thrill of it, in the way the storm responds to him, as if he’s dancing with chaos itself, laughing as it swirls around him.

Her chest tightens with fear, not for herself, but for the people caught in the storm’s crossfire, the innocents who will pay the price for their powers, for their mistakes.

She can feel the weight of the magic bearing down on her—each shield she summons drains her a little more, the toll heavier than she can carry.

Already, her body is breaking under the strain. Her blood hums. Everything comes with a price, and it’s a price she is paying in pieces of herself. 

The wind picks up again, a vicious howl that tears through the park, uprooting trees and snapping branches like brittle bones.

A frozen tornado spirals across the grass, its icy tendrils lashing out, wrapping around anything in its path. People scream, trapped in place, frozen in a tableau of fear, their breath turning to mist, their faces pale with horror.

Ladybug’s mind spins with the enormity of it—how can she protect them all? “Stop!” she yells at Chat Noir, her voice raw, straining to be heard over the storm.

“Stop using that! You’re making it worse!” Her words are knives now, cutting through the madness, slicing through his laughter, but he still doesn’t understand.

He thinks it’s a game, that this is part of their dance, but her fury is palpable, burning hot and desperate.

Her anger, sharp as glass, cuts through the chaos, and for the first time, Chat Noir falters, his grin slipping, frown growing as he realises she is not playing.

And then, the inevitable happens.

Rubble falls, heavy and brutal, from a collapsing building. It crashes into the street with a sickening sound, and for a heart-stopping moment, she watches it, powerless to stop it.

People scatter, running in every direction, but not everyone is fast enough. A child is pulled to safety just in time, but an elderly man is not so lucky.

The bricks hit him with a final, terrible weight, and the world goes silent.

Ladybug’s heart stops. She watches, frozen, as the man crumples to the ground, motionless, his body broken beneath the wreckage.

The sound of screaming fills the air, but it feels distant. Everything around her is collapsing, and she feels so tired. How is she supposed to save them?

Panic claws at her chest, sharp and suffocating, but it’s nothing compared to the guilt that follows—the crushing weight of it settling like stones inside her ribcage.

Chat Noir does not see, he is batted away by a parasol wind.

And— she wants to shake him, force him to look at this, to see what she sees.

It takes everything in her to keep standing, to keep fighting, as the storm rages and claws at her from all sides. The wind is a banshee scream in her ears, tearing at her skin with icy fingers, while the taste of ozone and ash coats her tongue.

Her gaze locks onto Stormy Weather, standing in the eye of the storm, her umbrella raised like a twisted crown, crackling with green energy.

The clouds around her writhe and churn as if they’re alive, bound to her every emotion. Every surge of lightning, every blast of freezing rain, is a scream of Stormy Weather’s heart.

And that… that is where Ladybug’s chance lies.

She knows she has to use Aurore’s emotions against her. She has to unravel her, provoke her, make her powers spin out of control. What other choice is there? What other plan?

The storm is a swelling beast, a living, breathing thing, its howling winds gnawing at the edges of the world, gnashing its teeth through the bones of the city.

Paris—once vibrant, alive—has become a frozen graveyard, a cold, merciless wasteland where the screams of the wind drown out the silence of the dead.

But she cannot stop. She will not stop. I have to win this, the desperation grips her ribs with steel fingers. There is no other choice. There never has been.

The image of Alya and Manon, trapped in the frozen carousel, flickers through her mind like a haunting memory.

Are they dead? The thought lodges itself in her chest, twisting like a knife, but she cannot afford to hold it.

She cannot let herself sink into that fear. Not now, when the city is hanging by a thread, when the entire world feels like it’s collapsing. Not now, when Paris has become an ice-encrusted tomb, the dead lying beneath heaps of rubble.

Chat Noir lands beside her, the reckless energy still simmering beneath the surface, she is about to snap at him but she sees his eyes are different now—more focused. 

“We need to stop this,” she gasps, her voice rough, shredded from the cold and from the endless screaming into the storm.

“But you… you have to keep that power in check. You’re making it worse.”

He opens his mouth to argue, the reckless grin flickering back to life for a moment, but it dies quickly when he looks into her eyes and sees the raw, burning desperation there.

She isn’t playing. There is no playful banter, no teasing exchange. Only a girl standing on the edge of her own breaking.

“Fine,” he scoffs, his voice unreadable. He looks away, his jaw tightening, but he nods once he sees the empty wasteland their city became.

She can’t tell what he’s thinking—doesn’t have the energy to try and decipher the emotion flickering in his eyes. It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters now is stopping the storm. Stopping her.

Ladybug takes a step forward, her legs threatening to give out beneath her, her vision swimming as pain flares up her spine, but she holds her ground.

Her gaze sharpens, locking onto Aurore—onto the storm that radiates from her very being.

And with her heart hammering in her chest, she calls out, her voice cutting through the chaos like a blade. “Aurore!”

The name hits the air like a shockwave, and for a moment, Stormy Weather pauses, her umbrella twitching slightly, her eyes narrowing as she turns to face Ladybug fully.

But she’s not afraid. Not anymore.

She knows what she has to do.

“A fluke,” she calls Stormy Weather, her voice ringing like a death knell.

Each taunt feels like a sin, a betrayal of something innocent, but she forces herself to keep going, to dig deeper into Aurore’s insecurities.

“Second place—that’s all you’ll ever be, isn’t it? Just a runner-up. Even with all this power, you’re still not good enough.”

Aurore screams.

It’s a sound that tears through the fabric of the storm, a primal wail that sends shivers down Ladybug’s spine.

The winds respond in kind, doubling their ferocity, a whirlwind of ice and fury that tears at the city like claws. Buildings groan under the pressure, their very foundations trembling as if the storm is trying to rip the earth apart.

Lightning cracks through the sky, violent and unpredictable, tearing open the heavens like the whip of an angry god. The ground beneath her feet shakes as if the storm is alive, as if Aurore’s fury has given it a soul, and it is hungry for destruction.

But Ladybug can see it now—the cracks in Stormy Weather’s control, the wild way her powers lash out with no sense of direction.

Tornadoes whip across the landscape, but they lack precision, tearing apart everything and nothing at once. The storm is spiralling out of control, and that’s exactly what Ladybug needs.

Push her further, she tells herself, even though it feels like she’s pushing herself closer to a cliff’s edge.

With a flick of her wrist, she summons a construct shield—solid, gleaming, but this time, it’s not meant to protect.

Her heart pounds in her chest as she hurls it toward Stormy Weather like a weapon. The shield cuts through the howling winds, smashing into the invisible wall of air Aurore has summoned around herself.

It doesn’t break through, but it distracts her, and that’s all Ladybug needs. As Aurore turns her fury on the shield, focusing her energy on destroying it,

Ladybug can feel the strain. Every second she holds the shield is another second her body screams for rest, another piece of herself sacrificed to the cause.

Her vision blurs, her legs buckle, and the cold wraps itself tighter around her like a shroud. But she can’t stop. She won’t.

Across the battlefield, Chat Noir moves like a shadow, slipping through the chaos with feline grace. The wind tears at him, the ice bites at his skin, but he is relentless, his eyes locked onto his target.

Ladybug watches him through the storm, her heart a war-drum of fear and hope, fear and hope, as he inches closer to Aurore, to the eye of the storm.

He’s in position now, but they need an opening—just one.

Her hands shake as she summons her Lucky Charm, and for a moment, dread fills her veins as the object materialises in her hand—a metal rod, dull and useless in the middle of this cosmic storm.

Her mind races——the lightning. It crackles above her, wild and untamed, and realisation hits her like a punch to the gut.

She plants the rod into the frozen ground. Immediately, the metal begins to hum with energy, low vibrations sending pulses through her bones.

The storm, as if sensing the rod’s presence, shifts. Lightning arcs through the sky, pulled toward the metal like a magnet, and when it strikes, the ground trembles with the force of it.

The rod glows with the power of the storm, absorbing the electrical charge, grounding it, and for the first time, the storm wavers.

The winds slow. The lightning fizzles. For one brief, fragile moment, the storm weakens.

It’s enough.

Chat Noir lunges, his hand outstretched, his eyes blazing with the intensity of the moment. Ladybug holds her breath as she watches him reach for Stormy Weather’s umbrella.

Time seems to slow, the world narrowing to the space between Chat Noir’s fingertips and the handle of that cursed umbrella.

And then, his hand closes around it.

Cataclysm spreads like wildfire, turning the umbrella to blackened ash in an instant, crumbling in his grip. The destruction is swift, absolute, and for a moment, the storm gasps in surprise—an inhale before the final breath.

The dark clouds above them begin to unravel, peeling away from the sky like layers of dead skin. The winds die, fading into a gentle breeze, and the freezing rain slows to a mere drizzle, then stops altogether.

The oppressive energy that had choked the city for so long drains away, leaving the air feeling hollow, empty.

The storm is over.

But the silence that follows is deafening.

She doesn’t feel victorious. She feels broken.

The world around her is a wasteland of ash and ice, crumbled buildings and shattered lives. The people who survived stare out at the ruins of their city, their eyes wide with shock, their faces pale with grief.

Ladybug leaves the battlefield in silence, her feet dragging over the rubble, each step as heavy as the storm she just quelled.

Chat Noir opens his mouth to say something but she can’t hear him—won’t hear him.

She had won. But all she could think of was the cost she’ll have to pay.

The world around her feels distant, smothered by a fog that dulls everything except the sound of her own heartbeat, erratic and stuttering like the last gasps of a dying creature.

She reaches her home, only to find the trapdoor frozen, frost crawling like skeletal fingers over its surface. She stares at it for a moment, before smashing through the ice with the last of her strength.

Inside, her room is frozen too, the walls coated in a thin layer of frost, the air sharp and biting. She steps inside and the cold embraces her like an old lover, familiar and cruel.

There, in the periphery of her mind, she feels it—the steel-fingered caress of death, trailing cold fingers along her spine, tracing the delicate line of her fate as though it were a thread to be snapped at any moment.

She knows death’s touch well by now, has felt its breath too many times. It lingers, always waiting, always watching.

With trembling hands, she casts the cure, but there’s no relief this time—only pain. Pain so sudden, so sharp, it punches the breath from her lungs and sends her crumpling to the floor.

Her vision blurs, the room spins, and for a moment, she thinks this is it—this is the moment when she shatters, when heroism turns her another body on the pyre.

This is the cost of miracles. It is a gift that wounds as it heals. Who is the lamb? Who is the knife? She is both. She is sacrifice and blade, bleeding out even as she holds the cure in her palms.

There is blood on her carpet now, a startling sight. Red—bright, garish against the soft pink fabric. The contrast is grotesque, the red too vivid, too alive, and the pink too innocent, too unaware of the violence staining it.

Her soul presses against the hallows of her broken ribcage. Her eyes fall shut, and she is lost in the fog of her pain. It is thick, suffocating, a thing that crawls into her lungs and fills them with water.

She drowns in it, over and over again, her breath stolen by the weight of it. This is the way it must be. Her entire life has been a series of omens.

As a child, a black cat followed her steps like a shadow, its eyes gleaming with silent knowledge, foretelling what she would come to know far too late.

Dreams of girls—brave, brave girls—never living to see twenty, their lives cut short by flames, by the weight of the world, by the gods’ cruel games.

She was cursed. She was marked. There was no other explanation.

She wants to scream at the heavens, to tear apart the very sky with her voice and demand to know why. Why must it be this way?

Her skin prickles with the knowledge that the world she once thought she knew. Gods, monsters, spirits—they circle her, unseen but ever-present, pulling strings she cannot see.

And Marinette is frightened. She is terrified of the path that stretches before her, a road carved in fire and blood, lined with the corpses of those who came before.

A voice drifts to her through the haze—Tikki’s voice, soft and ancient, crooning in that strange tongue, Ny’shaa, ryneth, dran loeith el vlyr— the words brush against her skin like a lullaby.

In the darkness of her mind, the black cat gleams. Its eyes glint with a terrible kind of victory that stings. She holds the miraculous of creation, of good fortune, and yet the curse of bad luck coils around her like a serpent, tightening its grip. 

Marinette has never believed in miracles, not truly. This—this is just another reminder. For every good, there is a price.

For every life saved, a debt must be paid, and the weight of it presses down on her chest like a hand squeezing the breath from her lungs.

She is the one who will pay it. It has always been her.

The thought loops through her mind like a mantra: It is fine. It is fine. It is fine.

She is used to this, after all. Sacrifice is second nature.

If she must die so that others may live, then it is fine. It is fine. She will not stay dead anyway, so it is fine.

She is creation’s martyred daughter, unlucky to a fault, sacrificed to the altar of necessity. Who is the lamb? Who is the blade? How can she create, how can she mend what is broken, when every act of creation destroys her a little more?

Her thoughts are spiralling as her mind fractures under the strain.

She falls into dreams, a city that burns with the fury of a thousand suns, Paris is a graveyard of flame, its streets turned to ash, its buildings funeral pyres that scrape the heavens.

Yet despite the inferno around her, she feels cold—so cold. Her bones are ice, her flesh numb, but she is burning alive.

She dreams of lightning— crackling and writhing, alive and hungry. It sears the sky, tears open the earth, but there is no escape.

She can’t breathe. The air, suffocating, pressing down on her chest until her ribs crack under the pressure. The feeling is horrifyingly familiar, a remnant of a time when she had died before.

Because she has died before, hasn’t she?

She dreams that she is dead. Over and over again, under buildings and rubble, frozen over and burned alive by lighting, collapsed in car seats.

The underworld claws at her ribs, river Styx winding through her veins, and she can hear the voices of the damned—screaming, wailing, cursing her blood, calling for her damnation.

The cold is deafening, the numbness spreading through her like a slow poison.

She wonders if this is what it feels like to be consumed by creation, to be devoured by the very thing you were born to wield.

She wonders if this is the price she must always pay—if she is doomed to bleed, to break, to burn, so that others may live.

When she wakes, the world feels muted, distant, like the haze of a dream still clinging to her skin. She’s on her chaise, bundled in layers of blankets that weigh down on her like heavy fog.

Her throat is raw, each breath scraping against the jagged edges of whatever storm still rages inside her. It feels like she swallowed glass shards. 

She glances at the window. The frost is gone and so is the storm.

Her eyes, gritty and dry, drift lazily around the room, still adjusting to being awake. They land on an unexpected sight—Tikki, perched awkwardly on her computer keyboard.

A faint glow from the screen flickers across the kwami’s tiny face, her expression focused, yet anxious. Marinette tries to make a sound, a groan or a word, but it catches in her ravaged throat.

She tries to rise, but her limbs feel too heavy, too hurt. All she manages is a weak shuffle beneath the blankets. Tikki notices immediately, eyes wide with worry. She abandons the computer and flutters over to Marinette, her tiny body radiating concern.

"Marinette!" Tikki hovers by her face, her voice gentle but filled with a stern edge, as if trying to mask her own panic.

"You should’ve never used the cure like that! You know what it does to you—how much it takes!" She continues fussing, circling Marinette like a protective orbit, her tone now part lecture, part desperate plea.

Marinette hears the words but can’t find it in herself to respond. She’s too tired to even sigh, too drained to feel anything but the lingering ache in her body.

Tikki hovers over her, still muttering under her breath, something sharp and frustrated that Marinette barely registers. "It’s been two days," Tikki says, her voice quieter now, though still tinged with worry.

"Your parents… they were getting worried, but they had to leave for that big catering order."

There’s a pause, a bitterness creeping into Tikki’s voice as she mutters under her breath. "Useless. Absolutely useless, leaving you like this.”

Marinette closes her eyes briefly, a fleeting attempt to block out the world. Two days? Had she spent the past two days dying? The thought sickens her and she abandons it.

Tikki breaks the silence, urging her. "You need to transform. It’ll help with the healing, at least a little.”

Marinette doesn’t even argue. The thought of transforming usually fills her with a sense of duty, a mantle she wears with pride despite its cost, but now it feels like just another act of survival.

With a whisper, she calls on her transformation. The energy washes over her, gentle and warm. She feels better instantly—at least, physically.

The stabbing pain dulls into an ache, it lingers but no longer overwhelms her. She reaches for her phone, moving slowly as if her limbs are made of lead.

The screen lights up with dozens of missed calls and unread messages. Her fingers tremble slightly as she scrolls through them.

Alya’s name dominates the screen, her messages frantic and increasingly concerned. Text me if you got home safe. Then another: Call me when you can. Are you okay? The messages grow more frequent, her worry bleeding through the screen. Marinette scrolls faster, until she the last message— I called your parents. They said you were fine… just sick. Call me when you feel better, okay?

Marinette stares at the words, her mind blank. She knows she should respond, knows she should let Alya know she’s okay—or at least, that she’s alive. But the thought of picking up the phone, of speaking, it feels like too much.

She lets the phone fall from her hand, the screen dimming to black.

In the quite of her room, Marinette breaks.

The mansion feels more like a tomb today. Adrien moves like a shadow through the empty corridors, his footsteps swallowed by silence.

Four years. It has been four years since his mother vanished, her absence a phantom that clings to every corner of this forsaken place.

And on this day—this cursed day—the ache is sharper, like a knife slowly twisting in the hollow of his heart.

He finds himself in the sunroom, her sunroom, bathed in the cold, lifeless light of an afternoon that feels like mourning.

The room is preserved as if expecting her return at any moment, though hope has long since withered here.

The smell of dust and old flowers lingers like a shroud, but it is the scent of old books that feels like a noose.

Adrien's fingers brush against the spines, until they pause on one that feels heavier than the rest—The Picture of Dorian Gray, his mother's favourite.

The cover is worn, the pages brittle, as though time itself has seeped into the ink and curled the edges of its pages.

He pulls it from the shelf, the weight of it familiar and yet strange, a relic of a life he barely remembers. He hasn’t opened it in years, hasn’t let himself. With shaking hands, he flips through the pages.

The sun outside casts a sickly light through the windows, but there is no warmth. The mansion’s chill is deeper than winter, a coldness that gnaws at his bones, at his soul.

And then, something catches his eye—a letter, neatly tucked into the back. He unfolds the paper. The ink is faded, the words delicate, but unmistakable. His mother’s handwriting.

"My dear friend,

I have spent too many sleepless nights thinking about our last conversation. My condition has worsened, far beyond what I had feared, and I am afraid that I will not make it another year."

The words spill over him like a poison, seeping into his veins, turning his blood to ice. Her voice is there in his mind, soft but steady, a final confession from beyond the veil. Adrien’s grip tightens on the letter, knuckles white.

"Gabriel refuses to accept it. I fear he is chasing shadows and that eventually, he will lose himself. ”

His father. Of course. A tremor runs through Adrien as he reads on. Adrien’s breath catches, heart pounding against his ribs, because now… now he wonders. What has Gabriel done?

“I am not afraid of what comes next, though I confess the thought of leaving Adrien without a mother tears me apart more than the sickness itself. He is still so young, and Gabriel… well, you know how he is. I can only hope that, in the end, my absence will not lead him further down this dark path he seems determined to walk. He is already too consumed by the idea of saving me, no matter the cost.

There is something I wish I could tell him, something I wish he could understand—that sometimes, even love cannot defy the inevitable. We cannot rewrite fate without consequences. ”

Adrien’s pulse quickens, his thoughts spinning like a whirlpool. What has his father sacrificed in his mad pursuit to save her? He runs a hand through his hair, pacing the sunroom, the letter still clutched tightly in his fist, anxiety festers like a wound left untreated.

What has his father done? What cost has been paid to stave off the inevitable? Adrien’s chest tightens with a sickening fear, a gnawing terror that claws at his insides.

Could his mother… still be here, trapped somewhere between life and death, suspended in some twisted limbo?

The walls close in around him, the floorboards beneath his feet groaning with the weight of hidden sins, of unspeakable truths. The very air carries the scent of rot, rooted decay that festers inside out.

Adrien’s hands tremble as he folds the letter, slipping it into his pocket. His heart beats with a slow, heavy dread as he turns his gaze toward his father’s study.

The shadows have been growing. The mansion is alive with them, a living thing, breathing with the buried secrets. And Adrien… Adrien is about to unearth them.

The soft murmur of wind through the leaves drifted through, the sky above shifting in shades of pale grey, as if the very heavens were undecided.

Marinette slides down next to Aurora, the rough surface of the stone beneath her unfamiliar but grounding.

She feels guilty for what she will do, yet she must. 

Her voice breaks the silence, soft yet deliberate, “Hey. Mind if I join you?”

Aurora doesn't meet her gaze, eyes fixed on the sky, on the drifting clouds that seem far too content to float, while the world beneath is anything but.

"No, it’s fine," she murmurs. ”Just… thinking.”

"Thinking or overthinking?" Marinette’s tone is light.

Aurora offers a small smile, but it’s fragile. “Is there a difference?”

”Touché." Marinette leans back against the rock, the coldness seeping through her jacket and into her skin.

"So, the school play’s coming up. You still thinking about auditioning?”

Aurora shrugs, "I don’t know. I’m not really good at that kind of stuff.”

"What, acting? You act like you’re fine all the time. That’s pretty convincing.” Marinette’s lips curve into a humourless smile.

The laugh that escapes Aurora is light, but it’s a hollow sound, "Thanks, I think.”

"I’m serious though!" Marinette persists, her voice full of warmth. "You’d be great. Besides, if it’s a disaster, we can just make fun of it later. Mutual trauma bonding.”

"Yeah, maybe. What about you? Busy with your designs?”

"Always." Marinette sighs, tilting her head back, eyes tracing the uneven canopy of branches above, like skeletal hands clawing at the sky.

"I’m drowning in fabric. I think my bedroom might actually be a fire hazard at this point.”

"Sounds like a fun way to go.”

"Yeah, 'Death by tulle.' Very dramatic. I’d make the front page.” 

Aurora, for the first time, relaxes, "You’d have a really fancy coffin. Silk lining, probably.”

“Yeah, fashion to the end.” Marinette snorts.

She glances at Aurora, catching the way her eyes dim just a little as the laughter fades. "Speaking of fancy—did you check out that new restaurant down the street? The one with the obnoxiously shiny sign?”

"Yeah," Aurora mutters, "I walked by it the other day. It looks expensive.”

"Oh, totally. I bet they charge you just for sitting down," Marinette adds. "Like, ‘Would you like a seat with your meal? That’ll be €10 extra.’”

Aurora smirks, "And water’s probably another €5.”

“Right?” They share a brief laugh, the silence after is loud, but comfortable, the kind of silence you can sit with for hours. Marinette leans her head back against the stone, eyes closing for a moment.

"Ugh," she exhales, breaking the silence and offering an opening, "I’ve been so stressed lately. I feel like my brain’s constantly buzzing, like there’s always something going wrong.”

"Tell me about it," Aurora mutters. "I’ve been so anxious, like… terrified of getting akumatized again.”

Marinette turns toward her, “Yeah?"

Aurora nods, her eyes falling to her hands, fingers twisting together in her lap. "It was horrible. I woke up in the middle of a frozen wasteland, and it hit me that… I caused it.”

Her voice wavers. “ "There were videos, and I just—I can’t stop thinking about how awful it was. How I did that. People died because of me.”

Marinette leans forward slightly, her voice soothing and urging. "That’s a lot to carry.” 

"I didn’t even remember anything," Aurora continues, "One minute I was normal, and the next, I was in the middle of all this destruction, and everyone was so scared of me. I was scared of me. What if it happens again? What if next time it’s worse?”

Marinette reaches out, her hand hovering near Aurore’s for a moment before resting on her wrist. "What do you remember from before it happened? Was there anything that stood out?”

Aurora pauses, her brow furrowing in thought. "I was feeling… small, I guess. Like nothing I did mattered. I was upset.”

Marinette urged her, “Did you hear a voice? Or see something?”

Aurora shook her head, “Just being upset, I guess. I was angry, and sad.”

Marinette rubs her wrist, “That makes sense. You were feeling like everything was out of your control, and that’s what Hawk Moth preys on, right? When things feel too big or too heavy.”

Aurora sighs, the breath shaky. "Yeah, but I should’ve been stronger. I should’ve been able to handle it.”

"No, Aurora." Marinette shakes her head gently, her voice still soft. "It’s not your fault. You didn’t ask for that. You were just trying to deal with your feelings like anyone else, and HawkMoth used that against you. It’s not on you.”

Aurora’s hands still, her eyes flickering with uncertainty, with the remnants of fear. "But what if it happens again?”

Marinette’s grip on her wrist tightens just slightly, “Then Ladybug and Chat Noir will be there to save the day, like they always are. And honestly? It’s not even you that’s the problem—it’s that terrorist with awful fashion sense holding everyone’s emotions hostage.”

Aurora snorts softly, the smallest hint of a smile breaking through. "He really does have bad taste, doesn’t he?”

Marinette grins back, “Terrible. I mean, frills and balloon sleeves? Come on.”

"You’re right, though. It’s not my fault.”

"Exactly. And I’ve heard meditation helps, but even if you do get akumatized again, it’s not your fault. You’re not alone in this.”

"Thanks, Marinette. I needed to hear that.” Aurora’s voice is barely above a whisper, but there’s a tremor of relief in it.

Later that night, Marinette sits on the edge of her balcony, bathed in the cool breath of twilight. Tikki floats near her shoulder, bluebell eyes wide and vivid.

Marinette’s fingers clutch the edge of the balcony, knuckles pale in the dim light.  “Tikki, how does HwakMoth akumatize people?”

Tikki hesitated. “It’s… more complicated than just sensing emotions, Marinette,” Tikki finally said after a beat of silence,  her tone cautious.

Marinette leaned forward, “What do you mean?”

“The process of akumatization,” Tikki began, her voice gentle yet serious, “is a form of emotional alchemy. It follows the Law of Emotional Resonance.”

Marinette blinked, “Emotional alchemy? Law of Emotional Resonance?”

Tikki frowns, and then sighs, “Okay. Right. At its core, akumatization revolves around the concept that emotions possess energy. This emotional essence is linked to the magical flow within each person, acting as a conduit between their inner emotional state and external magical forces.”

Marinette’s eyes widened. She grabbed her design book from the tabletop, flipping it open to the last page and scribbling down notes.

“Positive emotions—joy, love, hope—they emit radiant, stabilising energies that strengthen the magical flow, thereby allowing spells to move smoothly.”

“So, positive emotions are like, say,  fuel for protections?”

“Exactly,” Tikki said. “But negative emotions—anger, fear, sorrow—they create unstable, chaotic energies that disrupt the flow. This disruption is what opens pathways to dark magic.”

Marinette paused, her pencil hovering over the page, mulling the words over.

“When a person experiences a surge of emotions that disrupt their natural state,” Tikki continues,  “this raw emotional energy can be ‘refined’ or ‘transmuted’ into something else. That’s where the akuma comes in. It serves as a kind of emotional vessel.”

“Once the akuma bonds to a person, it funnels that negative emotional energy into magical energy, which allows the akumatized individual to wield powers. The Law of Emotional Resonance is about how emotions have specific frequencies that resonate with magical forces. The stronger the emotion, the greater the potential for magical manipulation.”

“So, does Hawkmoth amplify the emotions? Like, he makes them more intense right?”

Tikki nods, “Yes. The more intense the emotions, the more power he can draw from them.”

Marinette outs her pencil down, “So, let me get this straight,” she began, “It is not just someone who’s upset, it has to be a disruption in their daily lives. And itt’s not just about finding people who are sad or mad—it’s about how strong their emotions are.”

Tikki nods again as Marinette processes it.

"Alright! Time for the next part of your training," Tikki chirped, clapping her hands together. The sudden sound jolted Marinette, her brows furrowing as she registers what Tikki said. 

“But I’ve already trained,” Marinette said, voice lilting. Her fingers flexed, aching from the earlier session, the ghost of bruises blossoming beneath her skin like flowers.

Tikki giggles, “That was only your physical training! What we’re about to do now is entirely different. We’re going to train your mind.”

Marinette nodded, curiosity rising within her even as a haze of uncertainty lingered.

Silently, they descended through the trap door, leaving the cool air of the balcony behind.

Inside, shadows pooled in the corners, gathering in whispers. The yellow lamps flickered weakly, struggling to pierce the thickening dusk.

Their uneven glow painted the room in half-light, over the chaos on her table—fabrics strewn, sketches crumpled, scattered pens.

Her soul presses hard against her ribcage, a trapped thing with frantic wings, its beats erratic. It pounds, aching through the cracks of her mortality.

Fire burns low in the corners of her mind, the warning hum of fate always present.  Tikki smiles—a smile so fragile, Marinette can almost see it wilting under the weight of the air between them.

In the dim light of the room, Tikki’s eyes look faded. Tikki lifts her hand, and a flicker ripples through the air like a sigh from the past.

And then it appears—a temple, floating like a phantom in the ether, its colours impossibly vibrant, the dreams of gods made manifest in stone. The temple stands, an offering to divinity, carved with the care of hands that believed in something greater than themselves.

The temple itself is alive, the stones hold memories that sing beneath the surface. And awe fills her at the thought, a sweltering sensation that weakens her knees.

But then Tikki’s voice slices through the awe, sharp.

“This,” she says, “is a murder that occurred over a thousand years ago. The victim was the king’s advisor, found dead inside this temple.”

The scene shifts. The image warps like light bending through water, and the colours drain into something cold, something dead. The advisor appears, a ghastly sight that claws its way into Marinette’s vision.

She flinches, instinctively recoiling as if the decay of death could somehow seep through the sands of time to kiss her once again. 

The advisor’s eyes are open, wide and staring, a hollow gaze. A thin trail of blood trickles from his mouth, a crimson thread against the pale ruin of his face.

Marinette wonders if that was what she looked like dying again and again, and the thought horrifies her, her tongue burns metallic even as the morbid wish of dying pretty burrows itself into her spine.

“The body was discovered in the center of the room,” Tikki continues. “The room was locked from the inside. There were no signs of forced entry. No footprints. No weapon.”

Tikki pauses, glancing at Marinette, whatever she sees pushes her to continue. "The advisor was rumoured to be corrupt. No one acted against him publicly. His enemies had solid alibis. When the body was found, a single candle was still burning.”

“No physical evidence left behind,” Tikki repeats, her eyes narrowing as if she’s looking beyond the present, beyond the image she’s conjured. “Only whispers of a vengeful spirit tied to the temple.”

Tikki looks into Marinette’s eyes and she finds the question:

Who did it?

Fact: His mother is supposed to be dead. Fact: She might not be.

There is no escape from the dissonance—they are truths, yes, but they are unwhole, incomplete, dissolving into contradictions as soon as he tries to hold them steady.

His mother was dead. Is dead. Might be dead. Is kept alive by machines, or something far more.

Fact: His father is trying to save her. Against her will. Fact: His father is hiding. From him. From the world. From the truth.

Adrien thinks of the investigations he did, after reading the letter. His father slips away, vanishes for hours, not in his office, not where he should be, as though the earth itself swallows him whole, hiding him in shadows Adrien cannot reach.

What is he doing? Where does he go? Fact: His mother accepted her death. She welcomed it like an old friend, with quiet grace, with the peace of someone who has made their choice.

And yet she is here—or might be. His mother didn’t want this. She chose to die.

Yet she lingers, suspended in this half-life, tethered to machines or some grotesque magic.

And his father—what has he done?

Fact: Adrien’s world is collapsing. Quietly, like the slow erosion of cliffs under relentless tides, his life crumbles. Piece by piece. Day by day.

He is trapped in the suffocating space between knowing and unknowing.

Fact: His mother might be alive. Fact: She is not. She is gone, and yet she is not.

Fact: She did not want this. She did not want to be a prisoner of her own body. His father must know this. His father must have known. Did she run away because of this? Then what happened to her body?

And then, why? Why this charade? Why the silence? Why the slipping away, the disappearing into shadows? His father knows more than he says. Of course, he does. He must.

His father has always been distant, always walled off behind a fortress of duty, work, and secrets. But now, those walls are crumbling, a truth seeping into his veins.

Fact: His father is involved. Fact: His father is hiding something.

He has to know. He has to know. Not just the surface truths, the fragments his father throws at him like crumbs to a starving dog. He has to know everything. The full, unbearable weight of it all.

His father’s lies, his mother’s half-death, his own ignorance—it all coils tighter and tighter around him, squeezing, choking.

Fact: His mother might be alive. Fact: His mother is gone. Fact: His father is keeping something from him. Fact: His father is trying to save her. Fact: She never wanted to be saved.

Fact: He doesn’t know if he wants to respect her wishes or save her in spite of it.

Fact: His world has collapsed.

Marinette’s mind spins. The weight of it all sits on her shoulders, unfamiliar and suffocating.

The simplicity of battle, of quick decisions and fast reflexes, feels worlds away from this suffocating stillness, where time stretches and each thought clings to her like a web spun too tight.

Her voice trembles when she speaks, “If the room was locked from the inside… maybe it was suicide?”

The words feel wrong even as she says them, she continues ahead regardless, trying to salvage the answer. “But why the blood? And the candle still burning…”

Tikki watches her, silent, her expression unreadable, the carved face of a statue long forgotten by time.

Marinette searches for something—anything—that might hint at whether she’s on the right path, but Tikki remains unmoving. 

Her stillness is its own form of pressure, bearing down on Marinette, making her heart rattle from the imagined accusation.

And then Tikki’s voice cuts through, “You’re too focused on what you think should be there. You want the answer to make sense in your world.”

The words hit hard, the sternness isn’t surprising nor is the pressure, but the disappointment wrapping around her like a cold chain is.

Tikki has always been strict with training, had pushed Marinette to learn how to fight, even injured.

Even now, Marinette still bore wounds that reopened during training, had forced her broken body to push the limits of what she was, to push through her own mortality. 

But Tikki had never been disappointed in her.

“This murder didn’t happen in your world. Suicide would not leave blood at the mouth. And if someone escaped, why leave a burning candle?” Tikki says, her voice near emotionless. 

Marinette feels her chest tighten, her pulse pounding in her ears. The heat rises in her cheeks, a burning frustration and shame that makes her dizzy, the fire in her mind growing more insistent, more consuming.

She forces herself to think, even as the blood thrums louder in her head, an insistent funeral drum of failure.

“You need to think beyond the obvious, Marinette.” Tikki’s voice is low, yet it reverberates through her, sinking into her bones.

