💗 marinette (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bonnechance) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
genevrier2016-04-15 05:13 pm
bonnechance) wrote in genevrier2016-04-15 05:13 pm
💀 pour oublier ma peine immense
It had been a long and hard three years.
Ladybug had run out of fingers with which to count the sticky situations she and Chat Noir had been in because of Hawkmoth. But finally, finally, she and her partner had him dead to rights. As time went on, they had grown desperate, and they'd made mistakes - but nothing they hadn't been able to fix. He'd made mistakes, too, and that was how the two of them had managed to track him down.
Heart pounding, she cast her gaze down at the man that had been their adversary for so long. Hawkmoth stared back at the both of them with a dark glare full of loathing. There were a lot of things she had wanted to ask him when she finally caught up to him, but there was only one question she was actually able to form.
"How could you?" She whispered, her voice ragged. She was breathing heavily - the fight had taken a lot out of her. Out of her partner, and out of their enemy, too; had it gone on much longer, they all might have dropped dead out of exhaustion. "You hurt so many people."
Hawkmoth's eyes glittered, and he pressed his lips together into a thin line. Ladybug felt something roll down her cheek - sweat, she hoped, and not blood or tears, but she'd taken a hit to the temple earlier and she couldn't be certain that it wasn't bleeding (and in fact it was). But she was in better shape than him, at least. He was beaten down, he had lost.
All that remained was to take his Miraculous and make sure that Nooroo's power never, ever fell int the hands of someone like him ever again.
His refusal to answer stirred anger in her where there had once been pity.
"Men. Women. Children. You used them all - and for what? What on earth could have been worth it? I don't understand. Explain yourself, Hawkmoth."
He didn't answer. He looked between the two of them, seething. Ladybug scowled and knelt down in front of him, curled her fingers around his brooch, and yanked it away from his suit.
The magic holding his transformation together fell apart, and Nooroo emerged from the butterfly Miraculous at long last. Ladybug cradled him in the crook of her arm and watched as the facial features of their nemesis became clear.
A well-dressed man, middle-aged. Nobody she recognized. Without his Miraculous, he should have been powerless. Defeated. Done for.
She didn't catch his smirk until it was too late.
His hand darted into the suit jacket that hadn't been there before, and his fingers closed around something she couldn't see. "I'll make you understand," He snarled, and the next thing she knew his hand emerged from the jacket and the crack of a gunshot split the air. "Perhaps now we'll share the same wish."
There was a gun in his hand, Ladybug realized, as a dull roar and the man's twisted, bitter laughter filled her ears. He hadn't aimed at her. She turned toward her partner with dread.
He had aimed at him, and his laughter was not the laughter of a man who had missed his mark.
Ladybug had run out of fingers with which to count the sticky situations she and Chat Noir had been in because of Hawkmoth. But finally, finally, she and her partner had him dead to rights. As time went on, they had grown desperate, and they'd made mistakes - but nothing they hadn't been able to fix. He'd made mistakes, too, and that was how the two of them had managed to track him down.
Heart pounding, she cast her gaze down at the man that had been their adversary for so long. Hawkmoth stared back at the both of them with a dark glare full of loathing. There were a lot of things she had wanted to ask him when she finally caught up to him, but there was only one question she was actually able to form.
"How could you?" She whispered, her voice ragged. She was breathing heavily - the fight had taken a lot out of her. Out of her partner, and out of their enemy, too; had it gone on much longer, they all might have dropped dead out of exhaustion. "You hurt so many people."
Hawkmoth's eyes glittered, and he pressed his lips together into a thin line. Ladybug felt something roll down her cheek - sweat, she hoped, and not blood or tears, but she'd taken a hit to the temple earlier and she couldn't be certain that it wasn't bleeding (and in fact it was). But she was in better shape than him, at least. He was beaten down, he had lost.
All that remained was to take his Miraculous and make sure that Nooroo's power never, ever fell int the hands of someone like him ever again.
His refusal to answer stirred anger in her where there had once been pity.
"Men. Women. Children. You used them all - and for what? What on earth could have been worth it? I don't understand. Explain yourself, Hawkmoth."
He didn't answer. He looked between the two of them, seething. Ladybug scowled and knelt down in front of him, curled her fingers around his brooch, and yanked it away from his suit.
The magic holding his transformation together fell apart, and Nooroo emerged from the butterfly Miraculous at long last. Ladybug cradled him in the crook of her arm and watched as the facial features of their nemesis became clear.
A well-dressed man, middle-aged. Nobody she recognized. Without his Miraculous, he should have been powerless. Defeated. Done for.
She didn't catch his smirk until it was too late.
His hand darted into the suit jacket that hadn't been there before, and his fingers closed around something she couldn't see. "I'll make you understand," He snarled, and the next thing she knew his hand emerged from the jacket and the crack of a gunshot split the air. "Perhaps now we'll share the same wish."
There was a gun in his hand, Ladybug realized, as a dull roar and the man's twisted, bitter laughter filled her ears. He hadn't aimed at her. She turned toward her partner with dread.
He had aimed at him, and his laughter was not the laughter of a man who had missed his mark.
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"Very well."
Releasing her, he got up to his feet. Sore. He wasn't as young as he used to be... he didn't actually plan to take her advice, but it would catch up with him eventually if he didn't.
"Put your earrings back in. We'll need to do something about your clothes."
... they were both still covered in blood.
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Her hand came to rest over her purse, and she nodded before reaching in to extract the earrings. One, two. She closed her eyes and felt Tikki rematerialize in the air next to her, and the kwami landed briefly on her shoulder to catch her breath before immediately diving into her bag.
She didn't feel like talking with Gabriel around, apparently.
"...I'll transform after we get to the apartment complex and go in through a window," Marinette murmured, forcing herself to think ahead. Strolling into the lobby with her clothes in this state wouldn't work. "Unless Alya's hanging out in my room, and she shouldn't be if she knows what's good for her, I should be able to get changed before she sees anything."
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Nooroo had taken up residence in Adrien's bedside drawer for now, but Marinette still held the locket for safekeeping. Gabriel hadn't tried to take it from her, and he wouldn't.
For now, Plagg's ring still remained in his pocket.
Gabriel hesitated, as if he wanted to say something, but seemed to think better of it. Instead he inclined his head and left to shower and change. Nooroo would stay at Adrien's bedside, and Gabriel apparently trusted him to keep watch.
One more mystery.
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From there, it was a simple enough matter to detransform, change her clothes, and pack up what she needed. A few changes of clothes, some textbooks, her sketchpad, and a few small projects - a bag here, some embroidery there - would come with her; she needed something to do in the quiet hours when she would be watching over Adrien. Her bloodied clothing was wrapped up in a ziploc bag and shoved deep under her bed for now.
The hard part was coming out of her room and explaining to Alya that she would be gone for a few days. Her roommate, not having heard her come in, looked suspicious as all hell and brought up a few concerns - what about school? Work? Marinette just shook her head, said she was going to be taking some time off, and let her know that she could call her if she needed her.
The police must not have spoken with Adrien's group of friends yet, Marinette decided as she headed down the stairs