“Forget the facts for a moment. Think about the people involved. Who gains the most from this death? Who stood to lose everything if the advisor lived another day?” Marinette closes her eyes, her thoughts racing.

She’s always been quick, always smart, but this feels like trying to hold water in her hands Her breath comes faster, shallower, but she forces herself to focus, to slow down.

The truth is there, somewhere in the fog of confusion, and she just needs to find it. The memory of the vengeful spirit lingers in her mind. What if… She clings to the thought like a lifeline.

“What if… the candle was a signal? Maybe the killer knew people would assume it was a spirit and used that to their advantage. If they had allies in the temple, they could’ve planned the whole thing to look like it was supernatural. They didn’t need to escape—they just needed everyone to believe the room was sealed.”

The words spill out of her faster than she can stop them. The silence remains but Tikki nods, a slight approval.

“I’ll allow you to think on it more,” Tikki says, and though her tone is soft, there’s a finality to it.

It cuts through Marinette’s momentary relief, reminding her that she hasn’t yet found the answer. Not really. Her shoulders sag with exhaustion.

Her eyes flick to the clock, surprised to see that an hour has passed. The exhaustion sinks into her bones, making her limbs feel heavy, her mind slower, more clouded than ever.

“So,” she asks, unable to help herself, “who did it then? Was it one of his enemies? Or someone from inside?”

She knows she’s asking for too much, but the question falls from her lips before she can stop it, the need for closure gnawing at her, sharp and insistent.

Tikki’s gaze sharpens, a quiet power in her eyes. “That is not how this works, Marinette.” The words are soft, but they feel like a reprimand.

“The answer is not for me to give you. The truth will only have meaning if you discover it yourself. If I simply told you who the killer was, you wouldn’t learn. You must learn to think for yourself, to see what others cannot. Your mind must be sharper than your instincts. You must rely only on your mind.”

Adrien sat by the window, his eyes distant, watching the city of Paris stretch out beneath him. There was a clawing, gnawing feeling deep inside that something was terribly wrong.

He clenched his fists, his fingers curling against the smooth fabric of his pants, his heart heavy with the confusion that came whenever he thought about her.

Plagg floated nearby, watching him with a tired expression, nibbling on a piece of cheese. The kwami let out a long sigh, breaking the silence.

“Alright kid, that’s enough,” Plagg muttered, drifting over to land lazily on the windowsill beside Adrien.

“Obsessing over stuff like that, it’s no good for you. Trust me, it eats you whole. You keep going like that, and it’ll kill you from the inside.”

Adrien blinked, slowly turning to face Plagg, “But I—” he started, but the words got stuck in his throat.

What was he even going to say? That he couldn’t stop thinking about her? That no matter what he did, the ache never went away?

Plagg floated closer, his green eyes half-lidded. “I get it, you got a lot on your plate. But sitting around in your head isn’t going to fix any of it.”

He crossed his arms. “So, how about this—let’s take a break from all that mess and actually finish what we started earlier.”

Adrien frowned. “What do you mean?”

Plagg gave him a pointed look. “Your powers, kid. Remember? The whole ‘you’re a superhero now’ thing? I never got to explain half of it before you went jumping off rooftops.”

He yawned, stretching his arms. “You can’t keep running around like a loose kitten forever.”

Adrien managed a small smile at that, “Right... I guess I do need to learn more, huh?”

Plagg nodded, floating over to Adrien’s desk. “Alright then. Let’s get to it. I can’t show you how to do everything, but I can explain it.”

He rummaged through the clutter on the desk until he found a piece of paper and a pen, then started drawing.

Adrien leaned forward, curious but a little skeptical. “What are you doing?”

Plagg scrawled a few lines on the paper with the pen clenched in his tiny paw, and when he lifted it up, Adrien had to hold back a laugh.

The drawing was a mess—what looked like a stick figure version of Cat Noir, with jagged lines for a baton and a lopsided circle where Adrien guessed his "destruction" power was supposed to be.

Plagg floated proudly next to his masterpiece. “Here, this is you.” He pointed to the stick figure.

“And this—” he gestured vaguely to the chaotic scribble next to it, “—is misfortune.”

Adrien stared at the drawing for a moment before snorting. “Are you serious? That’s supposed to be me?”

Plagg crossed his arms. “Hey, I’m not a teacher, alright? This is a one-time lesson. Count yourself lucky, kid, this ain’t ever happening again.”

Adrien chuckled, “Alright, alright, sorry. I’m listening.”

“Good.” Plagg floated closer, pointing at the drawing again. “So, the big thing you need to remember is your instincts. You can think all you want about strategy and technique, but when it comes down to it, your instincts are sharper than both your mind and your heart.”

Adrien’s smile faltered a little. “But... what if my instincts are wrong?”

Plagg floated right in front of Adrien’s face, his green eyes narrowing slightly. “They won’t be. You’ve got good instincts, kid. Trust them. They’ll guide you better than anything I can draw—or whatever weird plans you get stuck in your head.”

Adrien looked down, trying to let the words sink in.

“Alright,” Adrien finally said, his voice softer, but steadier. “I’ll trust my instincts.”

Plagg smirked, his mood lifting as well. “Good. Now, let me explain how to properly use that baton of yours. It’s not just for spinning around and looking lame, you know.”

Adrien pouts. “Hey, I think I look pretty cool.”

Plagg rolled his eyes dramatically. “Yeah, yeah, you’re super cool. Now pay attention.”

Marinette’s heart pounds against the weakened walls of her chest. The feeling of shame spreads through her like wildfire—consuming, relentless. It licks her spine, curling through her ribs, snaking through the gaps of her bones, settling into the piths of her lungs like molten iron.

It was unnatural, this sensation of being seen, truly seen. Tikki’s eyes, so ancient and all-knowing, bore into her like the gaze of an unblinking sun.

Marinette had spent her life as the one who shouldered everything—her own burdens, her own mistakes—alone. But now, under Tikki’s watchful gaze, she felt like a child again, lost and small, fumbling in the dark, trying desperately to please a god who could never be satisfied.

A creation disappointing its creator.

She forces herself to focus, to think.

See what others cannot.

Illusion? Of the spirit perhaps? It would cover up the crime.

But who did it? Why? Benefit? Marinette pulls the thread of that thought. Benefit.

The king? The thought forms in her mind like a whisper.

“The king?” she says softly, her voice barely above a breath. “If the advisor was manipulating him, then… maybe it was the king who needed him dead. But he couldn’t do it himself, so he made it look like something supernatural.”

Her voice strengthens as she speaks, “He wanted to free himself without taking the blame.”

Tikki allows a small smile, one so faint that Marinette almost misses it, but the sight makes her chest tighten. “So it was the king? But how could he have done it without being there?”

“The candle, Marinette. Think about the candle. Why was it left burning?”

Marinette’s eyes widen, “The candle was a signal, wasn’t it? Someone inside the temple did it for him. One of his trusted servants, or maybe a guard, someone who could slip in unnoticed and make it look like the spirit did it.”

Tikki nods, her eyes gleaming with quiet approval.

“The truth is never what it seems. It hides in the hearts of people, in their desires, their fears, their weaknesses. Remember that, and you will always find your answer.”

Marinette nods, exhausted beyond belief yet relieved.

That night, Marinette dreams of fire and blood.

The temples rise like phantoms in the haze, towering into a sky that churns, bruised purple and crimson. They are prouder, somehow.

Ancient pillars etched with forgotten gods, their stone faces both weeping and smiling, mock her. Sacred vines spiral through the cracks, vibrant, alive—yet everything is burning.

Everything reeks of death.

She dreams of priestesses. Their robes trail behind them, whispering against the blackened ground, their hands lifting urns brimming with light. The water inside glows, pulsating like veins.

But Marinette sees it for what it is. It is blood.

It trickles from the urns, warm and sticky, painting the stones, crawling up the walls like living vines, finding her. Her skin crawls under its touch, yet she doesn’t move. She can’t move.

They hum hymns, in both temples painted with life and death. Echoing through the ruins, filling the air with ancient voices that never belonged to her, yet now coil through her soul.

—Aenith sha khalekh, el maerkh’shaal—

It sounds beautiful.

It sounds like a war cry.

Creation, the hymn demands. Destruction, her soul whispers back.

Her mouth tastes of iron. She swallows, but it only grows. Blood. It drips from the corners of her lips, fills her throat, drowning her from the inside out. She tries to scream, but nothing comes out.

Yet she digs.

She digs through the ashes, through the debris of the once-sacred temples, through the ruins that crumble beneath her fingers. Her hands are raw, blistered, her nails broken and bloodied, but she digs.

Her hands burn, her skin crackling with the heat. The flames eat at her, licking at her flesh, but she doesn't flinch.

Fire and blood, her mind hums. Fire and blood.

She keeps digging, even when the ground beneath her starts to turn to molten rock, even when the bones of ancient gods crumble to dust in her hands.

The bones speak, their words etched into her skin, the ashes clinging to her like a second soul. She wants to scream at the ash, to kick it, to destroy it, but it is everywhere.

The very air she breaths is in the bones—those porcelain, fragile bones, turning black in the heat of the flames.

But they do not break. No, they stay whole, hollow, but whole. Heroism has fangs, and they have sunk into her. Since the beginning. Since the beginning of her end.

And there, standing at the center of the flames, is the girl in red armour. The girl from her childhood, the one who always lingered in the corner of her eye.

Always watching, always burning. The flames lick at her feet, rising higher, swallowing her whole, and still she does not flinch. The girl stares back but all Marinette sees is her eyes.

It is her. The red-armoured girl is burning at the stake is her. The fire rises, swallowing everything, and yet all Marinette can hear is her own voice echoing through the flames: What do you want?

The girl doesn’t answer, but the fire does. It roars in response, like a beast with no name, and in the sound, in the crackle of the flames and the scream of the winds, she hears it:

Warning.

She screams back at herself. She doesn’t stop. She can’t stop.

Gold glimmers at the edges of her eyes, molten, like the sun melting into her veins. It stains her lips, warm and heavy.

She laughs, her teeth stained with blood and her lungs filled with rot.

The fire burns hotter, brighter, and in that light, she sees the cycles. Destruction and rebirth. Flame and ash. The endless loop of life bleeding into death, only to rise again.

She is burning, her soul is made of death kissed ash. The flames do not consume her. She is the fire now. She is the ash. She is the blood that drips from the urns, the hymn that never stops echoing.

And through it all, she laughs.

Because fate has fangs, and it has bitten her deep.

Chapter Text

Adrien turns 16 beneath the moon, breathless as his feet drum against the cold tiles of Parisian rooftops. The city sprawls beneath him, indifferent, while the heavens loom above in their eternal silence.

The sky is endless, stretching like an ancient canvas, painted in shades of void and velvet, pierced only by the stars that seem to blink, watching.

His heart pounds not from exertion, but from a nameless ache. It seeps into his veins, slow and languid, a pain as vast as the sky, as deep as the ocean of black pines that line the distant horizon.

Humans are fragile beings. He knows this intimately now. His skin may be unscarred, his body untouched by true violence, but his soul has been bruised, over and over, by absences.

By the ghosts of people still living.

His mother’s touch was always distant, like a phantom, a wisp of warmth lost before it fully reached him. She was there, yet never there, a hollow figure that haunts him even now. Her touch is smoke, slipping through his fingers, a memory that fades like fog under the harsh light of day.

His father’s eyes are cold steel, his voice an iron chain that binds Adrien to this life, this place. A gilded cage. A bird with no wings is still a prisoner. He repeats this thought often, like a prayer, though it feels hollow.

What use are prayers to gods that do not listen? 

Beneath him, the world is alive—pulsing, breathing—but he cannot feel it. He is disconnected, a ghost drifting across the rooftops, suspended between earth and sky.

Even the wind that cuts through his hair feels thin, distant, like the echo of a forgotten memory. The night itself seems to mourn, the air heavy with a grief that is not his own, yet it haunts him all the same.

He returns to the mansion, a mausoleum draped in finery. The doors creak open, the vast halls empty save for their cold decor.

He has never known warmth here. This place is a museum, a collection of lives preserved behind glass, untouched, unfeeling. His room is no different, still and pristine, a tomb for a boy still living.

Plagg is there, of course, gnawing on cheese with casual indifference, a creature of appetite and apathy. Adrien envies him.

The kwami knows nothing of this hunger, this gnawing emptiness that devours him from the inside. Adrien longs for that kind of freedom—the freedom to not care, to exist simply and selfishly.

But even that feels beyond his reach, like everything else in his life.

He collapses onto the bed. His eyelids flutter, but sleep does not come easily. It never does. The quiet here is oppressive, not peaceful.

It is the silence of the dead, the kind that makes his heart race and his thoughts spiral. He lies there, staring at the ceiling, counting the cracks, the tiny imperfections in the otherwise flawless surface.

When morning comes, it brings no comfort.

The house is still quiet, too quiet. His birthday. It should mean something, shouldn’t it? Sixteen. An age where the world is supposed to open up, where life is supposed to begin. He feels no different from fifteen. 

Natalie’s voice is mechanical when she informs him of his schedule, her words devoid of any human warmth. There is no mention of his birthday, no acknowledgement.

At the dinner table, there is no one. No voices, no laughter, just the clink of silverware against empty plates. His appetite is gone.

He remembers, eight and alone, whispering into the quiet, his voice barely more than a breath. When will I grow wings?    

It is a question he has asked a hundred times, a thousand times. And each night, the silence answers him with the same cruel indifference.

The walls around him remain solid, the bars of his gilded cage unyielding. But still, he waited.

He had waited for the day when the ache in his chest will transform, when the heaviness in his bones will lift, when he will rise on wings that have yet to sprout from the scars life has carved into his back.

He waited for the sky to open and for his soul to break free.

It did, in a way.

Marinette finishes training with Tikki, her body aching in ways that speak of both triumph and defeat. Exhausted beyond belief, her limbs are heavy, like she’s been filled with lead, but beneath the fatigue, there is a flicker of pride.

She feels it in the way her breath shudders, in the way her muscles tremble as they remember every punch, every leap, every precise movement that carried her through the gauntlet Tikki set before her. Her mind, however, is still racing, still tumbling over itself, unable to quiet.

“That was good, Marinette!” Tikki’s voice floats into her ears, soft and light, but with an edge, a subtle undercurrent of expectation woven into the praise. “You’re getting so much better.”

Better. Better. The word curls around Marinette’s mind like smoke, an elusive thing, neither comforting nor cruel, just a wisp of a promise that dissipates before she can grasp it.

“But,” Tikki continues, the single word a blade slicing through the fragile peace that had begun to settle over her, “remember, next time you need to be just a little faster.”

Faster. Faster. Faster. The word sticks to her like oil, seeping into the cracks of her exhaustion, coating her bones.

Marinette lets out a long, slow breath, slumping where she stands, the weight of that simple phrase settling on her shoulders like a thousand invisible hands pressing her down.

I thought I did pretty good today, she thinks, almost absently, like a stray cloud drifting across her mind. Wasn’t that enough?

But no, it’s never enough. It never has been. Faster. Better. Perfect. The words echo through her, not as criticism, but as a challenge. She nods, a slow, automatic motion.

Next time. It feels like a warning, a prophecy of what’s to come if she doesn’t push harder. If she doesn’t outrun the failure that claws at her heels, if she doesn’t become faster, failure might not just be a mistake; it might be her undoing.

Faster. Better. Perfect.

Her body cries for rest, but her mind—her mind is already racing ahead, sprinting through the endless spiral of what must be done. It’s never truly quiet inside her head.

She blinks against the dizziness, but instead of falling into the embrace of her bed, she finds herself sitting at her desk, pulling out textbooks, notes, homework she should’ve finished days ago.

“You’re not going to bed?” Tikki asks, her voice distant, like a star far away in the cold night sky.

“I will. As soon as I finish this,” Marinette replies, the lie slipping out before she can think better of it.

She knows she won’t sleep. She never does, not when her mind is spinning like this, caught in a whirlwind of too much to do, too many things to fix, too many pieces of herself to hold together.

Tikki shrugs, unconvinced, but leaves her to it, drifting off to sleep with a murmured “Very well.”

But Marinette? Marinette can’t follow. Her bed, soft and inviting, is just a few steps away, but it may as well be miles.

Her body is screaming for rest, her eyelids heavy, but her mind is awake, a wild thing, a beast thrashing inside her, tearing through her exhaustion with frantic energy.

She drinks one cup of coffee—then two—because sleep isn’t coming, and if she can’t rest, she may as well do something. She may as well be productive.

The coffee burns its way down her throat, bitter and acidic, and she tastes the edge of her desperation with every sip. The bitterness lingers, staining her tongue, reminding her of the sharpness she’s supposed to have—faster, better, perfect—even as her hands shake from the caffeine, her mind buzzing like a live wire, too awake and not awake enough at the same time.

She finishes her homework, the words on the page blurring together, turning into strange symbols she barely comprehends anymore. But she’s done.

It’s finished. And yet, her mind won’t let her rest. It’s like a machine running too hot, gears grinding against each other, sparks flying. Sleep is a foreign concept now, something distant, unreachable.

So instead, she opens her textbooks again, eyes scanning the pages even though they ache, even though she can barely see straight.

The words flow in and out of her consciousness, sinking into the manic energy that pulses beneath her skin. She doesn’t need to study, but she does it anyway, because the alternative is worse.

The alternative is lying there, staring at the ceiling, and doing nothing. Her heartbeat thrums in her ears, loud and erratic, like a frantic drumbeat that won’t stop.

Every sensation feels heightened, the scratch of her pen against paper too loud, the smell of stale coffee too strong, the light from her desk lamp too harsh against her tired eyes. But she keeps going.

Keeps pushing. Faster, better, perfect. She can feel it now, the razor-thin line between achievement and collapse, and she’s balancing on it, precarious, unsteady, but refusing to fall. She can’t fall. Not yet. Not when there’s so much left to do.

And the night stretches on, endless, as Marinette drowns in her own relentless pursuit of something she can never quite reach. 

The dawn is thin, pale—an afterthought of light bleeding through the cracks in Marinette’s curtains. Her eyes, red-rimmed and dry, stare blankly at the papers scattered across her desk, the ink blurring together like dark rivers on the page.

She’s slipping, slipping into the heavy warmth of sleep, the kind that pulls her under so quickly it feels like drowning.

But she doesn’t let herself fall—no, she can’t fall.

If she sleeps now, she knows she won’t wake in time, won’t make it to school, and the thought of missing another obligation eats her with ice numbing panic. 

She stood, legs shaking beneath her, feeling like a marionette with its strings frayed, barely held together. Her body was screaming for rest, but her mind was a storm, a whirlpool of unfinished thoughts, of things left undone.

One more coffee. Just one more to keep her afloat, to keep her eyes open, to keep the world from slipping into that black void that waited at the edges of her consciousness.

She brewed it stronger this time, the bitter scent filling her lungs, seeping into her bones. Her hands were trembling now, not from exhaustion but from the relentless pulse of caffeine that coursed through her veins like lightning, sharp and jagged.

Her heart was already racing, each beat pounding against her ribs like a prisoner desperate to escape, but she ignored it. Tikki floated nearby, half-amused, half-concerned, her little eyes bright as she watched Marinette down the scalding coffee like it was water.

“Is the world ending? You’re awake early for once,” Tikki teased, her voice light with humour and the reward of a night well rested.

But then she took a closer look, really looked at her, and her smile faltered. “Wait… Marinette, are you okay? Did you even sleep last night?”

The question hung in the air like a noose tightening around her throat. Marinette forced a smile, one that didn’t quite reach her eyes, one that felt like it might crack her face in half if she held it too long.

“I’m fine,” she said, her voice bright, too bright. Sunshine forced through a storm. “Just tired, that’s all.”

Tikki frowned, clearly unconvinced, but she didn’t push it. “Okay…” she said slowly, the doubt lingering in her voice, but they both knew how this went. There were battles that even Tikki couldn’t fight for her.

They headed to school, the walk blurring together in a haze of cold air and the distant hum of city life waking up around them. The streets felt too quiet, too calm.

Her legs moved beneath her, steady yet shaky, as her mind floated somewhere far away. She felt detached, like a ghost trailing behind her own body.  Every step was a struggle, her eyelids fluttering, heavy, so heavy.

She could feel her heart thrumming in her chest, erratic, beating so fast it almost hurt. She wondered, vaguely, if this was how it ended—right here, on this cold sidewalk, her heart giving out because she’d pushed it too far. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.

She was already thinking about another coffee before she even got to school, she needed something to keep her going, something to keep her heart racing because if it slowed down, even for a second, she knew she would collapse.

She could feel it, the edge of that abyss yawning beneath her feet, waiting for her to misstep, to fall. Alya was waiting for her by the school gates, her face lighting up when she saw Marinette, but the smile quickly faded into worry.

Alya’s eyes narrowed, scanning her friend with a kind of quiet panic that Marinette had seen a hundred times before. Alya, always the sharp one, always noticing the cracks before anyone else.

“Girl, are you okay? You look like—”

“I’m fine,” Marinette cut in, too fast, the words spilling out before she could stop them. She forced another smile, wider this time, brighter, desperate to deflect the concern that was already swirling in Alya’s eyes. Don’t look at me like that.

“Just tired, you know how it is.”

Alya frowned, her lips pressed into a thin line, but she didn’t push. Instead, she sighed softly and slung an arm around Marinette’s shoulders, pulling her close.

“Alright, alright, I won’t pry. But seriously, you’ve got to take care of yourself.”

Marinette nodded, but the words bounced off her, too distant to reach her, too far away to matter. Her body was a drum, the rapid beat of her heart filling her ears, drowning out everything else.

She could feel it thudding in her throat, in her wrists, in the soles of her feet, like a war drum, relentless, pounding, never stopping.

Her head was light, spinning, the ground shifting beneath her like quicksand. She wanted to sit, to close her eyes, to just breathe, but she couldn’t.

Alya kept talking, her voice a steady hum in the background, a lifeline Marinette clung to, though she wasn’t really listening. She couldn’t focus on the words, just the rhythm of Alya’s voice, the way it swelled and ebbed like waves.

Her body was betraying her, shaking with the overload, with the unnatural energy that crackled beneath her skin, with the sheer exhaustion that dragged her down like an anchor tied to her feet.

Faster, better, perfect—the mantra that had lodged itself into her brain, that drove her forward even when she could feel her body breaking under the strain.

If she just pushed a little harder, if she just kept going a little longer, maybe she would finally be enough.

But right now, all she could hear was the frantic pounding of her own heart, and all she could feel was the weight of her own tired bones dragging her deeper, deeper into the dark.

And still, she smiled.

Nino pulls Marinette and Alya aside during lunch, his face set with the kind of urgency that immediately makes Marinette feel like she’s missed about half the conversation already.

Her brain, foggy and tangled from the night of no sleep, is lagging behind as she blinks at him. What now? She’s barely functioning, barely alive, and here comes Nino with his serious face.

Alya and Nino talk, their voices bouncing back and forth like a ping-pong match, but it’s all a blur to her—words overlapping, too fast, too much.

Alya’s throwing in snark, Nino’s deflecting with some witty comeback, and Marinette’s standing there, trying not to visibly check out.

Get a room, nearly slips out of her mouth, the words dancing on the tip of her tongue, but then Nino’s expression changes.

Something shifts, and his eyes are fixed on her with a kind of intensity that cuts through her fog

“We gotta do something about Adrien,” he says, voice low, conspiratorial.

Marinette, still stuck in mental quicksand, just blinks at him. Adrien? Huh? Her brain is in a full-on glitch, lagging so hard she swears she can hear the internal dial-up noise trying to connect.

Nino’s just staring at her, waiting for something—a response, a reaction, anything—but all she’s got is static. It’s like trying to start a car in the dead of winter: it sputters, makes some noise, but doesn’t go anywhere.

She just gives him a vague, half-hearted “Uh…” and hopes that will suffice. It doesn’t.

Nino gives her this look, like he’s genuinely concerned but also doesn’t want to touch whatever’s going on with her brain right now with a ten-foot pole.

The kind of look that says, Dude, are you good? But instead of asking, he just steamrolls ahead because clearly Marinette is not in a place to have this conversation with herself, let alone with him.

“It’s Adrien’s birthday today,” Nino says, dropping the bomb with a weight that barely registers in Marinette’s overstimulated mind.

Adrien’s birthday. The words hang there, floating in the space between them, and Marinette’s mind takes a full ten seconds to process.

It’s like someone’s thrown a wet blanket over her thoughts. Birthday? Adrien? Today? She’s still stuck on huh? while the rest of the world moves on.

“And his old man isn’t gonna do anything for him,” Nino continues, his voice full of frustration, like this is a thing he’s had to come to terms with but still refuses to accept. “He’s never had a real birthday party, you know? Like, never.”

This manages to cut through her mental haze just enough for her to focus. Adrien—golden, sunshine Adrien—never had a birthday party? The concept slams into her like a freight train. Something in her stomach tightens, like someone’s wringing it out like a wet rag.

Alya’s already caught on, her eyes lighting up with the plan that’s forming in real-time. “Okay, got it,” she says, her voice taking on that determined edge that means trouble’s brewing. “We’re throwing sunshine boy a birthday party.”

And it all clicks for Marinette, Ohhh, right, right. Birthday party. Plan. Her head’s still half-asleep, still buzzing with the echo of too much coffee and not enough sanity, but she nods along, because yeah—Adrien deserves something.

More than something. He deserves the world, honestly, but that’s not really in her power at the moment, so they’ll start with a party.

“Right, right,” Marinette mutters, trying to sound like she’s not running on fumes. “Throw Adrien a party. Got it. Easy.”

She nearly trips over her own feet just standing there, the floor feeling a bit too far away, like the world is tilting on its axis and no one bothered to tell her.

Her heart’s still doing that weird jackhammer thing in her chest from the caffeine, and she’s pretty sure if she has one more cup, she’ll start seeing sound.

But, hey, there’s a birthday to plan, right? And for her friends, she’ll push through the madness. She’ll run herself ragged and wear her nerves down to the bone if it means giving them something that feels like warmth, like love. Like home.

Nino’s grinning now, his hands already gesturing wildly as he spits out ideas. “We can totally do it at my place! I’ve got a sound system, lights, the whole setup! And Alya, you can handle the decorations, right? And Marinette—”

Marinette’s brain latches onto her name like a lifeline, dragging her back to reality just long enough to hear him. “Yeah?” she says, trying to stay afloat, trying to focus on something other than the constant buzzing in her head.

“You’re in charge of the cake.”

The cake. Of course. Marinette nods, her brain screaming at her to get it together because this is for Adrien.

Her pulse is still pounding, her skin crawling with the leftover energy from last night’s caffeine binge, but she straightens her spine, puts on her best I’ve-got-this face, and flashes a thumbs-up.

“Cake. Easy. I’m on it.”

Alya’s watching her, though, and even through the chaos in her head, Marinette can feel her best friend’s eyes boring into her, full of quiet concern.

Marinette knows that look. Knows that Alya’s piecing things together, filing away every detail like a detective solving a case.

But Alya says nothing, because now’s not the time for an intervention. Now’s the time for action, for saving Adrien’s birthday, and Alya’s always known how to read the room.

“Alright then, it’s settled!” Nino declares, his excitement contagious, even through Marinette’s half-dead haze. “This is gonna be epic.”

Epic. Sure. Marinette’s heart skips a beat—maybe literally, she’s not sure anymore—and she forces another smile, brighter than the sun.

And then startles as Rose, who overhears, her big eyes lighting up like she’s just stumbled upon the best-kept secret in the universe. “Wait, you guys are planning a surprise birthday party for Adrien?”

Her voice is bright, too bright, like sunshine that’s a little too eager to break through the clouds, and Marinette, still wobbling between the realm of caffeine induced alertness and the deep pit of sleep deprivation, just nods. Alya and Nino chime in, confirming, and Rose beams like she’s never been happier in her life.

“Oh, we should get the whole class in on it.” Marinette blurts, the thought barely registering before she said it.

Nino and Alya look at her like she’s a genius and also a little bit insane (which, let’s be real, she totally is at this point). “Yeah, why not?” Alya grins. “The more the merrier.”

So it begins.

The class catches wind, and it’s like setting off fireworks in the middle of a crowded room. Everyone’s talking over each other, excited, planning, plotting.

Even Chloé—of all people—decides to join in, and Marinette watches, utterly bemused, as Chloé is mostly civil for the time being, her usual venom somehow diluted by the collective energy of “Let’s make Adrien happy.”

There’s something so surreal about it all, like the universe tilted on its axis when she wasn’t paying attention, and now Chloé Bourgeois is helping plan a birthday party for someone other than herself.

What kind of upside-down world has she woken up into?

Marinette can’t help but reflect on how far they’ve come. The class, Adrien, all of them.

When Adrien first joined, it was awkward, painful almost, the way everyone kept their distance, eyeing him like he was an alien that landed in their midst. And, honestly? They kind of thought he was.

The whole being-best-friends-with-Chloé thing didn’t help either. They thought he was stuck-up, standoffish, that he believed himself to be above them, when really, he was just painfully awkward.

Marinette remembers how hard it was to see through that, how she’d doubted him at first. But then , he helped her, went through the trouble to walk her home in the rain, even kept quiet, a harbour of calm,  for her sake.

Nino was there for him—Nino, with his effortless charm and easygoing nature, who saw right through Adrien’s exterior like it was nothing but a poorly drawn curtain.

She and Nino, they chipped away at the walls Adrien didn’t even know he’d built around himself, and slowly, the rest of the class followed.

And now, here they were—protecting him like he was the class’s collective ray of sunshine. Because that’s what Adrien was.

And they all knew it.

They all felt it, this silent, shared understanding that Adrien was something precious, and that he lived under a shadow that stretched far beyond his own life.

His father. The thought itself sends a shiver down Marinette’s spine, like a cold gust of wind slicing through her. Gabriel Agreste, the man made of ice and stone, the man who had cast his son into a world without warmth.

They didn’t know much, but from the offhand— concerning— remarks he made. Her blood boils just thinking about it. 

And now? His dad hadn’t even planned anything for his birthday—nothing.

No celebration, no breaks, nothing. Just another day.

Her breath comes faster, heart pounding too hard, too fast, like a runaway train that’s about to derail. Maybe it’s the lack of sleep, maybe it’s the caffeine still pulsing through her veins like liquid adrenaline, but Marinette feels wild.

A manic energy seizes her, pulling her thoughts into a spiral of indignation, frustration, and—if she’s being honest—rage.

But instead, she channels it all into the party planning, pouring every ounce of her buzzing, frayed energy into making sure that this, at least, is perfect.

That Adrien has one day, one day, where he can breathe freely, where the weight of the world doesn’t press down on his shoulders.

The class is in chaos—organised chaos—but Marinette thrives in it. The decorations, the cake, the little details that make a party special—it all starts coming together in her mind like a puzzle that only she can solve.

The room is buzzing with the energy of something unfinished, something cracked open and left raw. They’ve spent hours planning the perfect party—hours of chaos and laughter.

"My father won’t allow it.”

The words hang heavy in the air, a quiet heartbreak that reverberates through their bones. It’s as if the world had tilted, the weight of his silent suffering pressing down on them all.

Marinette feels her chest constrict, her breath catching as the rage ignites somewhere deep inside her.

No break.

No celebration.

Just endless obligations, like a machine set to perform until it burns itself out.

The modelling contracts, the photoshoots, the constant demands for perfection—they are swallowing Adrien whole. And now, on the day that was supposed to belong to him, the day meant to remind him he was human, not just an image or a brand, even that had been stolen away.

Nino’s voice breaks the silence first, raw with frustration. “Dude, you can’t just let him control your life like this. Come on, it’s your birthday! You deserve at least one day for yourself!”

Adrien’s response is softer, the crack in his voice barely audible. "I... I wish I could, but I can’t. You know how he is.”

That. Right there. The quiet resignation, the way Adrien had just... accepted it. It sends Marinette spiralling.

The call ends, and the air feels thick with unsaid words, with anger and helplessness.

Alya mutters under her breath, but her voice is sharp, venomous. “It’s so wrong. He’s not even allowed to celebrate his own birthday?”

Her eyes flash with the same fire burning inside Marinette, but there’s nothing they can do. Nothing but feel this rage that coils tighter and tighter around their hearts.

And then there’s Nino. Nino, who can never just let things go, who loves too deeply and cares too much to stand by and watch his best friend unravel. His jaw is clenched, fists balled at his sides.

Marinette can almost feel the tension rolling off him like waves crashing against stone, and she knows what’s coming before he even says it.

“I’m going over there,” Nino says, voice hard and determined.

Alya’s head snaps up, eyes wide with alarm. “Nino, don’t. You know it won’t end well.”

Marinette steps forward, shaking her head, her thoughts frantic, disjointed. “He’s... he’s too stubborn, Nino. You’ll just make things worse.”

But even as she says it, a part of her wants him to go, wants someone to do something—anything—because sitting here, feeling this helpless is unbearable.

But Nino doesn’t hear them, doesn’t care. His eyes are burning with a single-minded determination. It’s reckless, it’s dangerous, but it’s Nino, and when Nino cares, he cares.

He looks at Marinette, at Alya, and for a moment, he softens, but the resolve in his eyes remains unshaken.

“I’m not gonna just sit here and do nothing,” he says, voice shaking but steady. “He deserves better than this. He deserves... to be happy, just for once. I can’t—” His voice cracks, just a little, and that breaks something in Marinette, too.

She reaches out to him, her fingers brushing against his arm, trying to pull him back from the edge.

“Nino, please. If you go…”

But he’s already turning away, already too far gone, too deep in his love for Adrien, too deep in his desire to protect. “I have to,” is all he says before he’s out the door.

And then, he’s gone.

She wants to follow him, to stop him, but at the same time, she wants him to succeed. She feels a thousand emotions at once and she doesn’t know what to do with any of them.

Alya is pacing, muttering curses under her breath, her hands fidgeting restlessly. The clock ticks louder in the silence, each second stretching on too long, each heartbeat pounding in her chest like it’s about to burst.

She wonders what Nino will find when he gets there.

Will he get through to Adrien? Will Gabriel even let him in?

She doesn’t know.

And that’s the worst part—the not knowing. It’s tearing her apart from the inside out, this frantic, helpless feeling that gnaws at her like a beast with sharp, gnashing teeth.

But they wait. Because that’s all they can do now.

Nino stands at the gates of the Agreste mansion. The sky above him is a bruise, the sun slipping behind dark clouds, casting everything in a gray half-light.

It feels wrong.

The whole day feels wrong, like the universe itself is bending under the weight of something about to break.

He pushes forward anyway, through the gates and up the stone steps. Each step echoes through his bones, louder than the last, as if the very ground beneath him is warning him to turn back, to leave this place before the darkness swallows him whole.

But he doesn’t.

He can’t.

Not when Adrien’s smile is slipping away with every day that passes, not when his best friend’s light is dimming in the shadows of this house.

Adrien watches from the top of the staircase inside, eyes wide and dark, like the abyss itself.

His heart hammers in his chest, each beat a question—Will this work?—but even as hope flutters weakly, there is dread pooling at his feet, seeping into his veins like ink.

His father is waiting, cold and statuesque, his presence like a monolith in the grand, suffocating hall. Nino enters, his words measured at first, careful, respectful.

He’s always been good with people, always able to read the room and adapt.

But Gabriel Agreste isn’t people. Gabriel is stone and ice, a god of indifference. His gaze, sharp and unyielding, cuts through Nino’s words before they even have a chance to take root.

"Adrien deserves a normal birthday," Nino says, voice steady, even as his pulse races. "He deserves one day to just... be a kid.”

Gabriel’s eyes narrow, his lips barely moving as he responds, "Adrien has obligations. You wouldn’t understand.”

Obligations. The word feels like a curse, hanging in the air, thick and suffocating.

Nino feels his frustration rising, bubbling beneath the surface like molten lava. He breathes, forcing calm, forcing reason.

"I get that he has responsibilities, but he’s sixteen. He needs a break. One day, that’s all I’m asking.”

Gabriel’s face is a mask of indifference, untouched by Nino’s plea. His voice drops, colder than winter, sharper than a blade. “Leave."

And that’s when something snaps inside Nino.

He’s never felt anger like this, not the slow burn of it, not the way it rises like a storm, violent and uncontrollable.

His voice shakes as he steps closer, refusing to back down, "Adrien needs this. You don’t see it, but we do. He’s drowning in everything you’re putting on him. You’re breaking him, and you don’t even care!”

Gabriel’s gaze flickers, just for a second, something darker, more dangerous surfacing. He tilts his head, almost amused, but there’s no warmth in it, only venom.

"If you do not leave now," he says slowly, methodically, "I will call security.”

The words land like blows, but Nino stands his ground, even as his heart races, even as every instinct in him screams to run.

"You don’t care about him at all, do you? He’s just a,  just a tool to you. A puppet.”

That does it. The temperature in the room drops, Gabriel’s presence towering, suffocating. Without another word, a security guard arrives, face stone, body a bulk of mass and muscle.

He drags Nino’s arms as they drag him out, forcefully pulling him away from the mansion.

Adrien, watching from the top of the stairs, feels the world unraveling around him.

He wants to scream, to throw himself down those stairs, to run to Nino and apologise, to tell him that he was right—that he is drowning, that his father is breaking him—but his feet are rooted to the ground.

He wants to move, to do something, but Gabriel’s eyes are on him now, cold and sharp, like iron shackles locking him in place.

“You will stay,” Gabriel says, voice low and final. It isn’t a command. It’s fate.

Adrien’s fists clench at his sides, nails digging into his palms until he feels the sharp sting of skin breaking.

The door slams shut, and Nino is gone.

And Adrien feels the hatred, pure and white-hot, coursing through him like a river of fire. It’s a feeling he’s known before, a heat that consumes him, that leaves nothing but ashes behind.

He’s hated his father before, in the quiet, subdued way of a child who knows better than to bite the hand that feeds him.

But this? This is different.

This hatred is alive, breathing, a beast clawing its way out of him, beating against his ribs.

He stares at his father, the man who calls himself a protector, a provider, but who has only ever been a cage.

And for the first time, Adrien feels the full weight of it—the years of silence, the years of control, the years of pretending to be something he’s not.

And he hates it. He hates him.

Gabriel turns away, dismissing Adrien like he dismisses everything that doesn’t serve his purpose, and Adrien is left standing at the top of the stairs, heart pounding, blood dripping from his palms, and the echo of Nino’s voice ringing in his ears.

“You’re breaking him, and you don’t even care.”

The truth of it slams into him, and Adrien knows, in that moment, that he’s never hated anyone more than he hates his father now.

Marinette walks beside Alya, her feet moving on autopilot, her mind distant. The cobblestones beneath her shoes feel uneven, jarring, as though the earth itself is shifting, threatening to crumble beneath her.

The air feels like cloying smoke. The city, alive with its usual bustle, presses in on her, every sound too sharp, every breath too shallow. Alya is talking, but the words blend together, a melody of concern that Marinette can’t quite focus on.

She catches fragments—too much coffee, you're running yourself ragged—but they’re lost in the spiral. There's a rhythm beneath her skin, a pulse that throbs in time with her heartbeat, but it stutters now, faltering like a record skipping, like fate itself is misaligned.

Fire spreads, licking up her lungs, burning her from the inside out. Her muscles protest, tension coiling around her like barbed wire, pulling tighter, tighter until she feels she might snap in two.

And yet, there's no source, no origin she can pinpoint. It’s as if the world is holding its breath, waiting for something to shatter.

The sensation grows unbearable, like being trapped under layers of skin that no longer fit, like wearing the wrong body. Her fingers twitch with the need to do something, to fix whatever it is that’s wrong.

But she doesn’t know what’s broken.

She only knows that something is unraveling, thread by thread, coming apart in ways that she can’t stop.

“Something’s wrong,” she whispers, almost to herself, but the words slip out like a confession.

Alya’s voice breaks through the haze, concerned but distant. "What do you mean?”

But how does Marinette explain the feeling of falling when there’s no ground beneath her feet? How does she describe the sensation of the world tilting on its axis when it looks so still? She presses her lips together, her pulse hammering in her ears, drowning out everything else.

“I don’t know,” she murmurs, brushing off the question because the truth is too intangible, too elusive.

It slips through her fingers like water, impossible to grasp, and yet—there it is, gnawing at her insides.

The streets seem too quiet, the noise of the city too far away. It feels like she’s trapped in a bubble, like everything beyond her immediate vision is dull, muted.

Her skin prickles, and every breath feels like it's fighting through the weight of something heavy and unseen.

It’s suffocating.

The sunlight above seems harsh, too bright, too blinding, stabbing into her eyes with needlepoint precision.

She closes them for a second, trying to find her balance, but the darkness behind her eyelids only amplifies the sensation of spinning, of being lost in a cyclone of thoughts that won’t stop swirling.

Alya’s voice cuts through again, “Mari, talk to me.”

But what could she say?

She feels as though the universe itself is shifting, tilting her world on its side, and yet she can’t see the cause.

Her hands tremble, a subtle shake that she hides in her pockets, but the tremor runs deeper than that. It’s in her bones, in the marrow, in her very soul.

She bites her lip, her mind spinning like a wheel with no end in sight. The urge to fix it, to find the source of the imbalance, claws at her insides like a caged beast, desperate to be free.

But she doesn’t know where to begin.

Doesn’t know how to stop the unraveling.

All she knows is that something is wrong—so wrong it feels like a wound in reality, something gaping and raw and bleeding into everything she touches.

She opens her eyes again, the city too sharp, the colours too vivid, the sounds too loud. She feels off balance, like she’s teetering on the edge of something she can’t see.

Her heart pounds in her chest, but it’s not just the coffee.

Something is wrong.

Something she can’t name.

And the worst part is, she doesn’t know if she’ll end up breaking herself to stop it.

But then she sees it—a faint shimmer in the air as though the world itself is warping. She wouldn’t have recognised it, not if she wasn’t Ladybug.

She feels it in her bones—a creaking, an aching—as if her very marrow is being pulled in opposite directions.

The weight of centuries presses down on her shoulders, and her breath hitches as the world shifts under her feet, sliding backward into an era she has never lived but now feels intimately.

The light begins to fade, as though the sun itself has abandoned Paris. Over the city, a ghastly green glow unfurls, casting shadows that swallow the city whole, blanketing every corner with a sickly, spectral hue.

In the distance, a clock ticks wildly, erratically—its gears turning backward, scrambling the natural order. Marinette glances at her own watch, eyes widening as the hands spin in reverse, slipping through the minutes as though time itself were unraveling.

Backward, always backward, she thinks, and a chill whispers up her spine, a dread that feels like it’s tugging her back in time along with the ticking. Around her, the park stretches in unnatural quietness, bathed in that sickly glow, the once-green foliage now a greyish emerald that quivers as if with breath.

The trees seem taller, older, their branches gnarled and twisted into strange, skeletal shapes that claw at the darkening twilight. Shadows creep along the pathways, trailing from one tree to the next like long, spindly fingers.

A distant chime floats through the air, tinny and warped, like a music box winding down. Her skin prickles as the sound weaves into a soft lullaby, childish and far away.

The world flickers, unstable—a kaleidoscope caught between wonder and decay. For one heartbeat, Paris blooms like an endless carnival, streets streaked with colours so vivid they hum.

But then the glow sours, turning pale, sickly, as if the vibrancy has been bled dry. The cobblestones ripple like liquid, their edges softening, sagging, folding in on themselves.

The glow—green, acidic, and alive—pours like oil across the streets, its light clinging to every surface, turning shadow into something solid, writhing.

The candy hues of the world are slick with it, and the brightness takes on the sharp sting of something poisoned. Marinette stumbles, her foot catching on a crack that wasn’t there before.

She looks up, and the streets twist.

A carousel rises where a bakery once stood, its horses peeling apart, their manes drooping in melted strands. The laughter that spills from the ride is jagged, like a breath wheezing through splintered ribs.

The cobblestones beneath her shoes seem to stick as though the ground itself doesn’t want to let her go. Ahead, a playground stretches into the horizon, impossibly large, impossibly empty.

Its swings sway gently, though there is no wind. Its slides stretch upward instead of down, spiralling into the sky in endless loops, impossible to climb or escape.

A shriek of laughter pierces the air—a child’s voice, too shrill, too long, the sound bending upward until it becomes a wail.

Marinette jerks around, heart pounding, and sees them: figures, young and small, darting through the streets. Children, their movements loose and exaggerated, their limbs almost weightless as they hop and twirl and spin.

Their faces are turned away, their features indistinct, and yet there’s something wrong in the way they move. They skip on toes that seem to float an inch above the ground, their shadows stretching long and warped behind them.

One of them turns. Her face, young and round, is painted with a smile too wide, too fixed, like a doll’s grin stitched into her skin. Her eyes—huge, glassy, and luminous with that same green glow—don’t blink.

The child opens her mouth, and instead of words, a nursery rhyme spills out, soft and lilting, looping endlessly into itself. Her shadow flickers and grows, swallowing the cobblestones.

Above, the sky churns like a child’s watercolour gone wrong—blues and yellows spilling into greens, dripping and running down the edges of the buildings.

A sun hangs there, its face cartoonish and smiling, but the smile twists, its rays curling like fingers.

She turns, and the world seems to tilt. The adults are changing too.

Their faces, which moments ago were tired or intent, are now slack, their expressions softened by a vacant, dreamy abandon.

Adults pause mid-task, their hands falling away from phones and bags, laughter bubbling up unbidden from their throats as though tugged by invisible strings.

She watches a man’s fingers uncurl from his bag, and it drops to the ground with a dull thud. His eyes lift, empty and bright, and a strange, slow giggle spills out of his mouth, raw and unfamiliar.

His hands rise as if to catch a ball, though there is none there, fingers curling and uncurling in silent play.

A woman reaches for a lamppost and swings around it, her eyes unfocused, lips moving in a child’s nonsense rhyme. Her shoes slip from her feet as she steps onto the road, her bare feet slapping against the stone with a hollow echo.

And then morph. The change, their faces melting into something more youthful, something more carefree.

They morph into children.

She sees Alya pause, her eyes going glassy. Alya’s expression loses its sharp edge of focus, her smile fading into something softer, dreamier. Her head tilts, and her voice drops to a soft murmur.

“Maybe… maybe I should join the others.” And before Marinette can reach her, Alya turns, drifting toward the shadowed areas where people have already begun to float.

They rise, suspended midair, heads lulled back, eyes closed, their mouths curved in serene, vacant smiles. Their faces hold the blissful unawareness of children lost in a playground—but there is something deeply wrong in that innocence, something vacant and eerie that raises the hair on Marinette’s arms.

Marinette steps back, and the air grows tighter, like a vice closing around her chest. She looks down at her hands. They tremble—not from fear, not from exhaustion, but from something worse.

Her fingers look smaller. The skin softer, unmarked.

A child’s hand. 

Marinette runs, but the streets seem to fold in on themselves, pulling her back toward the playground.

She looks over her shoulder, and the figures—children, adults turned, all the same now—float above the ground, faces frozen in bliss, limbs slack as though they’ve been discarded by time itself. Their eyes shine with that green light, and their smiles whisper:

Let go. Let go. Let go.

The streets shift beneath her feet, and though every step feels like wading through quicksand, she doesn’t stop. She can’t stop.

This is Nino. She’s sure of it. She doesn’t need to see his face to know; the weight in her chest tells her, pressing like an iron hand against her ribs.

Something in her—deep and ancient and aching—felt the balance shift, a fissure splitting the fragile order of things. She is woven into this, irrevocably.

The moment he turned, she felt it.

She feels it still.

The world is tilting, and she is the fulcrum.

Chat Noir stands in the middle of the fractured city, the warped skyline bearing down like a breathing thing. The world feels wrong, peeled apart and stitched back together with clumsy, childlike hands.

The shadows here don’t behave like shadows. They slither and crawl, creeping in jagged, serpentine paths. They stretch toward him, their edges luminous. The bright, bubbly veneer around him doesn’t comfort; it claws at the back of his mind, like an incessant nursery rhyme sung out of tune.

This isn’t freedom, he thinks, even as the warped laughter echoes faintly in his ears. It’s suffocating, like being trapped in a jar filled with shimmering air too thick to breathe.

He feels disconnected.

He moves through the twisted streets, the world bending and blooming in grotesque patterns as if it’s alive and watching him. 

Then he sees him.

Nevermore steps from the shadows with an unsettling grace, his movements sharp and jerky, yet fluid like a marionette dragged on invisible strings. His figure is a silhouette of nightmare—gaunt and impossibly thin, his limbs too long, his posture too rigid.

His clothes are a patchwork of textures, stitched and torn, their threads loose like veins unraveling. His face is obscured, but not fully—there are glimpses of something pale and hollow as if his features were etched lightly onto his skin and then forgotten.

Vines coil around him, dark and thorned, slithering with a life of their own. They burrow into his flesh, piercing and sprouting anew. His voice is a dissonant symphony, shifting with each word, rising high and childlike before plunging into guttural depths.

“Come play, won’t you?” Nevermore tilts his head, the movement slow and deliberate, like a bird watching prey. “No need to grow up. No more tears, no more pain, only games… forever.”

For a moment, Chat Noir can feel it—the promise behind the words. A life without grief, without guilt, without cages.

A world where he’s not Adrien Agreste, the boy shackled by his father’s expectations, by his mother’s absence. He pictures himself as a child, running through the park, unburdened by duty or consequence. The image is so vivid he can almost taste it, sweet and soft, like cotton candy melting on his tongue.

But beneath the sweetness, he tastes the rot.

He looks at Nevermore again. The vines that encase him are not growing—they are feeding.

They pierce and burrow, their thorns drinking deeply, sapping the light from within. The doll-like clothing, the eerie movements—this isn’t innocence. It’s decay, wrapped in the guise of play.

Chat Noir forces a grin, his signature smirk masking the unease bubbling beneath the surface.

“You know,” he says, spinning his staff in a lazy arc, “this shadow routine of yours? Very on brand. But I think you’re casting it a little too wide.”

He pauses, dodging the whip of a thorned vine that snaps just inches from his face. “Not to be in the dark here, but what’s the endgame? Eternal recess?”

Nevermore’s laugh slices through the air like a shard of glass. It lingers as though the world itself is mocking him. The akuma tilts his head, the motion too smooth, too deliberate, and his lips curl into a jagged approximation of a smile. 

“Games are all there is,” he says, his voice lilting and uneven. “No rules, no punishments, no ‘responsibilities.’ Isn’t that what everyone wants?”

Chat Noir tightens his grip on his staff, the metal cool against his palm. “What I want is to get my city back,” he snaps. “So let’s cut the cryptic act and fix this mess.”

Nevermore’s grin widens, impossibly large, a rictus of mockery.

“Fix?” he echoes, his tone mocking. “Why would I ‘fix’ perfection? Adults lie. Adults leave. They break promises. Here, in Neverland, there are no adults.” 

There is something familiar about that. It tickles the back of his mind.

“You’re wrong,” he says instead, his voice edged with steel. “There’s no perfection in running away. You can’t build a world on broken pieces and expect it to stand.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” Nevermore hisses, his voice darker now, a storm cloud ready to break. “This isn’t about building. It’s about breaking. Breaking free. You want to chain this city back to the way it was? That’s the real prison.” 

He feels the sickening weight of recognition clawing at him, but he pushes it down.

“Big talk for someone who’s playing puppet master,” Chat Noir shoots back, his voice harder now.

He lunges forward, his staff arcing toward Nevermore’s chest. But the shadow moves faster, fluid and sinuous, rising like smoke to block the strike.

The clash reverberates through the air—metal against something slick and unyielding, like glass slicked with oil.

The shadow coils around Chat Noir’s staff, dragging it down, forcing him to stumble.   He forces a smirk to curl his lips.

"I’ve gotta say," he quips, his voice trembling just slightly, “your décor really sticks out. But hey, I can vine with it.”

Nevermore doesn’t laugh. The shadows slither closer, curling and uncurling like claws, their jagged edges scraping across the cobblestones with an audible hiss.

The vines lash out, sharp and sinuous, their movements too fast to track. Chat twirls his staff, deflecting one, two strikes, but a third catches him at the edge of his ribs, bruising through his suit.

“Yikes! That’s gonna leave a mark,” he grits out, stumbling back. He forces himself upright, his grin brittle but unyielding. “You’ve got some serious commitment to this haunted-house vibe, but I think it’s time someone cut you down to size.”

He lunges, staff extending as he swings it in a wide arc. The air hums with its momentum, but Nevermore is faster. He twists away, his body bending at unnatural angles, the patchwork of his frame rippling like fabric caught in the wind.

With a flick of his wrist, the vines surge forward again, and this time they catch Chat Noir squarely in the chest. The impact sends him flying backward, the world blurring as he crashes into a crumbling lamppost.

The iron groans as it bends under his weight, the sound resonating like a death knell. The breath is forced from his lungs, leaving him gasping, his staff rolling out of reach.

Nevermore looms closer, his voice lilting with mockery, “Oh, kitty, did you fall? Let me pick you back up—no, wait, I think you’d look better on the ground.”

Chat Noir struggles to rise, his limbs heavy and aching. The world feels off-kilter, like a carnival ride spinning too fast. He thinks of Ladybug and scowls, unsure if he wants her here or not.

Always so bossy, always acting like she knows best. She didn’t even bother trying to meet up with him after the last battle. What’s the point? The last thing he needs is her seeing him like this.

As if summoned by his thoughts, she appears—a streak of red and black slicing through the corrupted air. Her yoyo spins like a blazing comet, its arc cutting clean through the encroaching vines.

She’s striking—blazing red against the sickly world. She lands between him and Nevermore, her stance firm, her eyes aflame with purpose. He’s unusually annoyed with how flawless and put-together she always is, like she’s stepped out of some hero catalogue.

“Nino,” she calls out, her voice steady but tinged with desperation. “I know you’re in there. This isn’t who you—come back.”

Nevermore halts, his head tilting as if considering her words. For a moment, the vines retract slightly, their movement sluggish, hesitant.

But then he laughs, a sound that cracks and distorts, jagged as shattered glass. “Nino?” he echoes, his voice dipping low, then rising into something childlike and mocking. “There’s no Nino here. Only Nevermore. And Nevermore doesn’t leave.”

Chat Noir’s stomach drops.His breath stutters, and for a moment, he feels like the ground beneath him is crumbling. Nino.

“I don’t believe that,” she says, her voice steady and unyielding. “I know you’re still in there. This isn’t over—not yet.”

Nevermore snarls, and the vines lash out, their movements wild and chaotic. “That part of me is gone!” he bellows, his voice reverberating with an ancient, unnatural power. “Why fight it? He’s free now. Free from pain, free from fear. And you… you could be free too.”

He leans forward, the shadows coiling tighter around him. “All you have to do… is give me your Miraculous.”

The vines shoot toward Ladybug, their thorns gleaming, but she moves like a dancer, her yoyo slicing through the air with precision. She doesn’t flinch, doesn’t falter.

Chat Noir forces himself to his feet, the pain in his side a dull throb. He retrieves his staff, his grip tightening around it as he steadies himself.

The vines surge forward again, and this time, Chat Noir is ready.

Ladybug wasn’t sure which was worse—Stormy Weather or this. Logic dictated it had to be the former.

After all, the casualties, the broken bodies and her own fracturing soul in the face of so much destruction should have made that clear. But this—this was different.

This was not a test of strength or endurance. It was a test of the mind, a quiet unravelling, a temptation so sweet it left rot at the edges of her thoughts.

The shadow slithered, slick and unnatural, darting toward her with a speed that made her heart thunder in her chest. She dodged, barely keeping pace, her breath sharp and uneven.

The whispers nipped at her ears, coaxing, cooing, Come back. Relinquish the fight. Relinquish yourself.

They were like songs from a past she could only half-remember—ripe peaches on warm afternoons, the sticky tang of lemon popsicles pooling at her fingertips as they melted too fast.

Simpler times, before rosehips had bloomed in her young heart. Before the legacy found her, before it demanded so much.

She bit down on the memory, forcing herself back to the moment, forcing herself to dodge. Again. Always dodging, always running.

Ahead of her, Chat Noir fought like he was born to this chaos. He was rage and beauty, the sharpened edge of destruction honed into something almost poetic.

The vines writhed around him, snapping like live wires, and he moved through them like a tempest, every swing of his staff a declaration.

His movements were too aggressive, too reckless, but there was a feral grace to them, and she felt an unwilling awe clawing at her chest.

He was destruction personified, brilliant and terrible, and she couldn’t look away.

She was defending his back before she even realised she’d moved, her yoyo snapping out with precision, cutting a vine and the shadow in their path.

It recoiled, twisting back on itself like a serpent of ink, its form slick and endless. She cursed under her breath as frustration licked at her, fire rising in the back of her mind.

“Chat, stop being so reckless!” she snapped, breathless. He didn’t respond, didn’t even turn, his focus locked on tearing through the vines.

They hissed and shrieked as his staff crashed through them, and with every swing, he seemed to grow angrier, his movements heavier, less controlled.

The shadow lunged again, and this time she was ready, her yoyo slicing through its centre, though it split only to reform moments later.

She landed on her feet, legs trembling beneath her, her fists clenched so tight that her nails bit into her palms.

“You’re not making this easy,” she mutters, a tremor in her voice that she hoped Chat Noir couldn’t hear. The shadow loomed above her now, its form shifting and slippery.

It doesn’t need to be easy, a whisper coiled in her mind, something ancient, something cruel. Just give in. You’re tired, aren’t you? Tired of fighting?

Behind her, Chat Noir moved like a storm unbound, reckless and raw, his staff crashing into everything in his path.

It wasn’t precision—it was fury.

She could feel it radiating off him like heat, blistering and directionless.

“Chat!” she called, her voice sharp, cutting through the chaos. “We need to fall back and regroup!”

He didn’t stop. Didn’t even glance her way. Instead, he struck again, his staff cracking through a vine that lashed toward him.

“We don’t have time for plans!” he snapped, his voice low, brimming with anger. “We need to finish this now!”

Ladybug paused, dodging another shadow with a twist of her body, her yoyo snapping taut around its form.

Her frown deepened, her grip tightening.

“You’re being reckless!” she shot back, dragging the shadow down and binding it momentarily. “If you keep throwing yourself at Nevermore like this, you’ll get yourself killed!”

He doesn’t answer.

She sighs through her nose as the shadows surged once more, but she moved on instinct, snapping her yoyo out to deflect them.

She leapt toward him, throwing up a golden shield just as a wave of twisting vines crashed toward his side.

The shield held, shimmering like sunlight on water, but she could feel the strain immediately—her limbs trembling, her breath hitching.

It drained her, pulling at her reserves like a leech, but she pushed through it. Focus.

The warped city loomed around them. Sickly vibrant and moulted rot, the distant ticking of a clock grated against her ears, relentless and maddening.

Ladybug’s gaze darted through the chaos, searching, her breaths coming sharp and shallow. And then—she saw it.

A clocktower loomed in the distance, its silhouette jagged and monstrous. It wasn’t just a structure—it was alive. Vines snaked up its surface, pulsing faintly like veins under taut skin.

Its face was warped, its gears grinding against one another with an unbearable shriek. Chains hung from its sides like sinew, rattling with every ominous tick.

The pendulums swung in jerking, unnatural motions, too fast, too slow, as if time itself had fractured.

Her earrings hummed, a warmth tingling through her brain.

Ladybug’s gaze snapped back to Nevermore. Hidden beneath the writhing, thorn-like vines coiling around his body, she saw it—a pocket watch, shattered and grotesque.

Its glass was cracked, fissures spreading across its face like a spider’s web, and its tarnished metal gleamed faintly.

It was alive, she realised. The hands twitched and jerked as if in agony, moving out of sync with the relentless ticking that emanated from it.

The sound grated against her ears, sharp and irregular, like the dying gasp of something ancient and cruel. Shadows seeped from the watch like spilled ink, coiling around Nevermore, feeding his power.

There. That’s it.

“Chat!” she called, her voice sharp with urgency. “The pocket watch—it’s on him! That’s where the akuma is!”

Chat Noir didn’t respond immediately, his movements wild and furious as he struck at Nevermore, forcing him back step by step.

His staff collided with the shadowed vines, sparks flying, but Nevermore hardly faltered. She clenched her jaw, frustration bubbling beneath her skin, but she couldn’t afford to waste time.

Her earrings hummed, their rhythm steady against the chaos, and she let herself breathe, deeply, sharply, ignoring the fire licking at her spine.

She summoned her Lucky Charm, and it landed in her hand with a faint shimmer—a spindle, delicate and unassuming. She turned it over in her palm, her mind racing.

It was almost laughable, how fragile it looked.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” she muttered, her voice tinged with desperation.

But the hum in her earrings grew louder and the world tilts. Her gaze locked on the clocktower again, and something clicked. She straightened, her grip on the spindle.

Think, think, think.

The spindle hums in her hand, a quiet pulse, as if alive, as if aware.

She closes her eyes, letting the weight of the moment press against her ribs, and thinks back to Tikki’s voice, soft yet unyielding, beneath the silver gaze of the moon.

“To master creation,” Tikki had said, her voice the belled whisper of fading dawn, “is to understand its core—not to destroy, but to unravel, reshape, and restore.”

The moonlight had painted them both in shades of pale gold and endless blues. Tikki’s eyes glimmered with the kind of wisdom that lived in the marrow of stars, her small frame brimming with truths too vast to fully hold.

Every curse, every spell, every bit of anger or hope was a thread, a single strand in the infinite. And every thread, no matter how tangled, how frayed, could be pulled, teased apart and rewoven.

Rewritten.

Her gaze flicked to the clocktower, the grotesque monument pulsating in the distance. Its vines writhed like snakes, the tick tock gurgles through carousel chimes and eerie giggle.

Creation doesn’t overpower—it undoes.

She turned to Chat Noir, who stood a few feet away, panting from his relentless assault on Nevermore. His shoulders were taut, his body coiled like a spring ready to snap.

“Chat,” she called out, her voice cutting through the din of the battle. He paused, glancing over his shoulder, his eyes dark and stormy.

“I have a plan,” she said, stepping closer. Her words were steady, but there was an urgency beneath them, like a drumbeat growing louder.

“I need you to keep Nevermore distracted. Keep him focused on you, no matter what.” He nods, just barely, lips curled and body poised to attack. A feral, wild energy lining his muscles.

She adds later, a faint afterthought, her mind still focused on the beaming clock tower. “Just… don’t get yourself killed. Please.”

She doesn’t wait for his response, her yoyo snapping out to vault her into the air. The city blurred around her, the warped shifting world rushing past as she headed toward the clocktower.

The spindle hummed in her grip, the vibrations growing stronger with each passing second. The fire echoed brighter, and she let it lead her.

The oppressive smell of damp earth and decaying metal filled her lungs as she approached the clocktower. The ticking sound grew louder like a heartbeat struggling to keep pace.

Vines lashed out as she landed, but her yoyo snapped around them, pulling them taut before they could reach her. The clocktower loomed above her like spindles reaching to the heavens.

Chains rattled like whispers of the condemned, and the pendulums swung in erratic, jerking motions.

Her steps were slow but steady as she approached the clocktower. Each movement felt guided. She stood at the heart of the clocktower, its pulse a living, suffocating thing.

This was where the magic was thickest, a disgusting parasitic thing that clawed at her bones with steel nails.

She closed her eyes and reached out. She stretched beyond her body, slipping into the fabric of the spell. It was a tapestry, woven from strands of Nevermore’s despair and Nino’s distorted hopes.

Each thread vibrated with raw emotion—anger, longing, fear—all tangled together in a parasitic snarl that fed off the world it had ensnared.

The spell wasn’t just magic; it was a living, writhing thing, clinging to reality like ivy choking a tree.

When she opened her eyes, the magic revealed itself in radiant hues. It exhaled around her, soft as the whisper of dawn breaking against a restless sea.

A shield of gold and crimson wrapped her like a half-remembered dream, its edges fraying into strands of liquid light—  shimmering trails of fireflies, their light soft but insistent.

Beyond, the dark unfolded in slow, viscous waves. It was black and bruised violet, alive in the way that rot hums beneath the bark of a dying tree.

It bled across the gears and chains of the clocktower, its pulse heavy and uneven, as though time itself struggled to breathe.

The broken pocket watch at its core quivered, the cracks in its face glistening like open wounds. The darkness threaded through its shattered hands, twisting, burrowing, anchoring itself with a sickly devotion.

The spindle in her hand warmed, its glow gentle but unyielding, like the first rays of dawn cutting through the night. Ladybug stepped forward, her breath steady, her resolve unwavering.

She pressed the spindle against the heart of the tower, and it sank in with a soft, resonant hum. The light flared golden, tendrils of magic extending from the spindle like roots seeking water.

They reached into the gears, slipping between the corrupted threads.

And the spell fought back.

The shadowed vines recoil, their movements sharp and skittering, like wounded beasts dragging themselves from the light. A low, guttural hiss spills from their depths, alive with malevolence.

She gritted her teeth as Nevermore’s emotions flooded her, threatening to drown her in their depth.

This is not mine, she reminded herself. These feelings are his. But they were so sharp, so overwhelming—like shards of glass scraping against her soul.

The vines writhe, shrieking without sound, their greenish glow pulsing in time with the clock’s anguished groan.

The unweaving feels sacred and violent all at once. Each pull of her magic is a hammer striking an anvil, every strand a spark against the night. She can feel the threads of her own soul thinning, fraying, as though she’s tethered to this fight more deeply than she understands.

Each turn of the spindle sends a thrum of power through her, and with it, ghostly impressions claw at her mind: a boy’s echoing grief, his loneliness a storm, his resentment a tide pulling everything under. 

She thought of balance. She thought of Nino—not as Nevermore, but as himself. The spindle glowed brighter, the golden tendrils growing stronger. They wrapped around the shadowy vines, not to strangle them, but to dissolve their grip.

The vines falter.

Their edges turn brittle, flaking into dark ash that falls away like charred paper in a soft breeze.  The gears stutter, their rhythm erratic but beginning to settle, tentative as a bird testing broken wings.

But the heart of the curse—the knot—is still there. It looms before her, a beating thing that resists her magic with the ferocity of a beast cornered. It is thick and impenetrable, its surface gleaming with a sickly sheen, as if drenched in oil. 

She pushes forward.

It resists her magic, pulling at the golden threads as though trying to unravel her in return.  The golden light spirals and binds, growing brighter with each passing moment. 

The knot shudders, trembles, then begins to unravel, thread by stubborn thread. It comes apart slowly, painfully. Ladybug feels it break inside her, the release a violent, aching thing that leaves her breathless.

The smell of burning flesh lingers of her tongue, heavy with an unspoken prayer, a churchyard quiet before the toll of the bell. 

The clock stops ticking.

The golden threads, now dimmed, seem to hum softly in the silence, a prayer left unsaid.

The world inhales. fate weaves, and creation smiles.

Chat Noir felt it, the shift, the moment Ladybug’s plan worked. The magic unraveled, dissolving like smoke on the wind, the shadows and vines fraying and collapsing into nothingness.

It was beautiful, that unraveling. So soft, so gentle. But it wasn’t the softness that burned into his mind. It was the sound—the sound of Nevermore’s scream.

It tore through him, a guttural sound that clawed at his chest, a screeching plea that seemed to echo through his bones. The scream was a death knell. It was the sound of breaking, of finality.

And then—then, there was silence. But the silence wasn’t peaceful. It wasn’t soothing. It was an emptiness, a hollow that stretched too wide, too deep, too far.

Chat Noir seized the moment, a raw instinct surging within him. His body moved before his mind could catch up, a blur of black and green as he lunged forward.

The pocket watch was undefended and within reach as his extended claws caught the dying light of the city’s ruin. A violent burst of energy exploded and in an instant, the pocket watch was gone.

For a heartbeat, everything stopped.

The air was still. The vines and shadows faded from Nevermore, and in his place was Nino. He staggered, his mind lost in the haze of what had just happened. Confusion clouded his features, then horror.

Chat Noir’s heart cracked as he saw Nino’s expression falter, his gaze shifting from the destruction surrounding them to the remains of himself.

In that moment, everything shifted.

Nino collapsed, his legs folding beneath him like a collapsing building. His hands grasped at the shattered earth, but nothing in the world could hold him now.

The guilt, relentless and absolute, coiled around Chat Noir’s chest like an iron band. Seeing Nino like this—broken, defeated—was a weight he couldn’t bear, because deep down, he knew: it was his fault. His fault that Nino was here, undone, akumatized.

“Nino…” The name slipped from his lips, small, barely audible against the ruins that surrounded them. “Look at me. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

But Nino’s gaze, glassy and unfocused, refused to meet his. His eyes focused on the remains of the world around them. 

His chest rose and fell too quickly, too unevenly, like a bird trapped beneath glass, wings beating frantically against an invisible barrier. 

“Breathe,” Chat Noir whispered. His voice wavered, lost in the tremor of the moment, but he stepped close.

The silence screamed between them, pierced only by the faint rasp of Nino’s breaths.

In. Out. In. Out.

Each one sounded thinner.

“Breathe with me,” Chat Noir urged, though his own lungs felt constricted, his own breaths shallow and strained.

He inhaled deeply, audibly, letting the sound fill the space between them. “Like this. Just like this.”

Nino didn’t respond, his eyes wide and glazed still taking in the city. Chat noir moved in his line of sight.

Slowly, Chat Noir’s hand moved, pressing gently over Nino’s heart, feeling the wild, erratic beat beneath his palm. Too fast. Too fast. Slow down. Please slow down.

He leaned closer, his forehead brushing against Nino’s, their breaths tangling in the air between them.

“You’re here,” he whispered, his voice raw, almost pleading. “You’re still here. With me. Just… hold on.”

“I’m sorry,” Nino choked out, the words like splintered glass. “I didn’t mean to— I just wanted—”

“You don’t have to apologise.” Chat Noir’s voice broke, heavy with all the things he wished he could say. “This wasn’t you. This wasn’t your fault.”

But in the spaces between his words, guilt whispered its truths. It was mine. It was mine. It was always mine.

Marinette collapses into herself, the transformation unraveling like the last gasp of a star. She hits the ground, a heap of trembling limbs, her body folding under the weight of exhaustion.

The cure’s effect is instantaneous, yet she doesn’t feel it at first. Instead, there is a painful stillness. Her limbs feel stretched thin, taut like brittle stems bending under frost.

Every muscle trembles, trembling like petals in a gale, and her breath is shallow, coming in gasps that rasp against her throat like wind through dry reeds.

She doesn’t notice the injuries at first—not consciously. But they seep into her awareness, one by one, like blood soaking through white cloth. There’s the phantom sensation of glass embedded in her hands. 

Her ribs feel like wilting branches. Breathing sends sharp stabs of pain shooting through her chest. Her collarbone throbs if the bone itself is trying to break free from her skin.

Her head pounds, the rhythm of it matching the unsteady flutter of her heart, each pulse a hammer striking against her skull. Bruises blossom across her body, dark and tender as crushed violets.

The taste of blood and lightening linger on her tongue sharply. Her nerves feel raw, like wires stripped of insulation.

She wonders, through the haze, if this is what it means to bear such power—the toll etched into her bones, the legacy carved into her skin.

How many more battles will leave her like this?

How many more times can she pick herself up when her body feels like this broken, fragile thing, barely capable of holding her spirit?

She thinks of those who came before her. How did they bear this? How did they carry the weight of saving the world when the cost was this—a body battered, a soul left aching?

Tikki flits around her, her voice filled with worry, but Marinette doesn’t hear it. The kwami’s presence is a blur at the edges of her vision, a red flicker like poppies blooming in a charred field.

Marinette’s gaze is unfocused, staring at nothing, her thoughts consumed by the daunting bite of the rhythmic chanting of legacy, legacy, legacy.

That night Marinette dreams of half bloomed roses burnt and wilted, of a girl clad in red armour, her movements swift but her face a blur, a smear of agony and resolve.

She dreams of a death that haunts her waking hours, a death she has carried for as long before she received her miraculous.

She feels scabbed and scoured, as though the battlefield has marked her, claimed her as its own. Her body is a shrine made of lillies and chrysanthemums.

Her fate was a crown of martyrdom and a funeral pyre.

Destiny is a cruel hand, and it has written her name in suffering.

When she awakens, it is before dawn. The sky outside her window yawns, an endless, depthless void, unbroken by stars. The room is heavy with the kind of silence that feels alive.

She blinks, the weight of the dream still coiled in her chest like a serpent, its scales dragging against her ribs with every shallow breath. Her body is pressed into the ground, stiff and aching.

A pillow beneath her head, a blanket draped over her—it feels foreign, as if someone else had arranged her like a relic in a tomb.

Tikki slumbers beside her, her faint breaths stirring the strands of Marinette's hair. Marinette tries to move. Her limbs creak in protest, every joint grinding like rusted gears.

Pain flares sharp and bright in her ribs, and she hisses, her fingers curling against the floor. When she finally stands, the room tilts and her vision blacks out, stars blooming behind her eyelids in bursts of blinding white.

Instinctively, she gropes for support, her hand planting itself on the cool, worn surface of her desk. Her throat burns dry as sand, and she wonders, with the detached logic of someone teetering on exhaustion, if she could take Advil and Efferalgan at the same time.

Two of each, she decides, fumbling for the bottles. Was it healthy? Probably not. Would she overdose? Hopefully not.

The pills stick to the back of her throat as she dry swallows them, resisting the urge to cough. The sharp, chemical taste lingers, acrid and bitter, but she ignores it, instead reaching for her phone.

The cold light of the screen stabs into her headache, making her wince. 3:57, the numbers glare back at her, stark and merciless. Beneath them, a stream of texts and two missed calls from Alya.

Marinette lets the phone slip from her fingers and back onto the desk with a dull clatter, the sound like distant thunder in her pounding skull.

She wonders if her parents checked on her while she lay unconscious on the floor. Probably not. If they had, she doubts she would have woken here.

She sighs, deep and shuddering, the motion pulling at the sharp stings of pain that radiate from her bruised ribs. Her legs ache, her muscles taut as pulled wire, and her skin feels tight, stretched over a latticework of scabs, cuts, and blooming bruises.

Her hands tremble as she patches herself up, her movements clumsy, the bandages sticking unevenly to her raw skin. The sterile, biting smell of antiseptic fills the air, stark against the faint iron bite of dried blood.

It’s a poor job, the wrappings frayed and loose, but it will do. It has to. The mirror catches her eye. She doesn’t want to look, but she does.

Her reflection stares back at her, pale and hollow, a face she barely recognises. Her eyes are shadowed, dark crescents carved beneath them, her lips dry and cracked.

She traces the outline of a bruise blooming across her collarbone—a deep purple, ringed with sickly yellow, like the wilting edge of a flower long past its prime.

Flowers. Her thoughts turn to them as she presses her fingers to the bruise, as if by naming it she can lessen its sting.

A garden of wounds, she thinks, blooming across her skin.

Each cut, each scab, is a thorn. Each bruise, a blossom. Her body is a graveyard of flowers. 

She showers.

Crouching on the floor, her body folds like a crushed bird, the sharp angles of her knees biting into the tender flesh of her chest. Her legs ache, burning with the prickling pain of tendons stretched too far.

The water is hot, blistering—each droplet a needle of fire stitching her skin into a patchwork of raw, reddened hues.

Pale flesh turns peach, then scarlet, then something beyond colour, as steam coils around her like a living thing.

She stays.

The heat is unbearable, yet she cannot move. Time dissolves, the sharp hiss of its descent a song without end.

The scalding stream turns tepid, then cold—icy fingers tracing lines of frost along her spine—but still, she stays.

There is an ache of roots breaking through soil, splitting the earth’s skin in their relentless search for sustenance. She feels them in her, clawing through her ribs, winding around her heart.

The shiver of leaves sharp as blades, a hunger in her stretching toward something nameless, breaking though roots and stone.

No, not hunger.

A black hole carved into the pith of her soul, an absence that devours everything it touches. She feels it pull at her, a void both silent and screaming, filling her with everything and nothing all at once.

She feels like something ripped open and left in the dark to find its own way back to the light.

Her hands tremble, clutching at nothing but the slippery air around her. Her mouth tastes of seeds, seeds she never meant to swallow.

Seeds that root themselves deep within her, curling around her spine and binding her to a path she did not choose.

The water drums against her skin, relentless. The ache grows louder. The hunger grows sharper.

She pretends she isn’t sobbing.

Her dreams are rot beneath her fingernails, nails that dig into her arms, carving scratches among the bruises.

She is terrified. She is sad. She is nothing and everything at once, a tempest tearing through a hollow shell.

Was it a villain’s hands that painted these gaping wounds, or her own blade that she drove through her ribs? She is scrubbed raw, stripped to the bone, yet the phantom grime persists.

There is dirt she can’t see under her nails, blood she feels yet the water runs clean.

She feels nothing and everything all at once—a cacophony of silence, a scream buried alive. She rocks herself gently, cradling her broken limbs to herself and pretends she isn’t hugging herself.

She pretends she isn’t sobbing.

The sound doesn’t belong to her, she tells herself—it’s the wind through the hollow spaces of her ribs, the whisper of leaves decaying in some distant wood.

Her dreams rot under her fingernails, fraying, falling apart as she digs her nails into her arms, carving lines of red among constellations of bruises.

Was it the villain who painted her wounds, crimson on pale skin, or was it her own hand?

Or was it her blade that slid between her ribs, her fingers trembling as they turned the hilt?

She doesn’t know.

She scrubs herself raw, over and over, over and over.

But the dirt stays—buried deep under her nails, clinging to her like a second, heavier skin. Blood clots in her hair, sticky and thick, no matter how many times she drenches herself in water.

The filth is not of this world; it is born of the unseen, the unsaid, the unbearable. She feels it crawling beneath her flesh, slithering between her bones. She feels nothing. She feels everything.

She rocks herself. Her broken bones ache. She cradles herself, arms wrapped tight and pretends she isn’t holding herself.

She feels rotted, hollowed out, a fruit left too long in the sun until it collapsed inward.

Perhaps she is rotting.

She remembers the deaths—too many to count. She recalls the sensation of being torn apart, and she wonders: did she ever come back? Has she been a ghost all along, haunting a body that no longer feels like her own?

She crouches there, knees pressed to her chest, until her legs go numb. The ache in her bones dulls, retreating to the edges of her awareness, but it never leaves.

She holds her breath, until her lungs quiver, until her chest tightens, until the pulse in her ears grows louder than her thoughts. She holds her breath to remember what it is to live.

She breathes, but she still doesn’t appreciate breathing.

When she finally drags herself from the shower, the water pools at her feet, clear streams weaving through the cracks in the tiles. The night, once a velvet void, has surrendered to morning, soft bluebells unfurling in the sky.

Marinette moves like a marionette with frayed strings, limbs jerking, body heavy. She packs her bag with hands that tremble, each motion deliberate and slow.

Another painkiller finds its way past her lips. It won’t help much. It never does. But she swallows it down because she must.

She rushes, always rushing.

The thought hammers in her skull, keeping pace with the dull ache in her ribs. No, Tikki. She has to go to school. There’s no time to transform, no time to pause, no time to let her hands tremble like this. Yes, she knows she’s injured, she knows she’s bleeding in ways that pills and gauze can’t fix. But please, not now. Can we hold off the lecture? Just until after school.

Her legs scream with every step, the broken bones grinding like distant thunder, but she forces herself forward. There’s no time to eat, not even to think about eating.

She grabs an energy drink from the counter and mutters a half-hearted goodbye to her parents. They’re too busy to notice, their heads bent over their work, voices hushed in shared distraction.

She tells herself it doesn’t sting.

She tells herself it never has.

She doesn’t believe it.

The streets blur as she pushes herself onward, each step like stepping through broken glass and hot coal.

Her legs trembling under the strain, her mind cursing the pharmacist who refused her the stronger painkillers.

By the time she reaches school, she’s breathless, her chest tight, her legs wobbling under her weight. But she’s on time. Barely. She slips into class, quiet as a corpse.

Alya hisses her name, sharp with worry, but Marinette pretends not to hear. She doesn’t meet her friend’s eyes, doesn’t acknowledge the quiet questions buried in her tone.

Instead, she forces her gaze toward Nino, who sits sullen and hunched. Adrien glances between them, his face clouded with worry, his gaze lingering too long on Marinette.

She winces.

Does she really look that bad?

No. It’s fine. Everything is fine.

Everything is fine.

She thinks about yesterday. A clusterfuck, she decides. But the thought doesn’t stop there. It grows roots, twisting, twisting, twisting deeper into her.

She thinks, thinks, thinks, spiralling inward, caught in the echo chamber of her own head. Her hand trembles as she pulls out her phone.

The glow of the screen is cold against her raw skin. She creates a class group chat—bar Adrien—and types the words quickly, the letters forming a lifeline she didn’t know she needed.

Hey! I was thinking we could throw a quick, impromptu birthday party for Adrien during lunch at school. We could bring some snacks, maybe a small cake or cupcakes, and make it fun. What do you think? Let me know if you’re in, and we can plan it together!

Its more enthusiastic than she actually feels, the message sits there for a moment, her thumb hovering, hesitant, before she presses send.

It feels like exhaling after holding her breath too long, a small relief she doesn’t let herself trust. Alya leans over, her eyes scanning the screen, her lips curling into a knowing smile.

Marinette braces herself. Alya nods, but there’s something sharp in her gaze, a gleam that says this isn’t over. Marinette winces, the unspoken promise of a conversation she’s too tired to have weighing heavy on her chest.

From across the room, Nino catches her eye. He nods, discreet but warm, offering her the first real smile she’s seen from him since yesterday.

It’s small, fleeting, but it presses against the cracks in her armour, and she feels it linger longer than it should.

The minutes drag. The pain hums beneath her skin, a low, ceaseless song. It’s still there, always there, but something shifts as the day unfolds. The responses begin to roll in. Plans take shape.

I’ll bring decorations.

I can grab snacks.

Who’s bringing the cake?

For a moment, she forgets the ache in her legs, the tightness in her chest, the scream lodged behind her ribs.

She forgets the rotting sensation, the way her skin feels too tight, as though her body is a cage holding something wild and dying within it.

She still doesn’t appreciate breathing. The air comes in shallow gasps, dragging against the thorns lodged in her throat. Her ribcage still feels like it might split.

But there, in the flurry of texts, in the shared purpose, in the flickers of light from her classmates’ plans, she feels something else.

For a moment—just a moment—she thinks she might be able to breathe fully. Not the jagged, clawing breath of survival, but something softer, something like living.

Adrien feels caught in a limbo. It’s like standing at the edge of a precipice, the air too still, the silence too sharp.

Inside him, there’s a scream—a low, guttural thing that doesn’t claw its way out but stays, humming in his chest like a broken record stuck on a scratch.  It lingers, long past the fall and rise of the sun.

He’s worried. So, so worried.

Nino looks sullen. Sadness pools in his expression, quiet but vast, laced with something sharper—guilt, though that’s absurd. It wasn’t Nino’s fault he was akumatized.

It was Adrien’s.

What could he say now? What comfort could he offer? The words in his head feel clumsy, their edges too rough to place gently in the space between them.

So he watches instead, his chest tight, his thoughts a cluster with no exits.

He’s worried about Marinette too.

Her presence in the room is like a ghost’s—pale, worn thin by something she won’t name. She moves like she’s dragging chains, her shoulders heavy.

She looks, Adrien thinks, like a corpse pretending to breathe.

Something shifts.

It’s subtle but he notices. Halfway through the monotony of the lesson, Nino smiles. Not the full, easy grin Adrien’s so used to, but something smaller, softer, yet alive. And it’s directed at Marinette.

She smiles back, a fleeting expression, but real enough to break through the haze around her.

Adrien’s heart lifts and sinks all at once. Relief washes over him, warm and sudden, but it’s tainted with something colder, something bitter. Envy.

What did Marinette say to Nino? Whatever it was, it worked—because Nino looks lighter now, less burdened.

His manner carries more energy, more life, as though her words stitched together something frayed inside him.

Marinette, too, looks a little better, her posture less slumped, her expression less hollow. And Adrien is thankful. So, so thankful.

But a quiet ache throbs in his chest, a longing to be the one who could fix things, to be the one who could reach them both.

He pushes the feeling down, buries it deep, and focuses on Nino. He prods him into conversation, carefully, deliberately, as though coaxing a bird back to its nest.

He asks questions—whatever comes to mind. What does atp mean? Why does Jack sit in the hallway sometimes, crouched in a box with a jacket draped over his head? The last question earns a shake of Nino’s head, though there’s humour dancing in his eyes as he answers, Stress.

Their conversation flows like water, effortless and unhurried. Somewhere along the way, Nino’s face lights up, and the conversation tumbles into music.

“Wait, hold up—you’ve never listened to rap?” Nino’s mock horror is exaggerated, but his dismay feels real.

Adrien shrugs, sheepish, as Nino whips out his phone and declares, “Alright dude, you’re listening to 21 Savage right now.”

Adrien listens intently, nodding along, trying to memorise the way Nino’s voice rises, the way his laugh tumbles out like a melody Adrien doesn’t hear often enough.

Eventually, Nino’s laughing outright, his exasperation at Adrien’s dad-level puns spilling out in groans and giggles.

Adrien leans into it, piling on more terrible jokes, each one pulling Nino further away from whatever shadow he’d been sitting in.

The relief that floods Adrien now is different. It’s warmer, steadier, without the sting of envy. He’s thankful.

So, so thankful.

Lunch comes, and Adrien expects the usual—bright chatter, their little table in the cafeteria, a place both noisy and comforting in its familiarity.

But instead, he’s led elsewhere unfamiliar, Nino guiding him with a quiet urgency, a hand on his shoulder, his voice light but insistent.

“C’mon, dude. Just trust me.”

Adrien follows, bemused but willing.

The classroom door opens, and he steps inside, only to be met with an explosion of colour and sound—a chorus of voices shouting “Happy birthday!”

Streamers cascade from the ceiling, draped in bright arcs that shimmer in the light. Balloons, soft pastels and vivid primaries, bob gently in the corners, and across the top of the room hangs a banner.

It’s colourful but harmonious, hand-painted letters in flowing calligraphy spelling out:

Happy Birthday, Adrien.

There’s a cake, modest yet beautiful, with a small “16” candle perched on top. Plates of snacks and little dishes line the tables.

The air smells faintly of frosting, sweet and rich, mingling with the faintly metallic scent of the balloons.

His classmates stand scattered across the room, faces wide with grins, their joy almost tangible in the way it radiates toward him. It hits him like a wave, warm and heavy.

Adrien feels something in his chest expand, unfurling like a flower caught in sudden sunlight.

The balloon of happiness inside him is too big now, stretching almost painfully, and he blinks rapidly as the world blurs. It takes him a moment to realise why—there are tears in his eyes.

Tears, not for sorrow or loneliness, but something new, something golden and whole and good.

He doesn’t let them fall. He swallows the knot in his throat, tries to laugh through the lump of overwhelming gratitude that threatens to choke him.

“This is—wow, this is amazing,” he says, his voice cracking just slightly. “When—when did you plan this?”

Marinette steps forward, beaming as she waves him off, her movements hurried and self-conscious.

“Today,” she says, brushing a stray hair behind her ear. “It’s not a big deal, really—it was a group effort.”

The modesty in her tone is almost laughable, especially with the way Alya’s smirking behind her. Nino nudges Adrien with his elbow, grinning.

“She started it, though,” Nino says. “We all just pitched in.”

Marinette shakes her head quickly, her words tumbling out in protest, no, it was Nino’s idea, really.

Adrien can’t stop smiling. “But—are we even allowed to do this here?”

“Miss Bustier gave us permission,” Alya chimes in. “She even helped us set it up!”

They laugh, the room buzzing with shared accomplishment, and Adrien can barely keep up with his thank-yous. His words spill out—“You shouldn’t have, really,” and “This is perfect,” and “Thank you so, so much.”

He says them so many times that they almost lose their meaning, but the sincerity in his voice makes them something new each time.

And then there are gifts.

They’re small things, simple and rushed: handmade cards with bright designs, notebooks with crisp, clean pages, scented candles that carry faint traces of lavender and pine.

Adrien holds them as though they’re the most priceless treasures he’s ever been given, his hands careful, reverent.

For the first time in as long as he can remember, he doesn’t feel alone.

The ever-present shroud of isolation, the cold weight of a life watched but untouched, feels thinner, lighter, almost gone. It’s as though someone’s cracked open the window of his tightly sealed existence, letting in the warmth of human connection.

Adrien feels happy. Truly, incandescently happy.

And he lets himself bask in it.

Chapter Text

Marinette’s room was her sanctuary, but it had begun to feel like a war room, each corner saturated with quiet desperation.

The sketches and blurry pictures hung on her corkboard told the story of her battles in jagged strokes and hastily scribbled notes.

Each page was pinned like a captured insect, wings spread wide for study, its once-living vibrance flattened and preserved in the stonewall of observation.

She’d noted every detail with ruthless efficiency: their powers, their patterns, their weaknesses. Arrows and annotations snaked across the sketches like veins, connecting one thought to another.

Words floated alongside their faces—"shame," "anger," "grief"—the emotions that fuelled them, pinned and cataloged like specimens under glass.

And the dates.

Marinette stared at them the longest. Each attack had come exactly seven days apart.

Her fingers hovered over the timeline she’d sketched in ink, tracing the spaces between the attacks. Seven days.

Just enough time for her to catch her breath, to feel the bruises on her ribs fade, to begin to think she could live without the weight of this fight pressing down on her.

And then it began again, relentless, like a clock wound too tightly.

Marinette turned to Tikki, who hovered by her shoulder curiously.

“Tikki,” she said, her voice a questioning lilt. “Is there a limit? A timeframe for him? Does Hawkmoth have rules he has to follow?”

Tikki paused. “It depends on the wielder,” she began, her voice ephemeral dawn bells. “But in short, each akumatization is a massive expenditure of energy—for both the wielder and the magic of the Miraculous itself.”

Marinette nodded, her thoughts already racing ahead, but Tikki wasn’t finished.

“When you purify the akuma,” Tikki continued, “it doesn’t just reverse the emotional damage. It also disrupts the Butterfly Miraculous’s magical network. That disruption resets his connection, forcing a cooldown period before he can create another akuma.”

“So he’s stuck waiting,” Marinette murmured, more to herself than to Tikki. “That’s why he spaces them out. He doesn’t have a choice.”

Tikki nodded.

But Marinette couldn’t help but feel like the time in between wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to recover, to process, to feel human again.

Each week blurred into the next, the rhythm of her life dictated by a man she’d never met, his cruelty a metronome that kept her moving forward, always forward, whether she was ready or not.

The corkboard loomed over her. Marinette stared at it until her eyes burned her mind a buzz.

One week. Seven days. Twice was coincidence. Thrice was a pattern.

Marinette stared at the timeline on her corkboard. The neatly sketched spaces between attacks—the seven-day rhythm that had become her life—mocked her.

Was it always going to be like this? Just enough time to breathe before everything came crashing down again?

Her fingers tightened around her pen, the sharp point digging into her palm.

“Tikki,” she said softly, not looking up, “why does everything always go wrong for me? It’s always something. Everything. Before I was Ladybug, things already went wrong in ways they shouldn’t."

Tikki hovered nearby, her small form illuminated by the glow of the streetlights filtering through the window. “Marinette, I don’t think—”

“No.” Marinette’s voice was firm, cutting through the usual gentleness. She raised her head, her eyes searching Tikki’s.

“This isn’t just bad luck, Tikki. It’s too much. It’s always been too much. Things just happen. And it’s never normal.”

Tikki slowed, her expression carefully neutral, but Marinette could see the way she fidgeted.

“Tikki,” she pressed, her voice wavering. “You know something, don’t you? You’ve always known. Please, just tell me. Is this—”

Her throat tightened, and she forced the words out. “Is this part of being Ladybug? Or… is it just me?”

Tikki hesitated. “Marinette…” she began, her voice softer than usual. “It’s complicated.”

Marinette’s chest tightened. “Complicated? Tikki, this is my life we’re talking about! I can’t keep pretending this is all just a coincidence. If you know something, you have to tell me!”

Tikki looked away, her words trailed off, refusal painting her face. “I…”

Marinette recoiled slightly, hurt flickering across her face. “Why not? If there’s a reason for all of this—if there’s something I can fix—don’t I have a right to know?”

Tikki finally met her gaze, her expression heavy with sorrow. “It’s not something you can fix, Marinette. And knowing right now… it wouldn’t help you. It might even make things worse.”

The words landed like a blow, and Marinette’s shoulders slumped. “So that’s it? I’m just supposed to keep hoping it doesn’t get worse and stay quiet?”

“No,” Tikki said quickly, her tone gentle but firm. “You’re supposed to keep being you—resilient, kind, creative. You’ve faced so much already, Marinette, and you’ve always found a way to rise above it. That’s what makes you so special.”

Marinette looked away, her jaw tight. “I don’t feel special, Tikki. I feel cursed.”

Tikki floated closer, resting against Marinette’s cheek. “You’re not cursed, Marinette. You’re a blessing. But some answers take time. I promise, when the moment is right, you’ll understand.”

The promise felt like a thin thread in a storm, but Marinette nodded, swallowing back her frustration. “Okay,” she said quietly, even though it didn’t feel okay at all.

Tikki lingered for a moment before retreating to her spot on the desk. Marinette sat in silence, staring at the faint fraying edges of the red string charm hanging from her phone.

She didn’t know what hurt more—the not knowing, or the fact that Tikki did.

The hurt stayed, hours later. Marinette didn’t sleep much that night. She sat at her desk, staring at her sketches until the lines blurred into meaningless smudges.

Tikki’s words replayed in her mind: Some answers take time.

But time wasn’t something she felt she had. 

Instead, she’d put her focus elsewhere. If Tikki wouldn’t tell her the truth, she’d find her own answers.

For now, she turned to the corkboard, her gaze narrowing on the timeline of Hawkmoth’s attacks, for now, she’d find him. She’d stop him.

She rakes her fingers through her hair, dark strands curling around her knuckles like a snare, and bites her lip hard enough to bleed.

The sketches on her desk blur into abstract shapes but she stares at them as though willing them to speak. Her head throbs with a dull, persistent ache.

What now? she wonders, her thoughts circling like vultures around the same unanswered question.

How can she find a man who never leaves his lair? The helplessness gnaws at her, sharp teeth tearing into the edges of her resolve.

Her hands shake as she rips another page from her notebook, crumpling it and tossing it toward the bin. It misses, landing on the floor with the others—a scattered graveyard of failed ideas.

She wants to scream, to cry, to do something, but all she can do is stare at the paper and feel the clasps of her legacy pressing down, down, down.

By the time the sun sets, her eyes are aching, bloodshot and dry, and the pounding in her skull has become a hammer, relentless and cruel.

Marinette breathes deeply, forcing herself to her feet, and Ladybug takes her place in a flash of light.

Ladybug rises into the Parisian night, a blur of red and black. The air is cool against her flushed skin, and she drinks it in, each breath cutting through the fog in her mind.

The city stretches below, a labyrinth of lights and shadows, and she moves through it with practiced grace. Her feet find purchase on rooftops, her body moving instinctively, as though Paris itself were guiding her.

She’d messaged Chat Noir earlier, asking to meet. She doesn’t expect him to have answers, but having a concrete plan calms her.

Hours pass, and he still doesn’t come. She spends long hours waiting, practising in the quiet spaces of the city, her movements fluid but her mind restless.

She works through routines with mechanical precision, each motion a temporary reprieve from the chaos in her head. It helps, a little, but not enough.

Hours pass, Ladybug sits perched on the ledge. Her notebook lies open in her lap, pages streaked with frenzied lines of ink, arrows and annotations like battle scars on the paper.

She doesn’t glance up when she hears him approach—the soft whisper of leather boots, the faint jingle of his bell.

She doesn’t need to look. His presence is magnetic, sharp black and blurred green, a storm wrapped in mischief.

“Wow,” Chat Noir drawls, his voice laced with mockery and something softer she can’t quite name. “You even write like you’re angry. What is that—battle plans for our next skirmish?”

Her pen stills, the tip pressing too hard, dotting the page with a harsh blot of ink. “It’s called strategy and planning,” she replies coolly, snapping the book shut with a sound that feels like a warning. “You should try it sometime.”

“And you’re late.”

“And you’re predictable,” he shoots back, leaning against the ledge beside her, his smirk curling like smoke. “Oh, I have a strategy. It’s called ‘don’t overthink it.’ Works pretty well, if you ask me.”

She finally looks at him, her eyes narrowing. “Really? Is that what you were doing last week when you charged in blind and nearly got us both killed?”

He shrugs, his smirk widening, a challenge glinting in his eyes. “I didn’t hear you complaining when I saved your ass.”

She’s on her feet before she realises it, the notebook clutched tightly in her hands. “You didn’t save me,” she snaps. “You made me save you, and then I had to clean up the mess you left behind. Again.”

His brow arches, and he tilts his head, mockery dripping from his voice like venom. “Clean up the mess? That your thing, huh? Fixing everything, putting all the little pieces back where they belong? Bet you’re real fun at parties.”

The words hit their mark. She feels the sharp sting of them. Her voice comes out sharper, colder. “This isn’t about fun. It’s about not letting anyone else suffer because you can’t keep your head on straight. Do you even care what happens to them? Do you even notice the damage you leave behind?”

His jaw tightens, his smirk faltering for a fraction of a second before returning, sharper than before. He leans closer, his eyes gleaming with something dark and electric. “Wow. Harsh. So I’m just the reckless idiot, and you’re the one holding it all together, huh? Must be a real thrill ride up there on your high horse.”

“That’s not what I said,” she counters, her voice steadier now but still pointed.

“Sure sounded like it.” He straightens, throwing his arms out in an exaggerated gesture. “But fine, sure. What’s your grand plan, mistress? You always have one, right? Go on, enlighten me.”

“You think this is easy? You think I like being the one who has to figure everything out while you treat this like some kind of joke?” Her voice rises, trembling with the force of her frustration, and for a moment, she hates him—not for who he is, but for what he reminds her of: all the ways she can’t fall apart.

He laughs, a low, bitter sound that twists in her chest. “Yeah, because I just love being dragged along like your sidekick. Newsflash, Bugaboo: I didn’t sign up to be bossed around.”

Her anger boils over, her voice cutting through the air like a blade. “And I didn’t sign up to babysit someone who won’t take anything seriously!”

His smirk falters again, and for a moment, silence hangs between them. She forces herself to breathe, to pull back the anger threatening to drown her. When she speaks again, her voice is softer, but no less firm.

“We don’t have to like each other. But if we don’t work together, people are going to die. So yeah, I have a plan. And whether you’re in or not is up to you.”

For a moment, she thinks he’s going to leave. His jaw clenches, his eyes narrow, and his muscles pulled like a taut wire, ready to snap.

But then he smiles—a dangerous, sharp-edged thing that sends a shiver down her spine.

“Well, when you put it like that,” he says, his voice low, a purr that lingers in the air, “how can I say no?”

The hum beneath her skin is a hymn she dares not name, a static that feels both divine and ruinous.

Sacred. Forbidden. Her heart beats, but she doesn’t want to know why. She doesn’t want to understand the reason it races, the reason it pounds like war drums in her chest. It presses against her skin, whispers against her lips, drips into her soul like the first drops of rain before the storm.

Focus. Mission. Purpose. These are the things that matter, the things that keep her tethered.

She tells him what she knows, her words measured but quick, and he listens, leaning closer as if drawn into her orbit despite himself.

He cracks a pun in one breath, and in the next, his tone grows serious, his observations sharp and perceptive. He mentions things like how Hawkmoth seems to favour public events and working times, suggests the possibility of a civilian cover.

The night stretches on, and they work in tandem, their movements like the ebb and flow of the tide—sometimes clashing, sometimes seamless.

By dawn, when the first light bleeds into the horizon, they part ways. She watches him disappear into the fading shadows.

Her heart beats like fire, and she does not want to know why.

At the heart of it, Marinette clung to her rules like a drowning girl grips a lifeline.

Even before the weight of the Ladybug Miraculous pressed its ancient legacy onto her chest, she lived by laws carved not in stone but in fear, etched into her bones by the looming black cat that shadowed her every step.

"Never start anything important at 13 minutes past the hour."

"Never take shortcuts, even if it’s faster."

"Always carry extra supplies—pens, sewing kits, band-aids—because something will go wrong."

"Never wish for something too big or too perfect."

"Triple-check everything before leaving the house.”

They are etched into her bones, woven into her soul, guiding her every step like a compass pointing away from disaster. Without these rules, she is certain she wouldn’t be standing here at all.

Case in point: Marinette was six when she broke one of her first rules. A shortcut, just this once, she’d thought.

The alley was narrow and shadowed, but home was so close she could smell her mother’s cooking on the wind.

Then, a crash—a construction sign, heavy and splintering with the kind of finality that shakes the air itself, came toppling down. It missed her by inches.

Her parents called it “just bad luck,” but Marinette felt it differently. The wind had been too deliberate, a force that tugged at her pigtails and nudged the sign toward her as if testing the limits of her survival.

Another time, when she was ten, she forgot her lucky charm bracelet at home. It was a Zhōngguó jié, the red strings braided intricately into a knot that reminded her of safety, of her grandmother’s steady hands tying blessings into her future.

She told herself it didn’t matter—luck was just a word, wasn’t it? But halfway to school, the bus skidded, the screech of tyres and the metallic groan of bending steel seared into her memory.

A tree branch had fallen in the road, forcing the driver to swerve into a ditch. Marinette escaped with nothing more than a scrape and a few bruises, but the memory of standing in Death’s shadow haunted her every moment.

These were not coincidences. Marinette knew better.

If she doesn’t check the stove three times before leaving, the house would burn down. If she crosses the street when she’s the seventh person in line, a car would swerve, its tires singing a requiem on the pavement.

If she forgets her charm, if she steps too quickly, if she wishes too big—something will break. Something always does.

The Zhōngguó jié still hangs off her phone, its deep red threads fraying at the edges, but she clings to it anyway. 

So, yes, maybe she’s high-strung. Maybe she’s too much sometimes. But what the world doesn’t see is the curse written in the spaces where no light reaches.

She feels it in the moments when the wind changes just so, brushing against her skin like a whisper of warning.

She feels it in the tremble of a bus wheel against uneven ground or the brittle crack of a sign splitting above her head.

The rules are not superstition. They are survival. They are her way of holding the world together when it feels like it’s always on the verge of falling apart.

So yes, Marinette checks the stove three times, avoids the number thirteen, carries charms and pens and band-aids as if her life depends on it.

Because it does.

That is what she tells her friends, her voice carrying the tremor of someone confessing to ghosts over lunch one day. 

It starts with Nino, as it often does, his voice bubbling with excitement as he talks about a hat competition hosted for their class.

“Marinette,” he says. “You have to enter. This is, like, made for you! You’d crush it!”

Marinette freezes, her spoon halting mid-air.

“Oh no,” she says quickly, shaking her head. “I don’t do competitions.”

Adrien leans forward, eyebrows raised in surprise. “Why not?”

Marinette’s hand tightens on the edge of the table, her nails digging into the wood as though to keep herself grounded.

“Because…” Her voice falters for a moment, then steels itself.

“Because,” Marinette continues, “I’m bad luck, nothing ever goes right.”

And that’s when the words tumble out, halting and uneven at first, until the floodgates open.

Adrien’s look is a fleeting thing—a raised brow, the twitch of his lips betraying amusement or concern, she can’t quite tell.

He doesn’t laugh, at least, doesn’t turn her fears into a joke as so many others have. Instead, he offers a gentle, placating answer: If it makes you feel safe, then it’s worth it.

But Nino, bless him, doesn’t hide the way his smile tilts into disbelief, like he’s been handed a map to a world he doesn’t understand. Marinette doesn’t blame him. How could she?

No one else has seen the way the universe tilts against her, the way it conspires with cruel precision to unravel her plans.

Except Alya.

Alya says nothing, but her silence speaks volumes. Alya knows. She’s always known. Alya grew up with Marinette, watched her stumble and fall as the black cut tugged her feet out from under her.

Alya has seen the way Marinette’s hands shake as she triple-checks her bag, her door, her path home. It’s Alya who calls to make sure Marinette is alive, Alya who sends reminders—Did you pack your charm? Take the safe route home? Don’t forget the checklists.

Alya is her anchor, the steady weight that keeps Marinette from floating away, untethered and lost. Marinette feels the love swell like an ocean tide whenever Alya is near, overwhelming her with its force.

Alya is more than her best friend; Alya is the proof that someone can know her curse and stay anyway. The gratitude is staggering, a flood so deep it drowns her.

But with it comes the guilt.

Because Marinette knows she is selfish. She grips Alya with claws of desperation, her fingers clutching so tightly they leave marks.

Alya is hers, her one unshakable constant, and Marinette clings to her as though letting go would mean being swallowed whole by the fate that stalk her.

And what would Alya say if she knew how far Marinette would go to keep her close?

Marinette imagines the sharp pull of separation, the fight Alya would have to put up if she ever tried to leave. She imagines the resentment that might grow in the cracks of their friendship, the way Alya might one day look at her and see a burden instead of a friend.

And yet, Marinette knows she would still hold on.

Selfish. She is selfish to keep Alya close, to depend on her so utterly that the idea of losing her feels like the world might split open.

But selfish or not, Alya is hers.

Because who else would understand?

Who else would stay?

The competition stays with her, trailing behind like a ghost that refuses to fade, its presence lingering long after lunch. Marinette knows better than to entertain it. Knows better than to tempt the fickle hands of fate.

How could she?

Here’s how it always goes: Marinette, talented beyond doubt, a girl born with the kind of artistry that drips from her fingers, spills from her soul like ink from a tipped-over jar.

She knows it, feels it, this truth rooted deep in her marrow. She is a creature of creation. Blessed.

And cursed.

For everything  she creates, fate destroys two. Every joy she dares to grasp turns sharp in her palm. Every victory carries a price.

She is the unluckiest creature that ever dared to breathe luck.

She can see it now, how it would unfold:

She enters the competition. She wins. Of course she wins. There is no question, no uncertainty.

Her hands would work their magic, spinning silk from thread, conjuring brilliance from raw material. Her heart would swell, full of light, full of pride.

And then—

Disaster.

The bakery engulfed in flames. The competition halted by a freak accident. The ambulance lights reflecting off shattered glass. Marinette herself, breathless and bleeding.

For every miracle that blooms in her hands, the universe demands its toll. A balance must be struck, and Marinette has learned, again and again, that the cost is always steep.

It always takes more than it gives. And how much worse has it become since she took on the weight of Ladybug.

Oh, she knows how ironic it is. A thing of good fortune, burdened by a curse she can never shake. The miraculous should protect her, shield her.

But instead, it amplifies. Magnifies.

After every battle, after every whispered command to heal the world, the cure sets things right—but only for them.

For everyone else. Never for her. For Marinette, the balance swings back hard, pendulum sharp and unforgiving.

Her clumsiness? It’s no longer innocent. It’s a harbinger, a warning.

Where once she tripped over uneven pavement, now she watches sidewalks crumble, disintegrating beneath her feet.

Where once a slip left her with scraped knees, now it’s falling beams, collapsing scaffolds, bridges that groan and snap like brittle bones.

Minor cuts? They bleed rivers now. Wounds that split skin deep and jagged, aching long after they should have healed.

It was this that lingered in her thoughts as Marinette sat cross-legged on her bed, her fingers absently tracing the edges of a red string charm dangling from her phone.

The cure always demands more.

And Marinette, oh Marinette, she gives and gives until there’s nothing left but a hollow ache in her chest and a body stitched together by sheer will.

She tries to ignore the tally, tries to pretend she’s not keeping track of every time fate tips the scales against her.

Still, she keeps going. Because what else is there?

And yet—

Oh, how she wants.

She wants it so fiercely it aches, a deep, gnawing hunger that refuses to be silenced. She wants to create without fear, to shape and mold and stitch her dreams into reality.

She doesn’t care about winning. It’s not about the prize, not about the glory.

It’s about the joy.

The pure, untainted joy of creating something that feels like freedom. Something unshackled from consequence.

She wants to lose herself in the process, to feel the fabric beneath her fingers, the hum of the sewing machine, the quiet satisfaction of a job well done.

She wants to breathe in that moment, whole and unbroken, without worrying about what comes next.

She just—

Wants.

But want is dangerous. Want is a blade with two edges, cutting deep whether she holds it or lets it go.

And Marinette knows this better than anyone.

So she lets the competition linger, lets it haunt her in the quiet moments between heartbeats. She feels the pull, the ache, the impossible longing.

And she stays still.

Marinette falls asleep, slipping not into rest but into a chasm. She tumbles, weightless, caught between the breath of one world and the inhale of another.

In this dream, the air is cloying with the scent of old wood and rot, and she finds herself walking—though her feet feel distant, as if they belong to someone else.

The street she enters is alive but limping, a thing breathing through cracked ribs and wheezing lungs. The walls are made of wood, rough and splintered, each plank darkened by the years.

They lean like old men, sagging under the weight of years and rain, patched together with mismatched pieces of tin and tarpaulin. There are no names here, no signs to guide the lost.

Marinette doesn’t need one. The air hums with a quiet desperation, a call only the damned can hear. Inside, the space suffocates. Low tables dot the uneven floor, their surfaces sticky with the residue of countless spilled drinks.

Men sit hunched over, their bodies slack, as if they’ve surrendered to gravity itself. The scent of alcohal hangs in the air—sharp and sour. The floorboards creak beneath her, uneven and soft, worn thin by countless shuffling feet.

Smoke curls in languid tendrils from incense sticks, their fragrance too sweet, too cloying, masking but not erasing the underlying musk of bodies packed too tightly together.

The shadows here are alive, shifting with each flicker of the single oil lamp that hangs from the ceiling. Its light is weak, trembling against the darkness, as if it, too, is afraid.

The women move like ghosts, their kimonos loose and faded, their faces painted with smiles. They pour drinks with hands that shake just enough to spill a little, their eyes always downcast, always watching the ground.

The patrons’ laughter is loud, jarring, a jagged thing that cuts through the air. It is not joy but something cruel, something that takes pleasure in its own sharpness.

Hands reach, grasping, and the women endure it all in silence. Their bodies are marionettes, joints stiff but obedient, pulled by invisible strings.

In the corner, a courtesan plays a rectangular and slightly rounded at theedges drum like instrument. The neck is long, slender, and unfretted with three strings of silk.

Her fingers plucking notes that drown beneath the din. The music is fragile, like spider silk stretched too thin, ready to snap. Her eyes are downcast.

Marinette watches her for a moment, feeling heavy and unbearably sad.

And yet—

Marinette moves. She does not choose to; her body obeys a force she cannot name. A puppeteer’s hand guides her deeper, through sliding screens that offer brief glimpses into private rooms.

Each glimpse is a wound: shadows twisting, lamplight flickering over bodies entangled. Whispers, low and strained, crawl through the walls.

Laughter, harsh and jagged, breaks the silence like shattered glass. And sobs—soft, quickly stifled—cling to the air like the last breath of something dying.

She walks past them all, feet silent on the worn mats. The floor beneath her feels alive, pulsing with the collective ache of this place. A heartbeat slow and laborious, like the world itself is tired.

At the farthest corner, where the light barely touches, she sees them. The wilted ones. Bodies sprawled in exhaustion, faces slack with the kind of sleep that offers no rest.

They are flowers at the end of their bloom—morning glories, petals drooping, color drained. Their breath comes in shallow bursts, as if even that is too much effort.

Marinette does not want to linger.

But then she sees her.

A girl, no older than Marinette, sits with her back pressed against the wall. Her knees are drawn to her chest, arms wrapped around them in a protective cocoon.

Her eyes are wide, watching everything and nothing, taking in the scene with a gaze too sharp for someone so young.

Her lips are twisted, not in fear but in fury—a deep, visceral scowl that seems carved into her very being. There is hate there, raw and burning like the burnished red of a thousand wildfires.

She is beautiful in the way wild things are beautiful: untamed, dangerous. Her eyes are shaped like a phoenix’s wings, and her skin is pale and smooth, like untouched porcelain.

But the hate etched onto her face keeps the world at bay. It makes her untouchable. Marinette feels it from across the room, that wall of bitterness and rage.

Good, Marinette thinks, though the thought surprises her. Good. Let it keep them away.

Because this girl is too young to be here. Too young to wear a mask of hate as armour. Marinette watches her, unable to look away, drawn to the fire in the girl’s eyes, the way it burns without consuming.

The night stretches on, an endless void, but Marinette stays. She stays and watches, the two of them locked in a silent vigil.

In the back of a brothel that smells of sweat and rot, surrounded by ghosts, Marinette finds herself drawn to a girl who refuses to break.

She awoke with the taste of spite on her tongue, bitter as wormwood, clinging to her like damp silk. The girl’s glare—defiant, so defiant—was etched into the back of her mind, seared like a brand on tender skin.

It pulsed beneath her skull, a ghost she couldn’t exorcise, lingering as she moved through the morning’s hollow rituals. She double, triple checks her things, fingers trembling as they hover over the screen, waiting.

Once, twice. Again. The numbers blur, meaningless, but she can’t help herself. The clock ticks forward, mocking her precision. She leaves at fourteen past the hour. Not thirteen. Never thirteen.

The dizziness comes in waves, rolling through her like the tide. Fatigue sits heavy in her blood, clotted, like something rotten. She moves through the world as if wading through tar.

Her bones are sun-kissed primrose, and yet— they are only hostels, a pyrrhic hymn.

She sees them, the locusts, always at the edges of her vision. Chittering, crawling. Perpetual. Their wings hum in her ears, a dirge she can’t silence.

She walks faster, heart pounding against her ribs like a bird trapped in a cage. The sun, drowning itself in the horizon, burns her from the inside out. There is a burnished red that licks up her spine like a sear.

The rage comes suddenly, startling and raw. It bubbles up from some dark, bottomless place, and for a moment, she lets it take her.

She wears the scowl like armour, teeth clenched, fists tight, a wildfire threatening to consume. The hate is acrid, sharp as rusted metal in her mouth. It tastes like ruin.

But no. No no no no no. She can’t—won’t—let it bloom. She forces it down, shoving it deep into the pit of herself where all unwanted things go.

She cannot risk it. Not now.

Not when his eyes, his eyes, are always watching, searching. Hawkmoth’s shadow lurks just beyond the veil and the week is almost up.

She smooths her face, and forces the muscles into something neutral, something blank.

No one will know.

No one will know the blue-tinted hunger that coils within her, seraphic and ravenous, devouring her from the inside.

No one will know the way she wants to claw her own skin off, to dig her nails into the fragile flesh and rip until she finds freedom, or release, or something.

No one will know that her days feel like a burial ripped open.

She wants to scream. She wants to break something—everything.

She wants to tear open her ribcage, splinter it wide, and let the scream stuck in the gaps of her heart and ribs out. Maybe then she could breathe.

But she doesn’t.

She swallows the scream. Folds it into herself like a letter never sent. She smooths her hands over trembling limbs, forcing stillness where there is none.

The ache is constant, a low hum in her bones, but she bears it. She always bears it.

She is sanctified in ruin.

And she is tired. So very tired.

The classroom hums in monotony, a dull buzz punctuated by the scratch of pens on paper and the faint drone of the teacher’s voice.

Marinette’s head droops, eyelids heavy like storm clouds on the verge of breaking. Her hand moves absently, sketching hat designs without thought.

Lines curve and curl across the page, turning into feathers, tangled threads of some subconscious impulse. Her mind is sluggish, limbs leaden, a heaviness pressing down on her bones.

She laughs it off to Alya, who raises an eyebrow.

“My brain’s completely dead,” she quips, though the weight of it sits uncomfortably in her chest. Alya smiles but is quickly distracted by a commotion at the front.

She hangs, suspended in the fragile space between decision and inertia. Between entering and not. Between acting and remaining still.

She thinks she’s being selfish—unbearably so—and yet, the ache in her chest whispers otherwise. The ache hums with want. And oh, how she longs.

At lunch, she folds into herself, her mind spinning ceaselessly, a clock unwound but still ticking. The noise around her fades, a dull thrum swallowed by the roar of her thoughts.

Exhaustion grips her, heavy and absolute. Her head rests against the table, and she falls asleep, her longing weaving itself into dreams once again.

She’s back at the brothel.

The room feels different, though.  The girl is there—but she has changed. Older, sharper, more feral.

Marinette sees her now as something untamed, a wildfire ripping through a dry forest. Her presence is consuming, impossible to ignore, and Marinette is transfixed.

The girl sits in her same corner, her phoenix eyes smoldering with something raw and venomous. Bruises bloom across her arms and neck, dusky and painful, but Marinette doesn’t let herself dwell on them.

The girl’s defiance eclipses the marks, her spitfire anger swallowing the evidence of her pain. She glares at the world as though it owes her an apology, as though she’s ready to bite back when it doesn’t give one.

And Marinette—oh, how she wants that. Wants to carve her own rage into the universe, to set her teeth against its indifferent hand and bite.

She wants to drag herself from the pyre and glare back at the flames. But she can’t, not yet. So she watches the girl, eyes heavy with envy, heart raw with yearning.

The girl holds something—a box. Marinette feels her breath hitch, a low, painful gasp she can’t swallow. It’s a miraculous box. She squints, desperate to see if the girl is wearing any jewels, but there’s nothing.

No necklace, no ring, no comb tucked into her loose, disheveled hair. Her hands are bare save for the bruises that stripe her skin. Even her ankles are unadorned, free of anklets or chains.

The girl grips the box tighter, her knuckles pale against the lacquered wood. In her other hand, she clutches a bag of gold coins, rectangular and a bit too shiny, glinting in the low light.

Marinette doesn’t know how she knows, but there are sixty coins in that bag. Exactly sixty. She feels the number like a cold blade pressed against her ribs.

The girl leaves the room, approaching a man. He’s gaunt and hollow-eyed, his face slick with oil and his expression carved from greed.

They converse in low, rhythmic tones, melodic and sharp-edged. The man’s fingers twitch as he counts the coins, one by one, the metal clinking softly against itself.

When he finishes, he looks at her with something feral, something angry, and his voice rises like a whipcrack. He lunges, grasping for her arm. But the girl doesn’t stay.

She’s already moving, tearing herself from his grasp and bolting toward the exit. The man’s shout echoes, furious and impotent, but she doesn’t look back. She runs.

As she bursts into the open air, light explodes around her—blinding, searing. Marinette shields her eyes, desperate to see what comes next, to see the girl as she transforms.

But the light swallows her whole, and Marinette wakes with a start.

The bell.

Her heart stutters in her chest, uneven and frantic, like a bird beating itself against a cage. Her lungs seize, breath caught somewhere deep, as though the dream has left her hollowed out.

She blinks, disoriented, and her eyes land on Alya, sitting nearby.

Alya’s sweater is draped over her shoulders, the faint scent of lavender and something warm lingering in the fabric.

Alya chats easily with Rose and Alix, their voices soft and unhurried, discussing the upcoming competition.

The word—competition—makes Marinette’s heart clench.

Her ribs feel tight, her body too small to contain the storm inside her. She shifts, the weight of Alya’s kindness heavy against her skin, and tries to breathe past the ache.

The girl from her dream lingers, a wildfire burning behind her eyes. And Marinette—so small, so tired, so raw—feels the flames licking at her edges, threatening to consume her.

Later, as they part ways, Marinette waves off her friend’s apologies. Can’t walk her home, babysitting again. It’s fine, really. She won’t die.

Hopefully.

But something shifts as she steps forward.

The world blurs, a daze of feathers—gray, white, swirling. The air thickens, heavy with the scent of damp feathers and something more acrid, metallic.

The sky above dims, not with clouds, but with the churning mass of birds. Pigeons. Thousands of them. Their wings beat in eerie unison, creating a rhythmic pulse that reverberates in her skull.

The sun disappears behind this living fog, smothered. Fountains no longer sing; their stone mouths gape silently, dry and cracked. Benches lie overturned, scattered like forgotten toys.

Feathers carpet the ground in thick drifts, soft yet suffocating. The trees are gnarled, their branches clawing at the sky like skeletal fingers.

A sudden gust sends a flurry of feathers spiralling around her, soft and sharp at once, grazing her skin like paper cuts.

The pigeons perch in perfect rows along power lines and rooftops, their eyes dark and glinting with something too knowing, too watchful. They don’t blink. They don’t move.

But their presence hums with an unnatural intelligence, a silent menace that crawls under her skin.

Marinette’s heart hammers. The absurdity of it—pigeons taking over Paris—would almost be laughable, if not for the way the world itself feels wrong. Off-balance. Warped.

She bolts toward the bakery, feet pounding against cobblestones slick with scattered debris. The air tastes stale and it clings to the back of her throat.

When she bursts through the door, her parents barely glance up from their work, faces serene, oblivious. Flour dusts the counters, mixing with the feathers that drift in through the open window.

They don’t notice.

She doesn’t have time to question it.

The transformation is a rush, familiar and grounding, but when she steps back outside, the world has twisted further.

The sky churns in restless shades of gray and gold, clouds swirling like the endless beating of wings. The light flickers, shifting with each gust, dappling the city in pigeon coloured hues.

Above, a vortex of birds spins like a gathering storm, their shapes merging into a single, monstrous shadow. The buildings are no longer just buildings.

Their facades bristle with massive nests—tangles of branches, bits of trash, and forgotten things. The nests cling to every crevice, turning the architecture into something primal, wild.

Statues, once serene and noble, have transformed. Their faces now stretch into grotesque hybrids of human and bird, their stone eyes unblinking, their mouths twisted into silent screams.

They are watching. Always watching.

The ground beneath her feet writhes. Pigeons coat the streets in a living flood, their bodies moving in waves, their coos a constant, grating hum.

They shuffle and crawl like cockroaches, their feathers slick with an oily sheen. Marinette can feel their tiny claws scraping against the pavement, the sound like nails on glass.

She tries to step forward, but the pigeons part only to close in again, a living tide that swarms around her ankles. She takes to the sky, and perches herself on an empty gnarled branch.

Above, the vortex tightens. The pigeons scream in unison, a sound that is not quite a bird’s cry but something deeper, more primal.

It echoes through the streets, a warning. A promise.

Ladybug grips her yo-yo tighter. A laugh bubbles up, hysterical, for she could not help it as she wonders, for the nth time this week, why she ever chose to bear this mantle.

Chat Noir’s life had been a circus of near-death experiences, but this? This was different. Pigeons. Of all things. He could handle akumas, he could handle villains. He could even handle awkward arguments with Ladybug.

But pigeons?

He sneezed. Violently. For what felt like the seventeenth time in a row. Each sneeze rocked his entire body like a broken marionette, and, mid-arc through the air, he flailed and landed on a nearby rooftop with all the grace of a cat with broken legs.

“Oh, come on.” He groaned, dragging himself up. Why, sweet mother of jesus? Why me? What have I done to deserve this? I recycle.

Through watery eyes, he spotted Ladybug on a gnarled branch that definitely didn’t look OSHA-approved. Next to her were two pigeons. Their viscous beady eyes glared.

Ladybug was… giggling.

Not a happy laugh. No. This was high-pitched, breathless, uncomfortable. She kept giggling until, finally, her head fell into her hands, shoulders shaking.

Chat Noir blinked. What the ever-loving fuck?

Were the pigeons responsible? He eyed them warily, extending his baton and sitting on it. A pigeon fluttered closer. He sneezed again. His balance wobbled.

Ladybug lifted her head at the noise. Their eyes met across the void of pigeon hell.

Her face was blank. No expression. Just nothing.

A knot of unease tightened in his stomach.

“You know, I think these birds are really ruffling my feathers.” He sniffled, trying and failing to hold back another sneeze. It shot out mid-sentence, cutting him off like a cosmic punchline.

Ladybug blinked. Slowly. Then, as if someone pressed a button, she nodded. “Right.” Her voice was thin, distant. “Let’s, uh, find the akuma.”

And with that, she cartwheeled off the branch and swung into the sky. Red and black blurred against the clouds of feather gray.

Chat Noir stayed exactly where he was, staring after her, perched precariously on his baton. He rubbed a hand down his face.

“Yeah. Sure. Great. Let’s pretend none of this happened,” he muttered to himself, eyes narrowing at the pigeons one last time.

He sneezed again.

The akuma is striking, for once—aesthetic, even. His feathered cape ripples like storm clouds, gray and black with a silver sheen that catches the light, an almost holy glow in its movement.

The beak-like mask sharpens his face, angular and predatory, but not grotesque. It is sleek, sculpted, and disturbingly elegant. His gloves end in talons, polished like steel, cruel and gleaming.

His cane, capped with the silver head of a pigeon, feels almost ceremonial, an artefact from some forgotten myth. And those patterns—metallic greens and purples shimmer on his chest and shoulders, the ghostly iridescence of city pigeons beneath a harsh sun.

He doesn’t look like the others. He doesn’t look like a thing birthed from a nightmare, malformed and grotesque.

He looks like a figure from some twisted holy book, the kind that martyrs would dream of before meeting their pyres. A figure of doom, not malice.

And yet, Ladybug's fists clench tight, the strain buzzing in her palms.

She’s done. She’s so done. Her patience burns at the edges, fraying into smoke. Her jaw aches with how hard she grits her teeth, holding back a scream that begs to rip itself free.

Because then—then, as if the gods themselves are testing her—they emerge.

The bird people.

She blinks once, twice, hoping she’s hallucinating. She’s not.

They stand beside the akuma in grotesque homage, humanoid creatures twisted into avian horrors. Feathers erupt from their skin in uneven patches, stiff and unkempt.

Their arms are half-formed wings, their faces frozen in expressions of terror and subjugation. Beady black eyes glint beneath brows that still try to look human, and talons click against the pavement with every step. The smell of sweat, dirt, and something gamy—birdlike—clings to the air, thick and cloying.

Ladybug feels her gorge rise. Her stomach twists into itself like a serpent devouring its tail. A strange, sour taste floods her mouth as her breaths come shallow and fast.

Chat Noir ran a hand through his hair, trying to process what he was seeing. “Did he… turn people into birds?”

Ladybug let out a low, strained laugh.

“Of course he did,” she whispered. “Why wouldn’t he?”

The bird creatures squawk, sharp and discordant, and she winces as the sound pierces her ears. Her muscles coil with a rage she doesn't recognize, doesn't want to claim as hers.

But it's there, rising with a heat that scorches her throat and settles low in her gut, molten and uncontrollable.   

Her anger feels irrational—wild, untethered, like a forest fire set loose on dry land. But she can't stop it. Her skin prickles with heat, her vision swimming with red around the edges.

The akuma’s elegance, the twisted forms of his bird-people army, the smell, the sounds—it boils her alive. She wants to scream at the absurdity, the cruelty, the sheer audacity of this farce.

The akuma bows, mockingly, his silver cane tapping the ground in rhythmic precision. The sound resonates like a heartbeat in her ears, deep and foreboding.

“Ladybug, Chat Noir,” he says, his voice smooth, almost kind, "Welcome to my parliament.”

The words drip with irony, and something in her snaps. Her scowl deepens, her teeth grinding so hard she feels them ache.

She can feel her fury clawing up her throat, sharp as talons, cutting through whatever control she thought she had.

She steps forward, yoyo in hand, trembling with barely contained wrath. “Parliament?” she spits, her voice sharp and cutting as broken glass. “You’re about to lose quorum, birdman.”

Chat Noir lets out a surprised laugh, and they charge—

And failed.

With a sneeze, Chat stumbled away from the bird people.

“Chat!” Ladybug called, her voice strained with frustration and a bit of concern. She immediately shot forward, grabbing him by the arm to pull him back, her grip firm and commanding. “Focus!”

But it was no use. The battle had turned against them. They were outnumbered, surrounded, each move they made only pushed them further into a corner.

Then, the villain spoke.

Chat Noir pinched his nose and sneezed for the third time, stumbling back a step as a stray pigeon wing grazed his cheek.

“Okay, not to be rude, but can we talk about the hygiene situation here? I don’t want to end up on Pigeon Flu Weekly.”

Ladybug side-eyed him. “Focus. He’s literally trying to replace humanity with birds.”

“Yes, I can see that. Very ambitious of him. Though I have to wonder—does he actually communicate with them, or is it a one-sided thing? Because if he’s having full-on conversations, I demand answers.”

Chat replied, gesturing to the villain, his arms spread wide as a dozen pigeons perched on him like Snow White.

“You don’t think they have turf wars, do you? You know, little pigeon gangs fighting over breadcrumbs? Perhaps a leader named Big Beak? Oh, I bet they’re ruthless.”

Ladybug pinches her nose, “The only ruthless thing here is your dedication to nonsense.”

He puts a hand against his chest, “Rude. I’m providing critical morale boosts. Besides, you’re one step away from a public meltdown, and I’d hate to see that overshadow my heroics.”

“Your heroics? You’ve sneezed more than you’ve fought.”

“Perhaps. But I’m very good at sneezing. You, however, are barely holding it together.”

“Because I don’t have the luxury of treating this like a joke. Unlike you, I take my job seriously.”

Chat Noir smirks, “And yet, here we are, a brilliant strategist and her sneezy partner, about to take down an army of birds. Clearly, my approach is working.”

"Ah, how blind you all are, scurrying about like ants in this concrete coffin you’ve built. You think yourselves gods, masters of all you see, and yet… you are nothing but prisoners of your own fragile egos and crumbling empires. Pathetic. Wretched. Blind to the true wonders that grace this earth!”

The akuma ignored them, as he paced, the birds following him like a halo. “But they, they know no such chains.”

He raises a hand, and pigeons flutter down, their wings catching the light like pieces of a fractured dawn.

"The pigeons. Perfect. Eternal. They live above your pettiness, soaring on the breath of the wind, free of your judgment and hollow ambitions. They do not toil for meaningless accolades, rules of forced structure or sell their souls for fleeting scraps of power. No, they live simply. Purely. Their loyalty is unshaken, their bonds untainted by lies or greed. They have no wars, no betrayals. Can you say the same, humanity?”

Behind her, Chat laughs softly, a low, mocking sound. “I think he’s talking about you.”

She glares at him over her shoulder. “I think he’s describing you, actually. All freedom, no responsibility.”

“And you’re all responsibility, no freedom,” he quips back, his smile curling like smoke. “How exhausting.”

She turns fully toward him, her yoyo trembling in her hand. “At least I’m not afraid of it. You run from anything you can’t control.”

He steps closer, his grin slipping into something darker, quieter. “Maybe I just hate being told what to do.”

Ladybug’s eye twitched, although she was half listening to the monologue because—

"I tried, once, to be like you. To belong among you. I swallowed your rules, your expectations, your hypocrisy—and it left me hollow. When I fell, did anyone catch me? No. You turned away. Mocked me. Cast me out. But the pigeons... they stayed. They welcomed me, not with scorn, but with open wings. They understood what none of you ever could: I am more than the sum of your petty judgments!”

Because the akuma had a point, something that made Ladybug hysterical.

"So now, I will build a world in their image. A world where the superior beings—yes, superior!—will inherit the skies. And you, you miserable, earthbound vermin, will finally know what it means to crawl. I will bring you to your knees, not out of spite, no... but to make you see. To make you understand that freedom—true freedom—can only exist outside the constraints of your pathetic humanity!”

He laughs, the sound echoing through the room like the cawing of break.

"The skies are theirs, the earth is mine, and you? You are simply… irrelevant. Now, go ahead. Mock me, call me mad if it soothes your fragile pride. It changes nothing. The age of humans is over. The age of pigeons has begun!”

The pigeons swarm around him, a maelstrom of feathers, as he turns to disappear into the storm, his voice ringing out one last time:

"And when you see them perched upon the ruins of your civilization, remember this: they never needed you. You needed them.”

Ladybug laughs.

It rises unbidden, a crackling thing. She clamps a hand over her mouth, but it spills through the cracks of her fingers—wild, relentless.

The sound echoes, hollow and brittle, filling the empty spaces between her ribs where something softer used to live.

It’s absurd, she thinks. He has a point. And yet—

This? This will not stop them.

Not after Stormy Weather. Not after Neverland. Not after everything.

Her shoulders quake with it, laughter unfurling in waves, bitter as citrus and just as sour. It sears her throat, a corrosive joy that burns going down but feels good in its ruin.

In the back of her mind, a voice whispers: No. No, bad—don’t jinx it. You know the rules. The superstitions she clings to like rosary beads. She knows better. She always knows better.

But still—she laughs.

She can’t stop.

Not now.

The day’s old rage stirs, simmering low and steady, igniting in the pit of her stomach. It’s been coiled there, patient, waiting for this moment to bite back. The laugh warps, twisting into something harsher, more feral. Spite sharpens her edges, and her gaze—blue as a flame’s heart—flickers.

Spite has teeth.

Her lips curl, a snarl masquerading as a grin. To meet the abyss head-on and smile, blood staining her teeth like ink on parchment.

Let him try, she thinks.

Let him try.

The bird hybrids screech, their bodies positioning to attack.

The words bloom in her mind, a flower with petals of iron. The taste of it lingers on her tongue: bitter, metallic, like the aftermath of a storm.

Her fists clench, knuckles ghost-white beneath the skin. The city hums around her, the pulse of Paris beating beneath her feet. She feels it, feels everything—

The cold bite of wind against her cheek.

The weight of the yo-yo in her palm, taut as a promise.

The tang of ozone in the air like a prelude to disaster.

And for a moment, Ladybug is nothing but a vessel of fury, a saint of ruin, crowned in her own wreckage.

The world tilts, sharp and dizzying, and she breathes in the ache of it, lets it settle into her bones.

Let’s see how this ends.

Chat Noir was not having a good time. Scratch that—he was having a distinctly terrible time.

His nose was waging a personal war against him, sneezing every two seconds. His partner? Yeah, she’s officially lost it. Gone. Checked out. Completely unhinged.

Maybe he should’ve checked in on her more often. Anyone that uptight probably had a few screws loose.

And now, he was fighting bird hybrids. Weird, creepy, why-would-you-do-this-to-people bird hybrids. With faces that didn’t know if they were supposed to say “hello” or caw ominously.

“Why,” he sneezed out, dodging a talon swipe. “Why is this happening. To me.”

The universe, of course, did not answer.

They managed to escape—barely. Ladybug landed next to him on a rooftop, still weirdly calm in that I might snap at any second kind of way.

“They’re coordinating,” she said, her voice clipped, eyes scanning the chaos below. “The pigeons. They’re moving in sync with the akuma. The object must be on him. Maybe the cane.”

Chat Noir squinted at the pigeon-headed monstrosity wielding the silver cane. “You mean the obvious, ridiculously on-brand cane?”

“Yes, that one,” she deadpanned.

She called for her Lucky Charm. A glowing flash filled the air, and—because the universe clearly had a sense of humor—it materialized into a… bird whistle. A small, red whistle. Shaped like a bird.

Chat Noir stared at it. “Oh, yeah. This’ll help. Maybe it does magic? Sets the birds on fire?” He sounded far too hopeful.

Ladybug gave him a look that could curdle milk. She blew into the whistle, and instead of glorious, cleansing flames, it emitted a high-pitched sound.

The pigeons below immediately went berserk, flapping and spiraling. Their once-coordinated movements turned into a chaotic mess of feathers.

Chat Noir wrinkled his nose. “Okay, that’s something.”

The akuma—Birdman, as Chat had mentally dubbed him—did not take kindly to the sudden breakdown in his avian army. He swooped in, all cape and feathers, eyes locked on them with murderous intent.

Chat Noir sneezed as a gust of feathers blew up his nose. Again.

“Guess we ruffled some feathers,” he quipped, pulling out his baton and readying himself. “Time to wing it.”  He sneezed mid-laugh.

Ladybug, meanwhile, had found her focus. Her face was a mask of calm, but her eyes? Oh, her eyes. They burned with the quiet, simmering rage.

She looked ready to murder Birdman, his pigeons, and possibly anyone who made eye contact with her for the next week.

Chat Noir grinned despite himself. “And all it took was birds to let loose, huh?”

She didn’t react. She launched herself at Birdman like a missile of righteous fury, her yo-yo slicing through the air with deadly precision.

Chat Noir, because he was a gentlecat (and also maybe a little afraid of what she’d do if he didn’t), instinctively moved to guard her back.

It did not go well.

He swung wildly at the bird hybrids, who, in turn, flapped at him with wings that were somehow both menacing and weirdly wet-looking.

One of them hissed. Do birds even hiss? It didn’t matter. It was awful.

Meanwhile, Ladybug, in her infinite brilliance, blew into the whistle again, this time producing a call that apparently made the pigeons part away.

The feathered rats fluttered around, heads tilting in that jerky pigeon way, looking thoroughly confused.

“Chat!” she yelled, her voice cutting through the chaos. “Destroy the pipes in the ground!”

Chat blinked. “Destroy the—what now?”

No time to overthink it. He went with the tried-and-true method of breaking stuff. He stomped down, activating his Misfortune with a muttered, “Please let this work.”

The ground exploded beneath him. Water pipes burst open, drenching everyone in a sudden deluge of cold, miserable chaos.

Bird hybrids squawked and scattered like someone had thrown rice at a particularly cursed wedding.

Ladybug didn’t miss a beat. She vaulted at Birdman, tackled him like a linebacker in designer red spandex, and wrestled his silver cane out of his grip.

Without ceremony, she chucked it at Chat.

“Catch!”

He caught it. Barely. Then broke it over his knee—except nothing happened. No magical burst of light. No freed akuma. Just a very broken cane and a sinking feeling.

Before he could say anything, something small and sharp hit him in the forehead.

A bird pin.

Chat froze, cane pieces still in hand, and slowly turned to glare at Ladybug.

Sighing, he rubbed at his temple and activated Cataclysm, disintegrating the pin. The akuma fluttered out, finally free, and Ladybug purified it with a flick of her yo-yo.

Chat slumped against a wall, drenched, exhausted, and 100% done with birds forever.

Ladybug’s earrings beeped, signalling her time was running out.

She gave Chat a quick, almost apologetic smile. “Can you handle the rest? Thanks!”

And just like that, she swung away, a blur of red disappearing into the Paris skyline.

Chat watched her go, dripping wet and too tired to even make a pun about being left in the lurch. He sighed, glancing around at the soggy, chaotic mess.

“Yeah,” he muttered to no one in particular. “I’ve got this. Totally.”

Chat Noir sighed, running a hand through his damp hair. Mr. Xavier—he said, now just a tired, middle-aged man clutching a pigeon like it was a life raft—stood in the middle of the street, trembling.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Chat said, stepping forward cautiously. He wasn’t great at this part, the feelings part, but he’d try. “You’re back. Everything’s fine now.”

Mr. Xavier nodded, though his eyes were glassy. His grip on the pigeon tightened as he let out a shaky breath.

Then, without warning, he broke down. Shoulders heaving, soft sobs muffled by the pigeon’s feathers.

Chat Noir froze. After a beat of hesitation, he reached out and patted Mr. Xavier’s back.

“There, there, let it out.” Chat offered weakly.

Between sniffles, Mr. Xavier started explaining. “They… they fined me. Again. Publicly. For feeding the pigeons. I know I shouldn’t, but they’re—” He choked on the words. “They’re my only friends.”

Chat felt something twist in his chest. He knew it too well, the type of loneliness he knew by staring at sterile walls and talking to air as pine dirges echoed in the back of his mind.

“I get it,” Chat said softly. “I really do.” He crouched down next to Xavier, looking at the pigeon nestled in his arms. “You just wanted to care for something, right? Someone.”

Xavier nodded. “They don’t judge me. They just… show up. Every day. Like they’re waiting for me.”

The words hung in the air, heavy and sad, but before either of them could dwell on it too long, the world shifted.

It was subtle at first—just a shimmer in the corner of Chat’s eye. Then it exploded into something beautiful. The world reset, as it always did after an akuma fight, it felt almost… sacred. A flurry of black and blue light swept through the streets like a cosmic tide, wiping away every trace of damage.

Like the first dawn rising after winter.

Buildings straightened. Pigeons fluttered back to their perches, ruffling their feathers as if nothing had happened. Even the air felt cleaner, crisper, like the city had taken a deep breath and let it out slowly.

Mr. Xavier stopped mid-sob, staring in quiet awe. His lips parted, but no words came. Just silent reverence.

“Pretty cool, right?” Chat said, watching the light swirl around them. Ladybug did a perfect job, as always.

Mr Xavier just nodded, wiping his eyes.

After a few minutes of quiet, Chat, feeling a little more like himself, offered a hand to help Mr Xavier up. “Come on. Let’s get you some ice cream or something.”

They walked in companionable silence to a nearby cart. Chat bought two cones—one for Mr Xavier, one for himself. Xavier stared at his like it was the most precious thing he’d ever held.

“Thanks,” he murmured.

Chat shrugged, licking his own cone. “Don’t mention it.”

They sat on a bench, pigeons gathering around their feet, waiting expectantly. Xavier’s shoulders relaxed, just a little. Chat held back a sneeze.

“You know,” Chat said after a moment, “life’s a mess. People are weird. Rules are stupid. But what’s life without passion? You’ve got yours. Doesn’t matter if people don’t get it.”

Mr Xavier smiled, a small, tentative thing. “Feeding pigeons isn’t much of a passion.”

“Hey, it’s more than most people have,” Chat said with a grin. “And, bonus: you’ve got an army now. Just… maybe don’t turn them into henchmen next time.”

Mr Xavier chuckled, the sound light and genuine.

For a moment, the city felt warmer. Not just from the rising sun, but from something quieter, softer. Two lonely people sharing a moment, surrounded by pigeons and melting ice cream.

Chat Noir leaned back, gazing up at the sky. Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t such a terrible day after all.

He sneezed. Thrice in a row.

When Ladybug casts the cure, the cost is light—a rare mercy from a universe that delights in teeth and claws. Her body feels distant, dulled, like the lingering ache after muscle paralysis.

There are lacerations, sure, bruises blooming in shades of midnight and storm, but nothing that screams of fracture or ruin. No broken bones. No cracked ribs. No concussions rattling her skull.

And she didn’t die. For once, she breathes that in, lets it settle like the cold relief after a fever breaks.

The akuma had been oddly elegant, dressed in silks and velvet instead of the usual madness spun from desperation.

Marinette should have found it funny, but all she feels is exhaustion, a heaviness that pulls her under like the slow drag of an undertow.

Later, much later, when the sky is still veiled in darkness and the moon hangs low, a solitary witness, Marinette sits at her desk. The quiet hum of the city is distant like a dream fading at the edges.

The pencil in her hand hovers over the blank page, its tip trembling as if caught between two worlds. She sketches a hat—soft lines, sweeping curves. The lines falter, break, dissolve into nothing.

Tikki sleeps beside her, curled in a makeshift pillow Marinette had crafted from scraps of fabric and gentleness. Her form rises and falls in a rhythm so steady it feels like the only real thing in the room.

Marinette envies that peace. She watches her kwami breathe, her own breath caught somewhere in her throat, waiting for permission she’ll never grant herself.

Once the rage burnt out—the hot, all-consuming fury that had fueled her steps, her strikes—only the hollow remains.

A vast emptiness, like the dying embers of a once-roaring fire scattered across snow-kissed ground. The heat is gone, leaving behind only the cold, biting and quiet.

She feels like crying. She doesn’t.

Rules dictate her life, hard and unyielding like iron shackles she locked around her own wrists. Because luck has never been kind to her.

She follows the rules because she has to. Because sometimes it feels like the universe itself is plotting against her.

It presses down with its weight, ancient and relentless, like rotten vines curling around her ankles, pulling her down, down, into the earth’s cold embrace.

A burial of roots and soil and decay, a womb that promises not birth, but death.

Her pencil drops, forgotten. Her hands curl into fists, knuckles white with the strain of holding everything in.

The hollowness inside her grows, expands, a cavern carved by grief and exhaustion and something deeper, something aching. She stares at the page, blank and waiting, and thinks: what’s the point?

Her breath is a hymn she never chose to sing, each note caught somewhere between a prayer and a curse. In the dim light of the night, Marinette is a ruin sanctified. 

She is holy in her destruction, sacred in the way only bent things can be, a thundering aestival storm blooming wild in the tomb of her hollows.

Her pencil moves as if possessed, dragging across the page in desperate, shaking strokes. Lines blur, shapes emerge and collapse, and still—

her pulse is a war drum, relentless, pounding against her ribs with thumping fists. Her mouth, dry and aching, tastes like the first fruit torn.

She is a child in a graveyard, hands stained with soil, lips pressed to the ground, asking if it will bury her. Her teeth are stained with blood, and she hungers.

A gnawing, terrible thing that coils in her belly like a beast. It rages, clawing at her insides, demanding more. Always more. A guard dog pretending to be a gladiator, trapped in a ring of insects.

Her chest tightens, lungs straining as if her lungs are filled with irises and amaranths.

It feels like drowning.

Was this the cure lingering? she wonders with a wry smile. And as the tears come, hot and unchecked, a prayer to no one, yet she offers her agony like a faithful, as if it were holy.

And perhaps it is—

a hymn carved into marrow,

a litany of floods,

blooming like epochs of oleander.

Still, she breathes. And in that breath, she is both ruin and revival.

The morning arrives like a reckoning, dragging its pale light across the horizon. Marinette sits, waiting. The sky fractures into shades of muted gold and bruised lavender.

She watches the sun creep upward, a reluctant witness to a dawn that feels like it doesn’t belong to her. She watches, quiet, as the light spills over the city, the rooftops shimmering with dew, a quiet apocalypse in shades of amber.

It clings to the air, thick and suffocating, as if the universe itself is holding its breath. Marinette inhales deeply, but the air feels thin, empty.

Her ribs ache, the kind of ache that lingers long after the wound has healed, and she wonders if the sun feels as hollow as she does, rising only because it must.

She looks away, finally, dragging her gaze from the sky as if breaking a spell. The chill of the balcony’s stone floor seeps through her thin socks, and she realizes she’s been sitting there too long.

When she stands, it’s with the stiffness of someone much older. Her legs tremble as she steps back inside.

Tikki stirs on her desk, blinking awake with the kind of gentle curiosity that feels almost painful in its innocence. The kwami’s gaze falls on the hat, the half-finished thing that now seems to fill the room with its quiet, unfinished presence.

Tikki tilts her head, her voice soft but clear. “Good morrow.”

Marinette doesn’t answer right away, when she does, the words come sluggish. “Good morning,” her voice rasping, roughened by exhaustion and things she’s too tired to name.

Tikki’s eyes trace her, lingering on the tangled strands of hair falling loose from the clip, the deep shadows etched beneath her eyes like bruises. “You’ve been up all night, haven’t you?”

Marinette shrugs, a gesture caught between indifference and exhaustion. She pauses, her lips parting, hesitant but needing to fill the silence with something more than breath.

“Do you think it’s a good idea? Entering the competition, I mean.”

Tikki’s response is immediate, clipped like the snap of a thread. “No. I don’t.”

The words hit harder than they should. Marinette straightens instinctively, the curve of her spine sharpening into a rigid line.

A frown tugs at her lips, deepening into something harsher, something almost feral. The frustration prickles beneath her skin, electric and restless. “Tikki, I—”

“You said it yourself, didn’t you?” Tikki’s voice cuts through, soft but unyielding. “The bad luck always comes back.”

Marinette exhales sharply, the breath escaping her like a gasp. The frustration bubbles just beneath the surface, hot and insistent.

“I know, okay? But for once, I just—” She falters, biting down on the words before they can unravel her. Another breath, shakier this time.

“For once, I want to show people what I can do. I want to be normal, Tikki. Just… normal. It doesn’t matter if I win or lose.”

Tikki’s gaze softens, but the worry in her eyes deepens. “This isn’t about your abilities, Marinette. Of course, you’d win—” The certainty in her voice feels like a distant echo, like a truth that Marinette can’t quite reach.

And it’s strange, Marinette thinks, because ever since Ladybug—ever since everything—her hands have forgotten how to create. The hat was the first thing she’s made in months. The first thing that didn’t feel like it was built on borrowed time.

Tikki’s voice is soft but unrelenting. “I’m worried you’ll get hurt, or worse. Every time you shine, Marinette, the world… it pushes back. Every time you create miracles, there’s always a price. And I can’t—I won’t—lose you to that.”

Marinette’s jaw tightens, the words pressing against her teeth, desperate to escape. “But what if this time I don’t let it?”

“What if I fight back, Tikki? I can push through it. I’m so tired. Tired of being scared to do anything so I don’t tip the scales. I just… I want this. Just this one thing.”

The room falls silent, heavy with everything unsaid. Tikki watches her, eyes wide and luminous, filled with a kind of ancient grief. “I don’t like it.”

She starts to drift away, her form retreating into the shadows. Marinette wilts, her body crumbling like a house of cards.

“But if you do this… you’ll have to be careful, Marinette. More careful than ever.”

The warning hangs in the air, suspended between them, fragile and taut. “Luck and misfortune walk hand in hand, and you’re always on the edge.”

The morning is a reckoning. And Marinette is left standing in the quiet aftermath.

What does it mean to witness a wildfire take its first breath?

It is not just heat or light; it is hunger incarnate. A golden rage unfurling in amber, copper and gunmetal, the violent burn of molten potential, the mirage of goldenrod blooming in ash.

Marinette sees it now, as clear as prophecy in the girl, the girl she saw before, standing before her. Ladybug— a Ladybug, one of countless before her, a streak of red fury etched into fate itself.

Marinette is entranced.

This Ladybug doesn’t wear simplicity like Marinette does—her plain red, her child’s yoyo a threadbare shield against catastrophe.

This Ladybug wears rebellion, seared into the fabric of her being. She wears sienna silk and scarlet fire, lined with the soot gray whisper of ashfall linen. Plates of obsidian armour catch the light. Her boots, tipped with molten metal, ring against the ground like the toll of a war drum.

And her weapon.

Marinette's breath catches as she looks at it—a blade, long and curved, an arc of molten silver. It gleams with the sharp, inevitable beauty of the first crack of lightning.

Its lacquered wood hilt is as dark as charred oak. The handle is wrapped in silk the colour of cinders, braided tight like roots clinging to scorched earth, as if it, too, has survived some fiery crucible.

She wields it as though she was holding a storm at the edge of control, like the first roar of an inferno, the blade moves in her hand as though alive, a streak of silver fire carving the air with promises of creation and ruin alike.

And perhaps she was holding a storm at bay—no, not merely holding it, but wielding it, bending its chaos to her will as though she were born of its wrath.

The soldiers stood as a wall of inevitability, a monument of steel and silence. Their long swords gleamed coldly, the edges kissed by dawnlight, cruel as frost.

Helmets crowned with horned crescents and jagged ornaments transformed them into specters, demons summoned from the depths of an iron world.

But she—the wildfire woman—cut through them as if they were nothing but ash.

Her curved blade sang a terrible hymn, each swing cleaving through steel and flesh with an artistry that was almost tender. Blood fanned out in arcs of crimson, staining the air, the earth, the future itself.

The ground seemed to shudder beneath her steps, the soil drinking deeply of the chaos she wrought. Marinette could hear the sound of it, the metallic scream of steel against steel, the wet, visceral tearing of lives undone.

Her eyes blazed, twin pyres that refused to die, even as the soldiers surged toward her, a tide of inevitability.

Marinette thought of the dreams and myths, of the armoured girl rallying armies despite the stake, of Icarus daring to touch the sun, knowing it would devour him.

This woman was both—a martyr and a rebel, a saint and a sinner carved from the same unyielding stone.

What could she ever do compared to this?

Yet, as the thought bloomed in her mind, sharp and sour as an unripe fruit, another followed close behind:

What if I could?

The wildfire woman’s blade carved through fate as if daring it to defy her. Marinette’s breath shuddered, her fingers trembling with the weight of all she wanted, all she could be.

She wants to take this wildfire, this storm, and hold it for herself. She wants to blaze brighter, burn hotter, become something impossible to contain.

And for the first time, she doesn’t feel small. For the first time, she feels hungry.

Chapter Text

The golden light of the setting sun filters through the kitchen window, painting long shadows across the tiled floor.

Marinette stands by the counter, fidgeting with the edge of her sweater, her hands trembling slightly. Alya leans against the doorframe, her arms crossed.

Marinette takes a deep breath, her voice barely louder than a whisper. “I’m joining the competition, Alya.”

Alya blinks, the words landing like a slap. For a moment, there’s only the faint hum of the fridge between them.

“You’re what?” Alya’s tone is sharp, a whip-crack of disbelief.

“I—” Marinette stammers, her hands twisting together. “I know you think it’s a bad idea. But I’ve been hiding my whole life, Alya. I can’t— I won’t do it anymore. I need to do this. For me.”

“For you?!” Alya pushes off the doorframe. “Mari, do you even hear yourself? You’re talking about risking everything—your health, your safety, your life! “You’ve had enough go wrong, Marinette. Why risk making it worse?”

“It’s not about risking it!” Marinette snaps, surprising even herself with the force of her words. “It’s about proving that I’m more than just some cosmic joke. I’m tired of being afraid, Alya. Of sitting on the sidelines while everyone else lives.”

Alya exhales sharply, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Mari, I get it. I do. You want to feel in control for once. But this isn’t the way to do it. You could get hurt—really hurt. And I can’t just stand by and watch that happen.”

“You don’t understand,” Marinette says, her voice breaking. “You’ve always been there for me, Alya. Always. And I’m grateful, I swear. But this—this is something I have to do alone.”

Hurt bleeds into Alya’s voice despite her effort to keep it steady.  “So what? You think just because I’m worried, I’m holding you back? You think I want to see you suffer? You’re like my sister, Mari. Of course I want you to be happy. But this—” She gestures wildly, her voice rising again. “This is reckless!”

Marinette flinches, the weight of Alya’s disappointment hitting like a punch to the gut. “I thought you’d understand,” she murmurs, her eyes glossy. “I thought—of all people—you’d believe in me.”

Alya freezes, her jaw tightening. “Mari—”

“No, it’s fine,” Marinette cuts her off. “You’re right. I’m just the walking disaster, right? Why bother trying to be anything else?”

“That’s not what I’m saying, and you know it!” Alya’s voice cracks with frustration. “I believe in you, Marinette. I do. But this isn’t about believing in you; it’s about keeping you alive!”

“And maybe I’m tired of living like this, Alya. Doesn’t that matter?” Marinette shouts, tears spilling over now. “I’m so tired, Alya. Tired of being scared, of feeling like I have to tiptoe around my own existence. Don’t you think I should fight back? That I deserve better than this?”

Alya’s shoulders slump, her anger deflating into something softer, more raw. She steps forward but stops just short of reaching out.

“Of course you do,” she says quietly. “You deserve the world, Mari. I just— I don’t want to lose you trying to get it.”

The room falls silent. Marinette wipes her cheeks with trembling fingers, not meeting Alya’s gaze. “I’m doing this, Alya. With or without your support.”

Alya’s jaw tightens again, and she looks away, the weight of the words sinking in. “Fine,” she says after a long pause, her voice low. “But don’t expect me to cheer you on when you’re walking into a disaster.”

Marinette flinches again, but she nods, swallowing hard. “Noted.”

The door clicks shut behind Marinette, and Alya exhales shakily, leaning heavily against the counter. In the empty kitchen, the silence is deafening.

She throws herself into designing. Like plunging into a storm-tossed sea, no lifeline, no shore. Her hands move with a frenzied precision, measuring, cutting, stitching, weaving desperation into seams.

Backups, her mind hisses, sharp as a blade edge, coiled in her chest like a spring ready to snap. More fabric. More than she needs. More than she can use.

She sees Alya in every spool of burnt-orange chiffon, in every bolt of cinnamon-brown wool—warm, familiar, distant.

She folds each fabric with trembling fingers, replaying the argument like a cursed song stuck on repeat. Did she push too hard? Was she selfish?

The questions loop like barbed wire around her ribs. She should’ve known Alya was only trying to help, only trying to protect her. But Marinette had fought back, had become selfish enough to defy fate.

Guilt claws at her like a living thing. It seeps into her bones, heavy as wet wool, tangled as unraveled thread. She imagines losing Alya—

Her breath catches.

No. She can’t—won’t—let that happen.

So she bakes. Orange marmalade cake, sticky-sweet with apologies she can’t quite say. Spiced cinnamon lattes brewed with hope and trembling resolve. A peace offering wrapped in wax paper and desperation.

But Alya doesn’t accept it at first. Her mouth pressed into a line sharp enough to draw blood. Marinette feels like she’s standing on the edge of a volcano, the heat of rejection burning her skin.

Ash clings to her lungs, and for a heartbeat, she thinks she might crumble into cinders. Then—finally, reluctantly—Alya takes the cake.

Their conversation is strange, stilted, balanced precariously on unspoken words.

"Hey, um... I just wanted to check if you’re still okay with helping me with my math homework later?”

Her voice wavers, brittle as frost. “No pressure though. I can— I can figure it out if you’re busy.”

Alya’s jaw tightens, a flicker of something unreadable passing over her face—guilt? Frustration? Marinette can’t tell. She’s drowning in her own second-guessing, sinking deeper with every passing second.

She hates this. Hates herself.

Alya nods. “Yeah. Sure.”

There’s a jaw clench, a twitch of her eyebrow— fleeting, restrained—like she’s holding something back. Guilt.

Why would Alya feel guilty? She’s the one who messed up. Marinette feels like she’s swallowed nails, sharp and sinking deeper with every breath.

She shouldn’t have done this.

Shouldn’t have brought the cake, shouldn’t have brewed the stupid latte, shouldn’t have—

Her mind loops like a needle stuck in a scratched record:

You shouldn’t have said that.
You shouldn’t have pushed back.
You shouldn’t have made her feel like she didn’t care.
You shouldn’t—

Her chest tightens, breath coming shallow. The shame is suffocating, clawing at her ribs like barbed wire. If she could tear herself open and rip out this gnawing wrongness, she would—

And then she trips.

Over thin air—of course she does—stumbling forward with graceless inevitability. The universe must be laughing.

She barely registers Nino’s hands catching her, steady and grounding.

“Dude, you okay?”

His voice is warm, concerned. Real.

Marinette forces a breath, forces a nod, even as she scrambles to gather her scattered belongings. Her hands shake—stop shaking, stop being this mess, hold it together—

Adrien crouches beside her, offering her a book that had tumbled from her bag. His fingers brush hers, light as a promise. He’s smiling, easy and genuine.

“Are you sure your bad luck isn’t just clumsiness?” His voice is teasing, soft as sunlight breaking through stormclouds.

Marinette lets out a breathless, shaky laugh. “You might be onto something.”

She forces a grin that feels stretched thin, brittle as old parchment. “Maybe I should just bubble wrap myself.”

They laugh, easy and familiar. For a moment, she feels almost okay—almost whole.

But guilt still gnaws at her, quiet and relentless, like moths chewing through silk. She holds the warmth of Adrien’s smile, of Nino’s steady hands, of Alya’s reluctant acceptance—holds it close, even as she waits for the inevitable unraveling.

Always waiting.

For the ground to give way.
For the sky to shatter.
For everything she’s holding together to finally fall apart.

The competition looms like a tidal pull, inevitable and merciless.

Adrien watches it approach through the fractured lens of his life—a glittering stage built on his father’s empire, another monument to ambition and control.

He is a spectator this time, tethered by circumstance, by the ghost of his mother’s vanishing, by questions that cling like wet autumn leaves.

Disappearance or death? He doesn’t let himself finish the thought. To name something is to make it real, and he cannot—will not—let that reality solidify. Not yet.

But then he hears her name among the list of competitors, and the air shifts. Marinette.

He remembers the sketches she scrawls absentmindedly in the margins of her notes—ink-stained musings that seem to spill from her soul unbidden.

There’s something about her work that unsettles him—not in a bad way, but in the way of seeing something true, something elemental.

It’s as though creation itself breathes through her fingers, weaving life and longing into fabric and form. A quiet magic she probably doesn’t even realize she possesses.

But there’s a sharp edge to that brilliance, too. He’s seen it in the rigid line of her shoulders. The way she obsesses, ruled by rituals that seem carved into her bones.

Three backup hats—three—when any one of them could win the competition on its own. It’s impressive, yes, but it needles at him, leaves a tight ache in his chest.

Her ‘rules’ seem to take over her life— superstition edging her very being. He half expects her to throw salt over her shoulders and knock on wood.

Scratch that, she has knocked on wood.

She knocks on wood when she leaves a room. He’s seen her count steps under her breath, fingers twitching as though tracing invisible runes.

She believes in bad luck like it’s a living thing with teeth—something she must appease or be devoured by.

He catches Alya shooting her worried glances, her resolve to mend whatever silent rift had grown between them evident in every lingering touch, every offered hand.

Adrien feels like an outsider looking in. He wonders when Marinette started walking the edge of a knife, balancing between willpower and weariness.

But then, as he thinks about it, perhaps she always walked the edge.

Still, they try to help. They must.

Nino pulls Marinette into a conversation about music, his voice easy, warm. She lights up just a little, speaking about songs that tell stories, the way melodies can weave memories out of thin air.

Adrien listens, half-lost in her words, half-lost in her being. He’s always known she was creative, but there’s something sacred in the way she talks about crafting worlds from thread and sound—like she’s chasing the divine through art.

He steps in where he can. He learns her strange rituals, her impossible rules, follows them without question. If knocking on wood or leaving at precisely thirteen past the hour will keep her anchored, then he’ll do it.

He watches her work with a kind of reverence that aches. She is intensity made flesh—hope and desperation stitched into silk, stubborn resilience moulded into wire and pearl.

He doesn’t know if she realises that the same force that drives her to create is the same one slowly unravelling her.

And God help him, he doesn’t know how to stop caring.

He is caught by her brilliance that dazzles and scars, and he finds himself helplessly drawn to both the light and the flame.

When the big day finally arrives, Marinette is a live wire of nerves—a storm caged in silk and seamstresses’ hands. He sees the way her fingers twitch, tugging at invisible threads only she can feel.

He wants to help. God, how he wants to.

But every gentle word he offers seems to only tighten the cord around her, drawing her further into the spiral. His reassurances hit like dull stones against her fortress of fears.

She deflects, shrugs, stiffens—fragile steel threatening to crack. Then Alya steps in, pulling her aside with that familiar, fierce determination.

They speak in low voices, their conversation intimate yet sharp-edged, like a blade being honed. Marinette's clenched shoulders begin to loosen, her breath steadies, the frantic fluttering of her hands stills. Whatever Alya says, it works.

And it stings—a sharp twist beneath his ribs, unexpected and unwanted. He shoves the feeling down, stuffing it into some forgotten drawer in his mind. This is about her, not him. Not whatever this is.

When she returns, calmer but still frayed at the edges, she gives him a small, tentative smile—a gift wrapped in exhaustion. He holds it close.

She stands there in the early light of dawn. The sun casts a halo over her dark hair, bringing streaks of deep sapphire, a glimpse of midnight crowned in flames.

Her eyes—those eyes—are soft and sharp all at once, the colour of morning skies after a storm, where wildflowers bloom defiantly among the ruins.

And she is achingly beautiful, not just in the way that makes hearts trip over themselves, but in the way somthing striking is— impossible to ignore.

When the time comes, they assemble for the presentations. The other competitors are lined up like toy soldiers, stiff and polished, their nerves hidden behind practiced poise.

He stands apart, a spectator again—just as always. His father’s presence looms even in absence, cold and distant through the sterile screen of a tablet held by Nathalie's steady hands.

Predictable. Expected. His father couldn't be bothered to show up in person.

Adrien scoffs quietly, his lips curling into something bitter and familiar. Of course, his father prefers control at a distance, watching through a screen like some dispassionate god.

Remote. Unreachable. Untouchable.

But his gaze shifts back to Marinette—all fire and sky—and something in him softens despite himself.

Hers takes his attention instantly. It looks alive.

The crown is a hymn of craftsmanship, gold-thread filigree curls like living vines, weaving constellations that map forgotten skies. He half-expects the stars stitched there to pulse with light.

At its center rests a mother of pearls, soft and luminous—a moon caught in her net. He swears it breathes, swirling with trapped mist, a world within a world, restless and eternal.

From the brim's edge falls a translucent veil, soft as exhaled prayers. Tiny beads cling to its length like dew on spider silk, glinting like fallen stars caught in dawn’s embrace.

The fabric shimmers in the light, flowing like smoke after a wildfire, its edges fading into nothingness, as if the hat itself might slip between waking and dream.

Flowers bloom along the brim—impossible flowers. Glass-blown petals, fragile yet fierce, faintly glowing with an inner light as though each carries a memory of some distant, unyielding sun.

Between them, galaxies unravel in embroidered whispers—silver threads in a sea of deep, endless blue.

It is beautiful.

A creation meant to be looked upon only from a distance, like fire—like stars burning far too bright. His chest tightens, an ache forming before he can even name it. Something raw, fierce, hungry.

His fingers twitch, an old instinct stirring, the desperate urge to reach out. To touch. To feel what she’s made—to understand it the way one understands a flame by burning.

But he doesn’t move. He knows better. He always knows better.

He looks at her—truly looks. At the way her lips press tight, the way her shoulders tense as though expecting disappointment. As though even now she’s bracing for the world’s indifference.

She doesn’t see what he sees.

And that realisation hits him like a fist to the ribs—unexpected. He can’t explain why it hurts. Can’t explain why he suddenly wants so much more than he’s allowed.

He only knows that her creation has carved its way under his skin—something that breathes of fate.

She wins.

Of course she wins. How could she not?

Her creation sings in the harsh, sterile light of the competition hall—a thing seeminly alive. It defies their measured stares, outshines their calculated whispers.

For a moment, the world seems right.

And then—Chloé.

A blade slipped between the ribs. She strikes with polished venom, hurling accusations like stones meant to shatter what should’ve been hers. Cheating, she says. Lies, she spits.

The weight of her father’s power already forming behind her words like a storm gathering on the horizon. Adrien feels it then—a spark, a crackling heat—a flash of anger sharp and unfamiliar.

He should be used to Chloé’s tantrums, her spoiled demands twisting the world into something smaller, colder. But this—this hits different.

Because Marinette doesn’t fight back.

She stands there, stiff-backed and still, hands clenched at her sides. Resigned. As though she expected this—had been waiting for the knife, already bracing for its sting.

He hates it. Hates it.

Before he can move, before he can speak, her father’s name is invoked. An official investigation is ordered. Why? It’s just a hat competition. But Chloé asks, and that means the world must bend.

Marinette’s face doesn’t change. She lifts her chin, proud even in surrender. She shows her work—delicate, undeniable proof etched in thread. Her signature is hidden among the constellations.

He sees his father’s face then.

A flicker of something—admiration, recognition, something cold and calculating, the glint of a jeweler appraising a rare gem.

Tell me what you find, his father says, already turning away, dismissive even in approval. A king retreating into his fortress of frost.

And Marinette stands there, alone.

Alone in her victory, alone in her defiance, alone despite the brilliance she created with her bare hands.

He can’t breathe. Can’t move.

The investigation spirals into something grotesque—a parody of justice cloaked in official badges and crisp, navy-blue uniforms. Officers stand awkwardly, stiff and uncertain, clearly uncomfortable with being called to settle a hat contest dispute.

They exchange looks, quiet murmurs drifting like restless wind through the sterile hall. But the Mayor insists, voice booming with the authority of someone used to bending the world to his will—or at least pretending he still can.

His words are thick with self-importance, dripping with condescension, heavy as rusted chains.

And in the centre of it all—Marinette. Roger Raincomprix steps forward, clearing his throat, his expression taut with barely concealed frustration and resolve. His badge gleams under the artificial lights like a vow renewed.

“This—” he gestures around the room, voice tight— “this is ridiculous. With all due respect, these accusations are baseless and clearly personal. Miss Dupain-Cheng has proven her work beyond question.”

His words land like iron striking flint.

But Chloé bristles, her eyes narrowing into sharp, venomous slits. Humiliation ignites in her chest, quick and furious, hotter than a brand.

“How dare you—” Her voice pitches, brittle and burning. “You’re incompetent! You’ll be sorry when I tell my father how useless you are!”

Her father turns on Roger, face dark with self-righteous fury.

“You think you’re indispensable, Raincomprix?” he sneers. “Expendable. Replaceable. You work because I allow it. Don’t forget that.”

The room fractures.

Marinette’s face tightens—just for a second—as though she’s swallowing something bitter, like she expected this, like she knew all along this was how it would end.

Angry, muttering voices rise—officers shifting uncomfortably, backs stiffening as Roger’s jaw clenches. His hands curl into fists at his sides, but he doesn’t break.

Everything is spinning out of control.

A sharp, commanding voice cuts through the growing noise—an officer calling for order. Someone suggests they all take a breather.

He feels furious and helpless and—

This isn’t right.

She shouldn’t have to prove herself. Not like this. Not to them.

She shouldn’t have to burn just to be seen.

And still—

He’s set ablaze by her fire, the viciousness in her eyes despite the resignation lining her limbs.

The world ripples again—fractured, distorted, like a mirror dipped in boiling water. Marinette feels it before she sees it, a gnawing wrongness that crawls beneath her skin like ants.

The sensation prickles at her scalp, a low, electric hum that sets her teeth on edge. She knows she broke the rules, though she can’t quite remember how many.

It doesn’t matter—breaking any rule is enough for fate to rear its gnarled head. Disaster is patient, it waits in shadows, sharpening its claws.

The hallways stretch longer than they should, angles warping. Fluorescent lights flicker before snapping to life, harsh and sterile, throwing long, eerie shadows that skitter like living things.

The air is stifling and chemical, like bleach-soaked cotton stuffed down her throat. Every breath tastes artificial, processed, permitted.

Posters that once burst with color—school announcements, charity drives, birthday celebrations—drain to muted greys. They are stripped of whimsy, rewritten in heavy black letters:

“SILENCE AT ALL TIMES.”

“UNAUTHORIZED MOVEMENT PUNISHABLE BY DETAINMENT.”

The ink seems to seep off the paper, staining the walls like bruises.

A crackling voice booms from unseen speakers, monotone and soulless:

"Students will proceed to designated areas. Failure to comply will result in corrective measures.”

Marinette’s stomach twists, cold and hollow. The voice is dispassionate—less a warning, more a statement of inevitability. Footsteps echo in measured precision, clicking like a metronome.

Teachers—if they are teachers—stalk the hallways with glassy eyes, their faces stretched into masks of dull authority. Their expressions are too smooth, skin pulled too tight, lips permanently pressed into thin, silent lines.

They see everything.

Noise is wrong here—muffled and strangled, as though the air itself conspires to keep secrets buried. Her shoes scrape against the linoleum with a sound like breaking ice. She flinches.

Marinette's mind spirals, untethered. Was this her fault? Was it because she let her guard slip, because she wanted—stupid, selfish wanting—to be more, to be something else? 

The ripple spreads further.

Or perhaps, this was Chloé’s fault. Was Mr Raincomprix akumatised because of the Mayor?

She remembers Chloé—crueller then, sharper, more venomous. She remembers the sting of betrayal, not just in words but in the hollow ache of lost friendship.

Chloé’s laughter had been barbed, but her smile—before—had been real. Was that what hurt the most? The knowledge that things could have been different?

A shadow shifts at the edge of her vision, sudden and predatory. Her heart lurches.

Focus, her mind hisses. Focus or be consumed.

But the world tilts again, sliding out from under her like oil on water.

The world is judgment incarnate.

Marinette's pulse pounds in her ears, a frantic, uneven rhythm that feels too loud, as though even her heartbeat might betray her presence. Her breath trembles like trapped moth wings, desperate to escape.

The city holds its breath—air tight, sterile, wrong. The distant clatter of car engines, the murmur of conversations, the warble of pigeons—all erased, replaced by the relentless hum of mechanised authority.

Somewhere overhead, unseen speakers crackle to life, the voice distorted, sharp as broken glass:

“Order brings peace. Obey to be free.”

The words echo coldly, hollow promises carved into concrete and sky. They are final, not a suggestion but a sentence.

The school contorts—lines sharpen, walls gleam with an artificial sheen, everything scrubbed clean of humanity. Desks align with precise exactitude, like gravestones in a field of the forgotten.

Every surface gleams with harsh, clinical light. And Marinette—she sees herself reflected everywhere: polished floors, sterile windows, metal lockers gleaming like sealed vaults.

Her clothes have shifted—her familiar, carefully chosen outfit gone, replaced by a stiff, authoritarian uniform: a buttoned-up, charcoal-gray blazer with razor-sharp lapels, a starched white shirt that bites her collarbones, pleated skirts cut with soulless precision.

It itches, constricts—like wearing rules she cannot escape. All personal touches have vanished. Her rings, her bracelets, her hair ties—gone. Panic blooms sharp in her chest—her earrings.

Her fingers fly to her ears—still there. Hidden by the collar of her uniform, small and fierce. A subtle pinch against her neck—Tikki. Silent, present. A reminder that she is not alone. Not yet.

Marinette exhales shakily, suppressing the raw instinct to run, to fight. Not yet.

The others wear the same uniform, clones stamped from the same brutal template. Faces stripped of identity, eyes dulled by confusion and dread. Nothing is theirs anymore.

Hair must be pinned back in utilitarian buns or buzzed short—no bows, no braids, no stray curls allowed. No piercings, no necklaces, no keepsakes.

A sudden mechanical whir draws her attention upward—the drones.

They hover like winged sentinels—metallic wasps with segmented bodies, razor-thin limbs ending in grasping claws. Their glassy black eyes pulse with flickering crimson light, scanning the crowd in harsh, jerking sweeps. The air buzzes with the faint hum of their hovering thrusters, cold and predatory.

A student near the lockers hesitates, adjusting her untucked shirt—wrong move. The nearest drone hisses toward her, emitting a sharp ping like breaking glass.

“NON-STANDARD ATTIRE DETECTED. CORRECT IMMEDIATELY.”

The girl scrambles, frantically tucking in her shirt, breath coming in panicked gasps. The drone waits, still as death—then emits a single pulse of red light.

The uniform on her chest burns, darkening into a glowing brand:

“VIOLATION: CORRECT IMMEDIATELY.”

The girl chokes back a sob, trembling as she fixes herself, the seared mark fading only after her perfection is restored.

Marinette clenches her fists, nails biting into her palms, forcing her breath into something steady. The urge to fight thrashes like a caged animal in her ribs, feral and unyielding.

But she’s trapped—for now. She has to play the part.

Then comes Chloé.

Her sharp, haughty voice pierces the suffocating quiet like a broken blade:

"DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?!”

Heads snap toward her as she storms into the courtyard. She radiates entitlement, a force still convinced that power bends in her direction.

The drones pivot as one. Scanners flash, locking onto her with surgical precision.

From the shadows steps Rogercop, so the akuma states, looms—a being of justice carved in mockery, his figure a cruel monument to corrupted order.

The helmet perches like a crown of false righteousness, ridges curling into the semblance of a judge’s powdered wig or the jagged edges of broken scales.

Each step he takes rings out like a gavel striking wood, hammering the world into submission. His badge burns with an ominous, cold glow, a heart of ice pulsing in the cavity of authority gone rancid.

The weapon he carries is grotesque in its symbolism— a judge’s gavel twisted into a warhammer, its impact still echoing in Marinette’s bones. Around him, the world succumbs to an uncanny order.

The ground straighten themselves like soldiers to attention. Leaves no longer drift but freeze mid-air, falling in perfect lines and then disappears before it touches the ground.

He raises his hammer in silent judgment.

“OFFENSE: CORRUPTION.”

Chloé blinks, incredulous, her bravado teetering—until two massive drones descend, claws snapping.

“NO! I’M THE MAYOR’S DAUGHTER—YOU CAN’T—”

Her father appears then, wide-eyed and stammering, already surrounded by three more drones. His gold watch is ripped from his wrist, tossed into the void like scrap metal.

Rogercop’s voice booms, cold as judgment:

“OFFENSE: ABUSE OF POWER. SENTENCE: CONFINEMENT.”

A pulse of energy binds them in translucent energy cells, harsh blue light searing through the sterile air. They rise—floated high above the city, suspended like warnings for all to see.

Silence falls absolute.

Marinette breathes shallowly, throat constricted with fury, with helplessness.

The message is clear—Conform. Submit. Vanish.

Her mind races—how to escape without breaking the countless rules closing around her like iron jaws?

But there is nowhere to go.

Not until the school day is over.

And in this warped prison, she has no idea if that time will ever come.

The rules loom everywhere, etched in metallic ink across announcement boards in rigid, unyielding rows. Their edges are sharp, mechanical—inhuman.

“WALK IN SINGLE FILE.”
“FOLLOW DESIGNATED PATHS.”
“MAINTAIN REGULATION PACE.”
“NO UNSCHEDULED SPEECH.”

The commands burn like branded iron, their simplicity suffocating, demanding not just obedience but erasure.

Marinette’s breath feels tight, her chest bound with invisible wire. The floor beneath her glows with pulsing arrows, dictating every step in a soulless rhythm. Each arrow blinks in harsh, timed intervals—marching orders carved into light.

She forces her feet forward, step after step, perfectly paced, as though surrendering to the grind of unseen gears.

They must stay on the paths, must move at the exact speed dictated—or face Correction.

Kim's shirt is untucked.

Nino’s collar is undone, his tie missing.

Rose dared to wear perfume—its floral trace already evaporated, scrubbed out by the sterile air.

Wrong. Incorrect. Flawed.

The drones descend, shadows of cold precision. Their smooth, spherical bodies reflect the harsh, flickering fluorescents like soulless mirrors.

Only their glowing red eyes break their seamless surfaces, scanning the students with cold, clinical purpose. Their single red gaze slices through the hall, blinding, accusing, merciless.

They hover too close, emitting a faint, electric hum like restrained violence.

“DRESS CODE VIOLATION.”

“UNAUTHORIZED PERSONAL SCENT DETECTED.”

Small, insect-like arms extend from their bodies, projecting holographic warnings in stark, unforgiving letters.

“CORRECT IMMEDIATELY OR FACE DETENTION.”

Kim and Nino fumble to fix their uniforms, faces pale and desperate, fingers trembling against stiff, regulation fabric. Rose’s perfume is confiscated, the bottle crushed into glittering shards beneath a mechanical claw.

Their fear is a living thing, dense and sour, saturating the air like burnt plastic.

The classrooms are worse—prison cells for the mind.

Rows of identical desks face blank chalkboards, the walls stripped of all warmth or colour. The windows offer no view—only mirrored surfaces reflecting the hollow-eyed students back at themselves.

Teachers speak with measured precision, their voices tight and wary, carefully enunciating every syllable. They’re afraid too.

“EVERY QUESTION MUST BE ANSWERED IN THREE SECONDS.”

“STALLING IS PUNISHABLE BY DETENTION.”

Marinette sits frozen in her assigned seat, her back ramrod straight, hands folded on her desk. Her pen feels heavier than steel in her fingers.

The drone stationed at the front of the room watches everything, its mechanical gaze burning into her skull. If she falters, if she hesitates, if her words tremble—

Correction.

The teacher’s voice cracks slightly when asking the next question, glancing warily toward the hovering sentinel.

No one dares look away, not even to glance at each other—eyes forward, chained by fear.

Marinette’s thoughts spiral, her pulse sharp and erratic, breath clawing at her ribs like something trapped.

Is this how people see me?

My rules. My routines. My need for control.

The thought digs deep, gnawing at her insides, making her small. But no—it’s different, she tells herself.

Her rules don’t hurt anyone.

They keep her safe—
Keep her from breaking apart.

But the walls press in, shrinking, until even that fragile reassurance feels like a lie.

Finally—the day ends.

But freedom is still a mirage, always out of reach.

Students are permitted to speak—but only in pre-approved groups, only on assigned topics. Every sentence is measured, monitored, recorded. Conversations are clipped, mechanical, drained of anything human.

Every corner is occupied by a drone, its red eye sweeping endlessly, dissecting every word, every glance, every breath.

No one lingers. No one risks being seen.

The students walk stiffly, shoulders hunched, heads down. Movements become carefully constructed lies, rehearsed and controlled to avoid detection.

The air itself feels sharp—hostile.

Marinette’s hands shake as she grips her school bag, eyes locked on the glowing floor arrows leading her home. Her pulse hammers with the knowledge that freedom is a fragile, conditional thing.

She walks—measured, silent, correct.

And still—

She feels guilty for existing.

The world is horrifying.

The Eiffel Tower gleams with an unnatural silver sheen, its iron bones polished smooth, stripped of its rust and stories—memory erased, history purged.

It stands too tall, too sharp—more monument to dominance than marvel. Its jagged silhouette pierces the sky like a blade meant to wound. 

The city isn’t just orderly—it’s mercilessly logical, suffocating in its mechanical efficiency. Streets stretch in flawless grids, rigid lines slicing the city into obedience.

Sidewalks are carved with arrows that dictate every step, glowing neon-blue, flickering like veins of trapped electricity.

Walk against them and the ground itself buzzes a warning beneath your feet—a low, vibrating snarl. Crosswalks glow pristine white, their borders too sharp, too clean, like surgical incisions.

Traffic lights freeze on red, blinking infinite denial, a visual chokehold. No one moves. Even the wind seems reluctant to stir.

Step off the path—even by an inch—and a harsh, mechanical voice barks from unseen speakers:

“CITIZEN: RETURN TO DESIGNATED ROUTE.”

A cold whirring sound follows—the overhead drones, gleaming spheres with cold, metallic hides and singular red eyes that sweep the streets like predators in search of prey.

Every movement is catalogued, every breath counted and weighed. Violations pile like ash—small, innocent missteps building into insurmountable offences.

Jaywalking becomes loitering.
Loitering becomes questioning.
Questioning becomes detainment.

Detainment becomes disappearance.

The city consumes itself in silence, its very air dense with unspoken fear, heavy as metal filings caught in a magnet’s pull.

Parks have lost their green.

Trees are hollow replicas, metallic trunks etched with geometric precision, branches stretched like grasping claws. Fountains have been drained, replaced with flat stone slabs carved with words:

“OBEY THE LAW.”

Their lifeless surfaces gleam in soulless symmetry—water turned to command, flow turned to control. 

The streets are still.

The world feels frozen—like time itself has stopped, locked in a clenched, mechanical fist.

Even the wind is forced into patterns, funnelled down empty avenues with ruthless precision. No mistakes, no chaos, no life.

Every flowerless planter, every seamless street corner fits with clockwork exactness, gears clicking into place with soulless precision.

It is perfect.

But lifeless.

A parody of peace.

A caricature of order.

A mockery of freedom.

And in the pit of her chest, Marinette feels something sharp, something ancient and unyielding rise—

Rebellion, coiled like a spring, like a blade still burning with purpose.

A wildfire grows in the gaps of her rib, like the first breaking of dawn.

The sky is an ugly uniform gray.

Not the softness of rainclouds or the stormy roil of gathering thunder—no, this gray is smothering, a lid clamped down tight, sealing the city under Rogercop’s authority.

A sky without depth, without promise. A dull slab of nothing.

Streetlights glow an icy white, harsh and clinical, carving out shadows too sharp, too deep—like razors hidden in the dark. The air is cold and bitter, antiseptic, stripped of warmth, like hospital corridors that stretch forever.

There’s no twilight, no sunset, no dusk or dawn—just an endless, sterile illumination. The world is trapped in a perpetual state of almost-morning, where time refuses to move forward.

And Adrien feels ill.

The nausea crawls slow and wrong, coiling low in his gut—a slick, oozing unease. It sticks, clings—the feeling of being watched even when the streets are empty.

But he doesn’t panic.

Not outwardly.

Not where the drones can see.

He defaults to nothingness.

No emotions.

No feelings.

Just blankness, polished smooth like the marble floors of his father’s mansion—cold, silent, perfect.

The drones might as well be Gabriel Agreste.

They watch with the same clinical detachment.

The same disapproval carved into their glowing red eyes.

Searching. Judging. Erasing.

He knows this feeling. He knows it all too well. The streets blur as he walks, mechanical and tight with tension.

His shoes click against stone too clean, leaving behind no scuff, no trace—he isn’t even here. He’s vanishing.

His thoughts echo like footsteps down an endless hallway, sharp-edged and wrong. He can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t—

His pulse throbs against his throat like a trapped animal.

He’s three again,

Locked in that too-bright, too-quiet white-walled room,

His voice swallowed by nothing.

He’s seven,
Alone.
Going slowly insane within the perfect, suffocating symmetry of his room— the isolation of its four immaculate walls, white and blinding and endless.

He breathes, chokes—

“’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe—”

Gods, he’s going insane.

When he reaches home, nothing has changed.

Why would it?

The mansion looms, pristine and horribly symmetrical, its sharp angles slicing against the featureless sky. Its glass walls reflect nothing. No warmth. No life.

Nathalie is the same— efficient, clinical, her mouth a straight, silent line. Gorille is quieter than usual, unsettled, the only difference.

And his father isn’t even here.

Adrien is past caring. Past wanting. Past hope. His father might as well be another drone.

He doesn’t wait. He can’t.

His skin itches, crawls, like there’s something underneath he needs to tear out. He rushes upstairs, slams the door, and falls against the wall, gasping—

He’s suffocating in this perfect, ordered nightmare—

He’s going to claw his own skin off if he has to endure one more second of this empty, gleaming world.

His hands shake as he rips the ring from its hiding place. Plagg barely has time to blink before Adrien spits the words like a curse, like a scream:

“Plagg, claws out.”

The air splits around him, dark and wild and hungry, ripping through the sterile stillness. Adrien becomes something other, something with claws and fangs and power.

Rebellion incarnate.

He can breathe again.

But even through the rush, the wildness in his blood, the words still echo unbidden:

“’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.”

A nonsense lullaby. A fragment of something lost—something he can't quite remember.

Ladybug is angry.

The kind of anger that burns clean, that sharpens every nerve to a blade’s edge. It’s been creeping in for weeks now—tight and coiled like a spring in her chest—but tonight, it ignites.

She’s been getting angry a lot lately, she notes absently, the thought flitting through her mind like static before it’s drowned by the pounding rhythm of her heart.

She cartwheels away, twisting mid-air with a grace that mocks their precision. The net crackles, electric and hungry, missing her by a hair.

Heat coils at the base of her skull, crawling down her spine, setting her every nerve alight. The wind slices past, sharp and cold, but she burns against it, untouchable.

The world sharpens in her fury: the glint of a rising barrier, the hum of rotors behind her, the tang of blood on her tongue. She can feel everything, hear everything—every whine of a drone’s targeting system, every scrape of rubber against concrete.

She hurls herself into motion, red blur, red riot, feet striking concrete like war drums. The sky is fractured with steel-gray clouds, thick and oppressive, but she feels alive.

The drones pursue—ravenous, relentless. Their automated voices spit sterile commands:

“VIOLATION OF MOVEMENT PROTOCOL. UNAUTHORIZED ACTIVITY.”

She doesn’t bother keeping count of the violations screamed at her by the drones overhead: dress code infraction, running, unauthorized activity. Possibly more.

They lunge, nets crackling with electric malice, but she twists midair—a violent, precise elegance. A cartwheel that defies gravity, a breathless arc that sends her hurtling past their claws.

Sparks hiss where her heel narrowly misses a closing barrier.

She lands—barely, her fingers grazing the cracked edge of a rooftop, cold and damp with lingering rain—and vaults again, pushing off with wild, reckless grace.

Barriers rise like jagged teeth from the asphalt, desperate to trap her, but she’s chaos in red, laughing silently at their clumsy attempts to contain her.

She pivots sharply, feet skimming the ground as she twists, a blur of motion. Her hands graze a barrier, pushing off with enough force to send her soaring into a perfect flip.

The drones lurch to compensate, their nets snapping open again, but she’s already moved, her shadow slipping through their reach.

A stun pulse scorches past her shoulder, close enough to sear the fabric of her suit. Her anger flares hotter. She vaults onto a ledge, her hands gripping the edge so tightly her nails scrape against stone.

Her muscles scream as she pulls herself up, but she doesn’t stop, doesn’t slow. Stopping is death. Slowing is defeat.

She is motion, she is rage, she is defiance made flesh.

The city twists around her, cold and hostile—monolithic towers like jagged teeth snapping shut. Barriers rise without warning, choking her path, forcing her into impossible angles, faster, higher, harder.

And then—he’s there.

Chat Noir streaks into the fray, all liquid grace and savage, feral joy. His staff blurs into a silver arc, scattering drones like shattered glass, and he laughs.

Laughs like he’s untouchable, like the world itself could never hope to hold him down. He is chaos unyielding, a wildfire with claws.

Their eyes lock for half a heartbeat.

She doesn’t think; she moves. They fall into rhythm, like they’ve been chasing this their entire lives. He pivots, she lunges. His staff strikes out, sending her spinning into the air—up, up, higher.

She catches the ledge he points her toward and scrambles up, gasping, pulse pounding in her throat.

Gods, he moves like freedom personified.

He grabs her hand without hesitation, fingers rough and warm, and pulls. A sharp, fierce tug that sends her breath spiraling away as they leap together—weightless, untouchable.

For the first time in forever—since the first battle, since her bones turned to steel and her heart to iron—she is breathless.

Her anger hums, still searing-hot—but now it’s something else. It thrums in her veins like a war drum, wild and exultant, tangled with the pulse of him, this reckless, grinning boy who refuses to be bound.

The city is a labyrinth of steel and stone—but tonight, she doesn’t feel trapped.

The drones are closing in again.

Their mechanical whine gnaws at Chat Noir’s ears, thin and piercing, a blade slipping between skin and bone. The city breathes in jagged gasps—metal against stone, electric hums crackling like distant thunder.

Every step he takes is sharp, driven, urgent. His staff snaps out, vaulting him across a narrow alley as Ladybug swings in parallel, red and relentless.

“We can’t keep this up forever,” he grits out, breath burning in his chest like hot iron.

His pulse thunders, fierce and steady, driven by something deeper than survival—rage, rebellion, refusal to fall.

Ladybug doesn’t respond. She doesn’t have to. Their movements are fast, brutal—more instinct than strategy now, locked in an unspoken rhythm of motion and defiance.

The streets twist into hostile terrain, a maze of closing walls and flashing lights, the city itself turned against them.

And then it clicks.

“City Hall.” His voice slices through the tense, crackling air, no room for doubt.

Ladybug’s gaze snaps to him, startled by the force of his certainty.

“It’s the seat of power,” he says, his words low and biting, like a snare pulled tight. “If he’s playing judge, jury, and executioner, that’s where he’s staging his trial.”

For a moment, something unreadable flickers in her eyes—calculating, weighing, trusting. She nods. No hesitation, no second-guessing—just agreement.

They move.

Rogercop’s distorted voice booms through the city’s echoing canyons:

“CRIMINALS DETECTED. ENEMIES OF ORDER.”

Floodlights slash through the dark, turning their world into harsh, glaring white. Drones swarm in ruthless, mechanical formation, boxing them in like wolves closing for the kill.

Ladybug bolts—but wrong move.

“NO RUNNING.”

They’re far too surrounded. The nearest drone fires, a crackling shock pulse striking her mid-sprint. She stumbles, gasping, her body locking in place like rusted machinery seized by static.

“Ladybug!”

Instinct detonates in Chat Noir’s chest. He lunges, staff flashing silver through the air—too fast, too desperate—until snap.

A cold, metallic bite cinches around his limbs, dragging him to the ground with cruel precision. A net, tight and unyielding, cold as judgment. The edges sear his skin like ice.

He twists, hissing through clenched teeth, but the net tightens, merciless.

“NO INTERFERENCE.”

His breath shatters into ragged gasps, eyes wild with defiance. The world sharpens, harsh and unrelenting, as reality strikes: They can’t win like this. Not here.

“Justice,” Rogercop begins, the word reverberating through the air as though it alone can shape the world.

“Justice is the only truth. The only constant. It does not bend to power or privilege.  Justice does not care who you are or what you feel—it cares only for the scales. For the balance.”

He steps forward, his movements deliberate, his tone sharpening with every word. “I’ve seen what happens when the scales tip. When those in power twist the rules to suit their whims. I’ve seen the innocent crushed under the weight of lies while the guilty walk free, laughing as they stain the world with their filth. And you call this justice?”

Ladybug pulls herself up, her eyes darting over the battlefield, hyper-focused. “The drones—” she starts, cutting herself off mid-thought, and he sees it: the gears turning in her mind, quicksilver and sharp.

“What?” he snaps, half out of frustration, half out of desperation.

“They only attack when we break the rules,” she murmurs, almost to herself.

Her gaze shifts to Rogercop, watching him step deliberately over a crosswalk marking as he continues talking. Her lips twitch into something that might be a smile—or maybe a snarl.

“Rogercop’s rules are absolute. They apply to him too.”

It clicks for him in an instant. “So we play by his rules,” Chat Noir he says, baring sharp teeth in something that might be a grin. “Until we don’t.”

She nods, pulling her yo-yo taut in her hands. “I need you to test their limits when I say go. Keep the drones on you while I distract him.”

He bristles. “Oh, great plan. Let me just paint a target on my back and call it a day.” His sarcasm is razor-edged, but his muscles tense, ready to move.

“Chat.” Her voice is quiet but firm, cutting through his resistance.

He looks at her, really looks and sees her.

There’s fire behind her mask, molten and fierce, a refusal carved from stone.

His breath hitches, something sharp twisting in his chest.

“Fine,” he mutters, rolling his eyes for show. “But don’t blame me if I end up the next court jester.”

Moments pass.

And then—

They move.

Think. Think. Think.

Ladybug forces her mind into overdrive, searing past the ache in her chest, the burning pulse in her legs.

Rogercop’s voice thunders in the background—sharp, precise, damning—but she pushes it out, drowns it in the roar of her own mind. She can’t afford to listen. Not to him.

Not to the cold sterile righteousness of his words that make too much sense in the most twisted, suffocating way.

Justice without mercy. Order without choice. She grits her teeth. Anything taken to extremes is just as bad.

Rogercop’s voice rises, filled with a fury that crackles like static. “No more. Justice cannot falter. It cannot hesitate. It must be absolute. Without flaw. And if that makes me rigid, if that makes me cruel, then so be it. Mercy is the refuge of the weak, the weapon of the unjust.”

The drones move like clockwork, seamless and unrelenting. Every flicker of motion draws a response, a rule cited, a punishment executed. It’s mechanical. Soulless.

They aren’t choosing to act; they’re following programming—Rogercop’s programming. And Rogercop himself is no different. His commands are rigid, absolute, punishing minor missteps as harshly as deliberate defiance.

Her mind races. Every action has a consequence. Every move triggers a rule. But what happens if the rules themselves become impossible?

The drones hum in unison, its eerie, as he gestures toward Ladybug and Chat Noir, his accusatory glare cutting through the floodlights.

“You call yourselves heroes, but you are nothing more than anarchists in disguise. You think chaos can breed justice? That breaking rules and defying order can somehow balance the scales?”

His voice hardens, the weight of his words pressing down like a gavel striking the bench. “No. You are the very disease I seek to eradicate.”

Her thoughts snag on the phrase as if on a thorn: “Obey all commands” and yet “No Actions Without Orders.

Her heart leaps, the realization hitting like a spark in dry kindling. She can feel it spreading, heating her blood.

If they’re supposed to obey commands but aren’t allowed to act without explicit orders—what happens when those two rules collide? When there’s no clear directive?

Rogercop continues ahead,  fists tightening at his sides, and for a fleeting moment, there’s a tremor in his voice—a crack in the armour.  “I was discarded by the system I swore to serve. Dismissed. Mocked. Because I dared to hold power accountable. Because I demanded fairness.”

He pauses, the bitterness in his tone simmering. “But the system does not matter. The people in it do not matter. Justice exists beyond them, and I will wield it.”

He raises his glowing gavel-like weapon, the light casting long, jagged shadows. “You will be judged, Ladybug. Chat Noir. And the verdict is clear. Guilty.”

Her gaze snaps to Chat Noir.

She meets his eyes and nods, quick and sure.

They move.

Her yo-yo snaps out in a blur of red, not to attack but to bait. She vaults toward Rogercop, deliberately erratic, drawing the drones’ attention.

Behind her, Chat Noir is a streak of black and green, cutting through like a blade. His staff whirls, calculated and devastating, as he weaves between the drones.

Chaos erupts. The floodlights flicker. The drones scramble to recalibrate, their monotone voices overlapping into a cacophony of commands.

“Obey all commands.”

“No actions without orders.”

“Violation detected.”

“Standby for correction.”

The chase fractures into chaos. Chat Noir runs—no, hunts—a streak of black and silver, teeth bared in defiance, feral and electric.

Ladybug leaves him to it, tells him where she’s headed before she draws Rogercop into the Reflective Mall. Its as dystopian and depressing as the rest but—

Cold. Hollow. Gleaming like a polished grave.

Ladybug presses herself against the edge of a mirrored column, breath sharp in her lungs, fingers bruised and steady around her yo-yo.

Good. She can use that.

She angles a reflective panel—glass smudged with old fingerprints, chrome edges warped by time—lining up the perfect shot. Her pulse thrums beneath her skin, tight and fast, ready to strike.

Rogercop marches in, boots ringing sharp against the marble floor, heavy as a death knell. Authority etched into every rigid movement. Predictable.

His breath hisses through his helmet's voice modulator, twisted into something impersonal and cruel.

Ladybug adjusts the angle—just so—and waits.

Chat Noir runs wild.

Drones scream behind him, relentless mechanical hawks with blazing red eyes. Surge. Dodge. Vault.

His body knows the rhythm before his mind catches up—a dance of rebellion set to the staccato beat of pursuit.

He crashes through the deserted plaza, a living spark, leaving shattered glass and scattered debris in his wake. His staff carves through drones, sending metal limbs spinning like broken marionettes.

But there are too many.

They tighten the circle, corralling him, cutting off exits with military precision. His breath scrapes raw against his throat, but he laughs, sharp and defiant—like a storm that knows it’s inevitable.

The trap springs.

A single drone skims past Ladybug’s hiding spot, its targeting sensors locking onto Rogercop’s reflection.

“HALT. STATE YOUR PURPOSE.”

The command blares across the cavernous mall, a sharp-edged order burned into the air.

Rogercop freezes.

His helmet tilts—glitching, twitching—processing the reflected image of himself. Authority turned inward like a blade caught in its sheath.

“I… MUST… OBEY…”

Ladybug moves, fluid and precise, her yo-yo slicing through the space between moments, unseen but unstoppable.

Rogercop’s body jerks, rigid and mechanical, trapped in a looping directive: Obey or command? Command or obey?

“I… CANNOT… UNAUTHORIZED… STATE… MY…”

His voice breaks into static bursts, distorted by his own laws collapsing inward.

And then—crack.

The sound of fractured glass, of splintering circuits, of power unraveling—

Like embers scattered by the wind, setting fire to an empire of rules.

Ladybug strikes.

The streets become a war zone of static and shattered rules.

Chat Noir moves like a riot given breath, precision wrapped in defiance. His staff strikes with lethal efficiency—not to destroy, but to break the system, to force it to turn on itself.

The water tower crashes, a tidal surge spilling into the cracked streets, surging through storm drains, shorting out circuits with an electric snap!

Sparks explode in sharp, metallic bursts, the air tasting like scorched metal and burnt rubber.

“Proceed—Do not—Remain still—Unauthorized action—”

Signs flicker, strobing messages in a broken rhythm, authoritative commands tangled in glitching syntax, helplessly shouting into the chaotic void.

He bends streetlights like they’re made of wire.

His staff whirls, slamming into a decorative awning. The frame buckles, crashing down in a twisted heap. Drones swarm, scrambling to enforce repair protocols, their cold logic fractured by competing priorities.

And still, Rogercop shouts, his commands splintering under the weight of collapsing authority. His eyes, burning like twin verdicts, track Chat Noir’s every destructive swerve, but he cannot contain chaos made flesh.

Ladybug stands at the heart of the storm.

The megaphone gleams red in her grip, absurd and simple, emblazoned with polka dots like a dare. For one searing second, doubt claws at her—how could something so mundane topple the fortress of law and power built around them?

Then it clicks.

Rogercop's strength isn’t his drones or his armour—it’s his voice. His orders. His need for control.

Her heartbeat surges, fierce and reckless. This isn’t about rules or laws anymore.

“YOU HAVE NO AUTHORITY HERE.”

Her voice explodes through the megaphone, ripping through the sterile air, cutting sharper than a blade. The street echoes, filled with a defiant roar that splits through Rogercop’s static.

His head jerks, caught in the violent collision of command versus command. His voice scrambles to respond:

“YOU—MUST—SUBMIT—”

“NO.”

The single word detonates.

Chat hears it—

Clear.

Certain.

A spark igniting a wildfire.

The world fractures around her defiant cry, and for the first time, he believes—really believes— they might win.

He leaps, slamming his staff into the nearest drone with enough force to crack its frame. “Listen up, rust buckets!” he yells, his voice cutting through like molten steel. “I’ve got a new rule: RUN.”

Rogercop glitches, his orders collapsing in a digital snarl.

Ladybug’s voice cuts through again, relentless and burning:

“YOU’RE NOT IN CONTROL.”

The weight of her words drives through his programming like a fault line, shattering logic and fracturing law. His limbs lock, caught in an impossible loop.

“CANNOT… OVERRIDE… ERROR… ORDER… INVALID…”

And in that moment—

The world burns free.

The city is unravelling.

Commands collide midair, STOP! CEASE ACTION! NEUTRALIZE!—authorities devouring each other like snakes swallowing their tails.

Ladybug runs—a streak of red defiance cutting through the ashen grid. The megaphone roars her rebellion:

“STAND DOWN IMMEDIATELY!”

The words slice through the streets, echoing sharp and merciless, a siren song made of iron and flame. The drones jerk in response, twitching, wires overloaded by conflicting protocols. Order collapsing under its own weight.

Chat Noir doesn’t hesitate.

His staff twists in his grip as he vaults over a line of fractured drones. Sparks skitter across shattered concrete, the air sharp with burning plastic and molten metal.

He’s a flash of wild hunger, rage edged with purpose.

He lands with deadly grace near the relay hub, its steel shell gleaming cold and imperious. His voice snarls through clenched teeth:

“Cataclysm!”

Destruction incarnate.

The relay buckles, a choking death rattle of breaking circuits and splintering metal. Sparks erupt in furious cascades as the hub collapses, dragging Rogercop’s system down into ruin.

And Chat Noir laughs through it all, wild tracing his bones and abandon lining his teeth.

“I GIVE THE ORDERS!”

Rogercop’s voice shatters, distorted and fractured, words warping into static. He lunges through the fractured command field like a dying monarch, still clinging to tattered power.

His armour clinks, grinding against itself, weighed down by his own laws turned chains.

Ladybug moves.

She vaults over crumbling patrol vehicles, landing with predatory silence atop the command van. The air burns with oil and ozone, the smell of war and resistance.

Her breath scorches her throat, but her eyes—blazing and unyielding— lock onto him.

“You think you’re untouchable.”

Her voice is razor-edged, cutting through static like light through ash.

“You think you’re above the law.”

Rogercop freezes, mechanisms grinding as he processes, trapped in the web of his own logic. His rule-bound mind spirals into a death spiral of reason:

“No one… is… above… justice…”

His hands jerk, caught between issuing judgment and denying his guilt. Conflict splinters his commands, turning his power into weakness.

“You’re above nothing.”

Ladybug strikes, her yo-yo whipping through the air like a comet’s tail, smashing his gravel clean off his hands.

Rogercop stumbles, armor fracturing in a shower of shattered glass and splintered law. He stumbles, locked in a silent scream, his voice stolen by defiance made real. 

Chat Noir’s hand snaps out—
Fast.
Precise.

His fingers close around the badge, its cold metal biting into his skin like a last breath of authority. He crushes it without ceremony.

Justice ends with a hollow crack.

And just like that—

The fire recedes.

Smoke lingers in the air, acrid and bittersweet, mingling with the scent of charred freedom. The streets remain scarred, their surface cracked and defiant, but alive.

Ladybug and Chat Noir stand side by side, breathing hard.

The city isn’t fixed. Not yet. But for now—

They burned brighter than the system that tried to break them.

The ground is cold beneath her trembling fingers. Ladybug—no, Marinette—gasps shallowly, breath catching like a frayed thread pulled too tight.

Her chest shudders with the ache of something fractured, something trying desperately not to unravel. The remnants of magic linger in her veins, sparking like static against frayed nerves.

Her limbs are stiff, tingling with the bitter aftertaste of power spent too far, too fast.

She’s still here. Somehow.

The air smells of rain soaked concrete, coppery blood, and burnt ozone—sharpened by the acrid tang of something unnatural, something wrong.

She’s tasted it before, after too many battles where the cure felt less like salvation and more like punishment. Tonight is no different.

Electric aftershocks ripple through her, nerve endings screaming like twisted wires sparking in a dying machine. She clenches her jaw against the sting, but it reverberates through her skull—a hollow, endless ache.

It always hurts.

Her body is a battlefield, torn between rebellion and resignation. She feels the phantom tug of invisible tethers still binding her wrists, her ankles.

She lies there, breath hitching, smoke still clinging to her like regret. Her fingers twitch, curling into the dirt, grounding herself in the only thing she can trust—the bruising reality of now.

She remembers the wildfire woman from her dreams—blazing, unyielding, forged in fury and purpose. But Marinette doesn’t feel like wildfire. She feels like ash.

What did you expect?

She breathes in, ash coating her lungs. She is still here, she reminds herself—though she doesn’t know if that’s victory or defeat.

For a fleeting, dangerous moment, she wonders if this is what fate wants. For her to wear herself down, to keep fighting until she has nothing left but the hollow shell of what could have been.

To burn out before she ever becomes something greater.

The thought is sharp—too sharp—and she forces it away, shoving it deep into the cavern of her chest where her secrets rot like forgotten fruit. 

A chorus of messages glows faintly in the dim light of her room, a soft chiming that breaks the quiet like the last echo of a bell. You won the competition! The screen hums with quiet triumph, but Marinette’s fingers tremble as they clutch the phone.

She didn’t die. She whispers this like a prayer to herself. She didn’t die.

Her victory feels thin, stretched taut like the silken threads of a spider web she can’t escape. She knows this should be a moment of elation, but her chest feels hollow, her heart beating faintly.

Rest.

She longs for it like a child longs for a mother’s arms. The kind of rest that doesn’t come with a price, that doesn’t carry the weight of what she left undone. Her bed is there, waiting, but it feels impossibly far, a summit she’s too exhausted to climb.

In another universe, she is still running—but not like this. Not with breath clawing at her throat like rusted wire, not with her pulse beating a desperate drum of survival.

There, she runs barefoot through fields of wildflowers, petals soft as forgiveness brushing her ankles, pollen clinging to her skin like the memory of gentle things.

She runs because she can, because the wind is hers to chase, not something tearing at her heels with ravenous hunger.

Her phone falls from her hand, landing softly on the blankets that pool around her.

But here—here—the ground is sharp with broken promises, every step a scrape, a wound. The earth swallows her footsteps like a grave that never stops widening.

Roots twist like gnarled fingers, clawing at her calves, and she wonders if the dirt itself is hungry—if fate's fingers were always meant to drag her under.

The night is vast, bruised and broken, like a sky weeping ink and forgotten stars. The moon, hollow and cracked, watches her with indifference, an abandoned sentinel too weary to care.

She is stitched together with frayed threads and aching defiance. Her skin is patched with makeshift sutures—hope she didn’t ask for, resilience she never wanted.

Her ribs are a splintered cage barely holding in her wildfire heart, a relentless thing that burns and breaks and survives.

There is no mercy in this night.

She feels it in her bones: a history older than memory, a war fought long before she was born. A destiny she never chose but can’t escape, no matter how fast she runs.

The stampede in her veins crashes louder, a furious tide. It calls her to fight, to burn, to become something sharp and unforgiving—but she is so tired.

Her phone buzzes again, but she doesn’t look. The faint vibration against her palm is unbearable, a reminder of celebration that feels like a noose tightening around her neck.

Her classmates mean well, she knows they do, but their joy feels like a distant planet she could never reach.

Darkness presses in, thick and velvet-smooth, smelling faintly of damp stone and old woodsmoke—like an abandoned chapel where forgotten saints weep. She imagines she can hear them, their soft, broken prayers rustling like wind through hollow reeds.

In the stillness, she names herself again—Blackthorn. Hardy. Thorned. Made for surviving harsh winters and sharp losses. She can’t be soft, can’t afford the luxury of tenderness.

Endure, the thorns whisper, endure.

But reality breaks like a blade through mist. She wakes to the weight of her body, heavy and unforgiving, an anchor she cannot slip.

Her joints scream as she moves, a cacophony of agony that feels too loud, too much, too everything. Reality is her stumbling into the shower, scalding water drumming against her rawness.

She scrubs, harder, harder still, as though the dirt is a second skin she can peel away, as though the pain is a penance she has not yet earned. Her nails rake across her arms, but the thorns remain, buried deep beneath the flesh.

Tikki’s voice hovers at the edges of her awareness, soft as moth wings, and just as fragile. She brushes her away, swallows the painkillers dry, the tablets sticking in her throat like half-formed promises.

She falls into bed—no, collapses—her body folding like paper. The mattress presses into her spine like the earth pulling her down. She stares at the ceiling, a blank expanse that offers no solace.

She wonders if she should drag the bed to the floor, of removing the climb, the ache.

She lies there still, cocooned in her too soft bed, her bones brittle glass under bruised skin, her joints screaming like rusted hinges.

The ache in her body pulses like a second heartbeat, steady, inescapable. Every nerve hums with exhaustion, a relentless vibration beneath her skin.

It feels ancient, carved into her like fate’s signature—unreadable, inevitable. The pain is not a visitor. It has lived here longer than she has.

It will be better, she thinks, the words brittle as frost on dead grass. They crack in her throat, sharp-edged and bitter, tasting of copper and crushed mint.

A promise she’s made too many times before, whispered like a spell that’s long since lost its power.

The wildfire she dreams of, untamed and unforgiving. She wants to tear herself open and let it out, let it burn away the ache, the fatigue, the endless dragging weight of her existence.

But she is so tired.

Victory should feel like flying, like fireworks, like warmth flooding her veins. Instead, it feels like standing at the edge of a cliff, her hands raw from climbing, her legs trembling under the strain.

She tells herself she’ll celebrate later. She’ll smile, she’ll let herself believe this was worth it. But right now, the only thing she can do is sink into herself, her thoughts folding inward like origami, sharp edges pressing against soft paper.

Outside, the world is still turning. The stars above Paris flicker faintly, their light distant and unyielding.

Marinette wants to believe they’re wishing on her behalf, but the thought feels childish, foolish even. She has always known the stars were silent witnesses, not saviours.

She’s tired—down to her bones, down to her soul. And she didn’t die.

She clings to that thought, even as it cuts her like glass. She didn’t die. The world didn’t win this time.

But even victories, she realizes, can feel like mourning.

Chapter Text

The gymnasium buzzes with late-night energy: sleeping bags sprawled like forgotten parachutes, pillows scattered like clouds torn from the sky. Fairy lights twinkle, strung up with more hope than precision. The smell of pizza lingers, mixing with the sugary tang of soda spills and cheap scented candles.   

The class had finished the donation kits earlier that week—a spontaneous decision that felt like a rebellion against time itself. What was meant to be a one-night charity event during their annual school sleepover turned into a week-long labour.

Marinette threw herself into it with the same intensity she gave everything—threading ribbons with precision, organising supplies like she was planning a military campaign.

She poured herself into the kits like she could balance the scales of the universe with enough donated socks and travel-sized toothpaste.

When the sleepover finally came, there was nothing left to prepare.

Marinette’s running on fumes and something sharper. The kind of sharp that comes from three energy drinks, a cup of coffee, four hours of sleep (total, this week), and the burning obsession of a girl determined to crack an impossible puzzle.

Hawkmoth.

Her mind’s still on him, even now, even here, with her friends laughing and the world pretending it’s normal.

She can’t stop seeing the tangled strings of her conspiracy board, the blurry pictures, the red ink circling possibilities and dead ends. 

Marinette is tired.

Not the kind of tired that sleep fixes, but the kind that settles. Bone-deep. Heavy. Stitched into her muscles, pressed behind her eyes, throbbing in her temples like a dull war drum.

Nightmares kept her up—dark, tangled things that gnaw and cling. She sees the ruins of her fate every time she closes her eyes.

So she stopped sleeping.

She worked instead—chased after answers like a storm, relentless and wild. Find him. End this. She trained, too—hard. Longer and harsher than she ever had before.

Tikki encouraged her at first—pushed her—but even Tikki started sounding worried after a while. Marinette ignored that. She couldn’t afford to stop. Couldn’t rest.

Rest meant thinking. Rest meant feeling.

But tonight isn’t about him. It’s about her class—her friends, she reminds herself. It’s about charity and bonding and maybe, for once, breathing.

She’s fine. She’s great! Her smile is a bit too wide, her laugh a little cracked at the edges, but no one seems to notice.

Or maybe they do, but let it slide because Marinette Dupain-Cheng is always a little too much and a little not enough, and isn’t that just who she is?

Alya plops down next to her, offering a bag of marshmallows like it’s a peace treaty. “You look wired,” she teases, eyes warm and knowing. “Did you chug rocket fuel or something?”

“Or something,” Marinette snorts, stuffing a marshmallow into her mouth before she can say anything too true.

Behind them, Nino’s setting up a movie projector. Someone suggests a horror film. Marinette laughs, sharp and breathless.

Horror’s nothing compared to the nightmares that haunt her every step.

The lights dim, and for a moment, she lets herself sink into the noise and warmth. Her head leans back against the wall, and she imagines the fairy lights above are stars. Safe. Far away. Unreachable.

Tikki hovers near her hoodie pocket, quiet but present. She doesn’t nag tonight. Doesn’t push. Maybe even she knows Marinette’s been holding on with frayed fingertips.

The movie starts. Marinette breathes. She’s still tired, still raw, but for now—just for now—she lets the night cradle her like it’s something soft, something that won’t ask for anything back.

Adrien is buzzing.

His first real sleepover—ever. Friends sprawled on blankets, tangled in sleeping bags, the air thrumming with laughter and too much sugar.

He didn’t think his father would let him go. Not in a million years. But “mandatory school project” had been a magic phrase. He’s still not sure how how he convinced him, but he’s not questioning it.

He’s here. For once, he’s not staring at life through a glass case. He’s inside it.

The horror movie was chaotic in the best way. Mylène and Ivan were adorable, huddled together like one unit made of love and shared terror.

Chloe would’ve latched onto him if Nino hadn’t beaten her to it, arms slung around Adrien’s shoulders like they were lifelines. Adrien doesn’t think Nino was actually scared—he just has this sixth sense for when Chloe’s about to cross a line.

Kim and Alix were taking bets on who’d scream first (Mylène, obviously, though Sabrina held out longer than anyone expected). Max tried to moderate the chaos, though he was terrible at it.

It didn’t matter. The night worked. It felt real.

But Marinette.

She’d been off. Her smile was too sharp, her laugh a little too loud. She sat still but felt like she was moving at a thousand miles an hour, like she was two seconds from shattering or taking flight.

He noticed.

He’s not sure why he noticed—or why it bothered him so much. She was still Marinette. Still beautiful. She’d looked tired.

He caught her once, staring blankly at the fairy lights strung across the ceiling like she was somewhere else entirely.

Alya was by her side, grounding her in quiet ways only best friends know how. He was glad for that, though a small part of him wished… He shakes the thought away.

The night continues. Nino’s messing with the projector again, mumbling about “next-level cinema experiences.”

Kim is arm-wrestling Max, declaring himself “King of the Gym,” and Alix is filming it for blackmail material later.

And Adrien... Adrien watches.

He’s good at that—watching. He’s spent his life behind glass, an observer of things he couldn’t touch. But this is different. These people are his friends. And Marinette— his eyes drift to her again.

She’s curled up now, half-asleep but still restless. The fairy lights catch in her dark hair, making her glow in soft, impossible ways.

He doesn’t realise he’s staring until Nino elbows him, grinning.

“Dude,” Nino whispers. “You’re staring.”

Adrien blinks, startled. His lips twitch in surprise, caught in the act. “What? No, I’m—”

“You are,” Nino insists, smug as ever. “Look at you, all dreamy.”

Adrien waves it off, light and easy. Nino doesn’t push, but gives him a knowing look before turning back to his chaotic projector project.

Adrien lets himself relax again, head tilting back against the wall. His gaze drifts once more, unbidden, to Marinette.

She shifts, face softening for just a moment as she listens to Alya talk. The fairy lights flicker, casting her in a gentle halo.

The Monopoly game spirals into beautiful, ridiculous chaos.

Adrien’s never played before—not like this. Not surrounded by friends, not with laughter ringing in his ears like a favourite song, not with stakes as high as imaginary hotels and bragging rights.

It’s perfect.

Alix slams both hands on the table, wild-eyed and betrayed. “HOW DO YOU HAVE THREE HOTELS ALREADY?”

Marinette calmly replies, “I just landed on the right spaces.”

“No,” Nino groans, tossing his useless dice. “No, no, no. This is black magic. I’ve landed on your properties FOUR TIMES IN A ROW.”

He points dramatically at Adrien. “And this guy just BANKRUPTED himself paying your rent!”

Adrien, quietly pushing the last of his fake money toward Marinette, shrugs. “I should’ve quit when she got Boardwalk.”

Marinette tries—tries—to look apologetic, but she’s already stacking her absurd mountain of fake cash into neat, intimidating towers. “Guys, it’s not my fault—”

“SAY IT,” Chloe snaps, stabbing her token into the board with imperial authority. “SAY IT’S JUST LUCK.”

Marinette hesitates. “…It’s just luck?”

Adrien can’t stop laughing. He’s doubled over, tears in his eyes as the Monopoly empire crumbles under sheer force of outrage.

Marinette’s trying to reason with Max, but he’s on a statistical warpath about “impossible probability curves”.

Chloé, undeterred by logic, flips her token with flair. “I am the queen of monopoly. bow to me.”

Marinette, hesitant but diplomatic, taps the board. “…I think I just bankrupted you?”

Chloé whirls, hair flipping in righteous indignation. “Sabrina, fix this!”

Sabrina, frantically shuffling useless property cards, stammers, “I—I can’t, Chloé! You traded me everything for Park Place, remember?!”

Kim, lounging like he owns the place, laughs. “HA! See? Should’ve listened to me—” He rolls the dice, lands directly on Marinette’s Boardwalk hotel, and freezes.

“…How much is it?”

Marinette checks her ledger (why does she have a ledger?), “Two thousand.”

Kim, grinning like he’s made peace with death, cackles. “Worth it.”

Rose beams. “Everyone’s doing so well! This game is so fun!”

Juleka, half-asleep and out of the game for ages, deadpans, “I’ve been bankrupt for twenty minutes. I’m just here for the drama.”

By thirty minutes in, Marinette owns half the board, including the high-rent blue spaces. She’s been to jail four times but each time she rolled doubles like its nothing.

Chole is bankrupt. Adrien is clinging to a single utility. Nino is desperately trying to trade his railroads for rent money. Alya is losing it, cackling like a mad scientist. Alix and Kim are plotting Marinette’s downfall.

And Adrien watches, dizzy with happiness. He’s surrounded by light, warmth, noise—the kind that fills instead of presses.

He’s never felt anything like it, like being tucked inside a story where everything is good and possible.

His gaze drifts, inevitably, to Marinette.

Her eyes are bright with triumph and something softer—something alive. She’s laughing like she’s forgotten what it means to worry.

And Adrien—starry-eyed, spellbound, undone—laughs too.

The game builds towards chaos, an alliance forming purely to dethrone Monopoly Queen Marinette.

Max leads a tactical assault with Alix and Nino, while Kim claims, “I’m playing the long game.”

Max, unimpressed, snaps, “You’re out of money, properties, and dignity. What long game?”

Kim grins. “Exactly. You’ll never see it coming.”

The game ends—not with strategy, not with victory—but with Kim flipping the board, property cards flying like shrapnel.

Silence.

Then—laughter. Breathless, uncontrollable, real.

Adrien leans back, chest warm, cheeks aching from smiling too much.

For the first time in a long time, he feels like he belongs.

Marinette has always been weirdly lucky with games.

Any type—board games, card games, chance-based nonsense where logic folds in on itself like a trick of the light. She always wins. It’s inevitable, like tides rolling in or the sun eventually rising.

It’s like fate's little cosmic joke: Here’s some luck, kid. But only where it’s useless.

She’s thought about it—a lot. It’s strange. Ironic, even.

The universe follows her with sharp teeth and whispered curses. Bad luck isn’t a passing cloud; it’s a tumour she can’t cut out, a parasite that’s dug deep, drinking down every drop of hope she’s got.

Her plans crumble, her dreams shatter, her heart breaks over and over—but at least she’s great at Uno.

What a comfort.

Sometimes, she imagines the universe sitting back, watching her struggle, saying, “Hey, kid, I know your life is a burning trash fire but here—have unbeatable Monopoly skills. That’ll fix it.”

She laughs about it now. What else can she do? Her world falls apart, her life spirals—

—but damn, she can wreck anyone at poker.

The Uno game is legendary.

It starts with bravado—loud, competitive, unshakable—but by the end, it’s pure survival.

Marinette’s shuffling cards like she’s dealing with the devil, each movement precise and fluid. The cards snap together like destiny folding in on itself.

“Who’s ready to lose?” she says, sweet as poison.

Kim leans back, cocky as ever. “I don’t lose, Dupain-Cheng. I dominate.”

Alix snorts. “Big words from someone who still says ‘Uno’ after drawing ten cards.”

Max adjusts his glasses, already calculating. “Statistically, Kim has a 0.04% chance of winning. I ran simulations.”

Kim waves his cards like a threat. “How about you crunch these—”

Alya, grinning, shakes her head. “Kim, we haven’t even started, and you’re already embarrassing yourself.”

Chloé flips her hair, looking bored. “Can we please get this over with? I have better things to do than watch you all lose to me.”

The first card falls. Kim slaps a Draw 2 on Alya, smirking. “Boom. First blood.”

Alya draws, unfazed. “Keep that energy, Kim.” She plays a Reverse. “Let’s see where it gets you.”

Kim groans. “I see how it is. Fine. Alix, your turn.”

Alix throws down a Wild. “Color’s blue.”

Nino side-eyes her. “How do you already have one?”

“Skill,” Alix replies smugly. “You should try it sometime.”

Max nods approvingly. “An excellent move.” He drops a Skip aimed directly at Kim.

Kim stands up. “WHAT DID I DO TO YOU PEOPLE?!”

Chloé, snickering, deadpans, “You existed, obviously.”

Marinette watches it all unfold, quiet, calm—waiting. Then, with the sweetest, sharpest smile: “Kim, Draw 4.”

Kim gasps like she’s betrayed him personally. “YOU CAN’T JUST—“

Marinette calmly places another Wild. “I can, actually. Colour’s green now.”

Adrien, perfectly at ease, plays a green card. “Thanks for the assist, Marinette.”

Marinette, shark-grinning: “Any time.”

The game builds, a rising tide of frustration and panic. Sabrina timidly places a Skip on Chloé.

“SABRINA,” Chloé gasps, scandalised. “HOW COULD YOU?!”

Sabrina scrambles, “It’s just a game! Don’t be mad!”

“You’re dead to me,” Chloé declares, folding her arms.

Max is crunching numbers frantically. “Given Marinette’s current trajectory, she statistically holds a Draw 4 or Wild Card with an 82.5% probability. We must avoid enabling her.”

Marinette immediately plays a Wild. “Colour’s red.”

Kim howls. “WHY is it always the one colour I don’t have?!”

Marinette shrugs. “Lucky guess?”

Chloé, playing a Reverse, snaps, “Go again.”

Marinette doesn’t even blink. “UNO.”

The table erupts.

Kim shouts, “SHE’S CHEATING!”

Marinette places her final card—a red 7. “Good game, everyone.”

By round two, they’re paranoid.

Alya eyes Marinette like she’s hunting something. “You’re too quiet. I don’t trust you.”

Marinette, all innocence, “Me? I’m just enjoying the game.”

Kim, pointing accusingly,  “NO. You’re scheming. You’re always scheming.”

Adrien plays a Reverse, sending the turn right back to Marinette.

Marinette lays her last card—a Wild Card. “UNO.”

Collective despair.

“AGAIN?!” Alya groans, collapsing dramatically.

Kim flips the table. “I CAN’T TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”

By round five, it’s every person for themselves.

Alix slams her cards down. “How does she DO it?! Every. Single. Time.”

Kim, throwing his cards into the air, defeated, “This game is RIGGED!”

Max sits in the corner, looking haunted as he mutters under his breath.

Nino’s just laughing in disbelief, half-buried under rejected Draw 4s.

Adrien watches it all unfold, entranced. 

Someone might be crying. Alya’s slumped in surrender. Kim’s pacing like he’s planning revenge.

And through it all, Marinette sits serene, victorious again.

The group collectively agrees—for everyone’s sanity—

Marinette Dupain-Cheng is officially banned from all board and card games.

It started with a bet. Simple, reckless, stitched together with the wild thread of youth. A race around the school grounds, daring fate with breathless defiance.

The rules were sharp-edged and clear—checkpoints marked by rusting lampposts and forgotten statues, the wind cold enough to sting their faces.

Kim’s grin was electric, Alix’s smirk sharper than a fox. Stakes that mattered only because they didn’t: costumes and lit assignments, absurd wagers meant to temper the pounding thrill in their chests.

But Marinette felt it—the tension coiling beneath the game’s surface like a storm gathering weight. The air breathed of fire and smoke, a tang of something wrong.

Her breath clouded faintly in the cold as they slipped out of the dim-lit gymnasium, sneakers whispering against the floor. The school loomed, its darkened windows like empty sockets, unblinking.

The long hallways stretched into eerie tunnels of shadow, lit only by emergency lights that flickered with restless, buzzing intensity. The fluorescents cast sickly halos on the cracked tile floors, turning every corner into a place that could swallow you whole.

“Come on, slowpokes!” Kim’s voice rang out, careless and alive, echoing too loudly in the stillness. His bravado bounced off cold walls, daring something unseen to listen.

Alix held up her pocket watch, the old metal gleaming faintly in the fractured light—a gift from her father, its worn edges speaking of countless years and hands that cherished it.

Marinette shivered. “Maybe you should leave it behind?” she offered hesitantly, her voice soft.

She had a bad feeling about this.

Alix laughed, light and careless. “Relax, Mari. Don’t worry ‘bout it.” Her fingers curled possessively around the watch, tucking it deep into her jacket pocket.

Chloé sneered from the sidelines, her voice a knife wrapped in silk. “What’s the matter, Alix? Afraid you’ll trip and drop your precious junk?”

Alix shot her a withering glare, cutting through the dark like a blade. “Keep talking, Chloé. See where that gets you.”

Marinette’s stomach twisted. Her bad feeling clawed its way up her spine, cold and relentless. The air was too still, too expectant.

Alix discreetly presses it into Marinette’s hand, her fingers firm and sure despite the weight of something so fragile. “You’re the only one I trust to keep this safe. Just... don’t lose it, okay?”

Marinette hesitates—fear curling low and tight in her stomach like a coiled snake. Her thumb grazes the cool, worn surface of the antique, its edges smoothed by years of handling.

“Are you sure?” she asks, voice brittle, barely above a whisper. “You know about my—”

“Don’t start.” Alix’s eyes flash, fierce and unwavering. “I trust you.”

And against every instinct screaming otherwise, Marinette agrees. She tucks the watch close, its weight pressing against her like a secret, hot and relentless.

Fight the universe, she tells herself, even as dread stirs in her chest. Prove it wrong for once.

She’s such an idiot.

Ivan clapped his hands. “Ready… Go!”

They took off like arrows loosed from a bow, laughter sharp and breathless, feet pounding against the cold, unyielding ground.

The school felt awake now, its darkened hallways stretching into infinity—places where shadows ran deeper than the dark, where time seemed to shudder and twist around forgotten memories. The emergency lights flickered harder, buzzing like angry wasps.

Her senses sharpen, heightened by the familiar static buzz of wrongness crackling beneath her skin. Her gaze sweeps the dimly lit hallways, alert to every shifting shadow, every creak of the floor beneath worn sneakers.

Be careful. She repeats it like a chant, a plea.

Please, just let me get through this one thing.

It happens fast—too fast.

They’re rounding a tight corner near the science wing when Chloé accidentally bumps into a mop bucket left abandoned by the janitor.

Soapy water spills across the floor, slick and treacherous under dim, flickering fluorescents.

Chloé’s mocking voice slices through the air, sharp and saccharine-sweet, “Oops! Watch your step, Marinette!”

Marinette’s breath snags—not now, please not now—

Her sneakers hit the soapy slick, and gravity tears her balance away. Her arms flail, reaching for purchase—but there’s nothing to grab, just empty air and the cold, unforgiving floor rushing up to meet her.

Not this time. Please.

She almost steadies herself, but in the desperate scramble, her fingers loosen their hold on the watch’s pouch. No.

It tumbles from her grasp, slipping across the wet tiles like a hunted thing fleeing into the dark. She lunges—too late.

The pouch spills open mid-slide, the watch glinting under the fractured light—gold and delicate, out of place in a world so harsh.

She watches in horror as it skitters across the floor, spinning once—twice—before colliding with the metal leg of an upturned desk someone left askew.

The sound of shattering glass.

Small. Sharp. Final.

Time stops.

The world narrows to the broken shards scattered across the floor—jagged and gleaming like cruel stars. Marinette’s knees hit the wet tiles, the impact numb compared to the sheer horror she feels.

Her hand trembles as she reaches for the watch, fingers brushing shattered glass and cold metal. Its delicate hands are still now, frozen mid-tick, suspended in the before—before fate reared its head, before gravity betrayed her again.

Behind her, Chloé’s laughter rings out, sharp and wicked. “Did I do that?” she purrs, syrup-thick with faux innocence.

Marinette doesn’t respond. Can’t.

The universe roars in her ears—Why did you think you could win?—a cruel litany she’s heard a thousand times before.

She presses her hand flat against the cold floor, half-expecting it to pulse back, to crack open and swallow her whole.

Her breath hitches—uneven, shallow. She knew this would happen. She knew.

But knowing doesn’t soften the blow.

Marinette stays on her knees, bruised and hands shaking as she gathers the broken pieces of the watch. Tiny, delicate gears cut into her skin, drawing thin lines of blood.

Fate is already watching. It always is.

The noise draws Alix, pulling—a gravitational inevitability.

Alix drops to her knees, hands trembling as she gathers the broken pieces, fingertips brushing jagged edges like she can undo the damage by touch alone.

“You... you broke it?” Her voice is thin, brittle, sharp enough to cut.

Marinette’s breath stutters. "It— it was an accident! Chloé—she—”

“I trusted you!”

Alix’s voice cracks, loud and vicious, echoing like a gunshot through the empty hall. The air feels colder, biting against skin, raw with the sting of something lost that can’t be reclaimed.

“You knew how much this meant to me—you knew— and you still—“

She speaks as though she chokes on the words, shaking, cradling the broken remains like something fragile and sacred.

Marinette stammers, pleads, her voice a twisted knot of panic and desperation. “Please, Alix, I didn’t mean to— it just—”

“Don’t!” Alix snaps, venom in her tone but heartbreak in her eyes. “Just... don’t.”

Her shoulders shake with barely-contained fury—or maybe grief, maybe both, maybe something even sharper that doesn’t have a name.

Marinette watches helplessly as Alix spins on her heel, her movements jerky, like a marionette cut loose. Her breath heaves like she’s drowning. She storms down the hall, boots splashing through soapy water without care, without looking back.

A heavy silence settles, thick as fog, suffocating and still. It weighs on their shoulders, presses against their ribs. No one speaks—what could they say?

In the dim light, eyes flicker toward Marinette—accusing, pitying, uncertain.

Chloé smirks from the shadows, venom-tipped. "See? I told you she’d mess it up," she hisses to Sabrina, her voice a blade slipping between ribs, cold and familiar.

Cruelty comes easy—effortless as breathing. Marinette doesn’t flinch. She’s used to this. The smirk, the whispers, the sharp edge of fate cutting too close.

Alya is at her side in an instant, her grip firm but gentle. "Hey... it’s not your fault," she murmurs, though the words wobble, brittle as thin ice. Even she doesn’t believe it.

Adrien is there too, his touch warm as he lifts her gently, his hands steady as he checks her knees. His brow furrows, worry etched deep in his features. Why is he—?

Her gaze drops.

Blood wells from scraped skin, dark and slow, tracing thin red rivers down her legs. It stings, hot and merciless, a throbbing reminder that everything breaks.

Alya gasps. Nino bolts toward the nearest classroom, calling over his shoulder, "First aid kit—hang on!" But Alya already has one, tucked in her bag because— of course she does.

Because of Marinette.

Because this happens.

It always happens.

Marinette wants to scream, wants to sob, wants to disappear. But her throat closes, tight as a fist, strangling the words before they can escape.

She barely registers Adrien’s soothing voice, Alya’s soft reassurances, the sharp sting of antiseptic— it doesn’t matter.

None of it matters.

Because guilt sits heavy in her chest. It digs claws into her ribs, carves itself deeper with every breath.

And underneath it all—loneliness.

Marinette presses her lips together, tasting salt and shame. Her hands tremble, useless in her lap, stained with memories she can’t scrub away.

The hall stretches empty, vast as a graveyard. The broken watch gleams in the dim light—a shattered relic, its ticking heart still.

And she knows—with a bone-deep certainty—

She’s the curse.

She’s always been.

Adrien sometimes wishes he had the same purification power, something that could cleanse hurt as easily as a snapped yoyo string gathering shadows from the air. The week is up.

Hawkmoth is watching.

Alix might be next. He knows her anger runs hot, sharp-edged and dangerous. But worse—so much worse—

He thinks of Marinette.

So, he talks. He  keeps talking, his voice a quiet current, steady and warm. Gentle. Words flow without purpose—small stories, memories, fragments of nothing, anything to fill the silence.

His hands hover, uncertain, close but never touching, like he’s afraid she might shatter under the weight of his care.

Marinette stares past him, her eyes glassy and far away, lost in some unreachable place. Her fingers curl into the hem of her sweater, twisting the fabric in silent desperation. Her breathing is shallow, measured—too measured.

He keeps talking.

The air smells like old wood and cleaning chemicals. The dim light from the hallway seeps in, thin and uncertain, casting soft shadows across her face. She looks fragile, like porcelain worn thin from too many falls.

Adrien doesn’t know what to do—he’s never known. But he can stay. He can be here.

Minutes stretch like twilight shadows, long and uncertain. He keeps talking, weaving threadbare stories into something solid, a lifeline stretched between them.

And then—finally.

Marinette blinks, slowly returning, her gaze shifting like clouds parting after a storm. Her eyes meet his—unfocused, but present.

Her voice is small, hoarse from disuse. "The fountain story was dumb," she murmurs.

Adrien laughs, the sound spilling out in relief, light and unrestrained.

"It was," he agrees, grinning. "But you smiled.”

Marinette’s breath hitches, her fingers loosening their death grip on her sweater. She still looks tired, weighed down by guilt and something else, but there’s a spark now—dim, but alive.

They’ll be fine.

Marinette feels it first—the wrongness, oily and slick, seeping into her flesh like poison. It thrums beneath her bones, a soundless pressure that makes her ribs ache, her pulse quicken.

The air is sharp, of burning wires and wet earth, an unholy marriage of metal and soil, as though something ancient is awakening beneath the gym’s splintered floors.

There’s a ringing in her ears—high-pitched, relentless, a bell tolling for an unnamed doom. It feels like fate fracturing, the clang of destiny's forge struck wrong.

Before she can excuse herself, before she can steady her trembling hands or swallow the rising panic, she sees it.

The gym is a wound, split open and bleeding light. Dim overhead bulbs flicker, suspended by cables that sway like they’re being breathed on by some vast, unseen thing.

The pulsing green glow of distorted time beats like a tainted heart, illuminating jagged cracks that spiderweb across the gym’s scarred wooden floor.

The wood is ruptured, gnarled edges splintering upward like twisted claws. Some parts of the floor sink, others rise, suspended mid-convulsion, as if frozen in the agonised act of transformation.

The walls shift, reality folding in on itself—one moment fresh and polished, adorned with triumphant banners celebrating long-forgotten victories; the next, decrepit, paint peeling like dead skin.

It reeks of old rust, charred wood. Marinette staggers, breath shallow, hands clammy. This is coming undone. She hears it better now—a scream, distant but growing, like fists thumping against a coffin lid.

The world shifts.

Broken clocks swing like twisted pendulums, their hands spinning wildly, trapped in some frenzied rebellion against order. The tick tock is relentless, a heartbeat gone mad, a countdown to nothing.

Spectres of past sleepovers bleed into the now—ghostly imprints wearing neon scrunchies and tie-dyed tees, faces flickering in half forgotten laughter.

They sit cross legged on the floor, tossing popcorn into empty mouths, playing games that never ended. Their hollow eyes glitch when looked at too long, twisting into distorted masks before vanishing with a static hiss.

A pillow soars into the air, weightless as a memory, but its flight is wrong, jerky, like a marionette on invisible strings. It explodes into a flurry of feathers—white, soft, silent—then rewinds, reforming into a perfect, unbroken pillow as though time itself can’t let anything go.

Alya pulls out her phone, hands trembling, capturing nothing. Her screen shows only smears of light, warped shapes that breathe and shift, a living canvas mocking her attempts at understanding.

At the far corner, where shadows seethe, a tear in time ripples like molten glass, shimmering, almost beautiful.

Through it, the gym lives again—bright, warm, alive—bursting with laughter and shouts, basketballs thudding against polished floors, sneakers squeaking in play.

Winged hourglasses hover like metallic angels of judgment, their mechanical wings beating with relentless rhythm. Sand within them flows backward, erasing seconds, stealing moments, undoing futures.

The class panics, their screams blending into the endless tick-tock, a chorus of fear and futility. In the chaos, Marinette slips away, her chest aching, her breath ragged with guilt.

She knows.

This is her fault.

It was Alix.

It was her.

The thought pierces her like a jagged blade, twisting deeper with every step. Her fault. Her fault. Her fault.

The air tightens around her like a noose, like destiny refusing to release its grip.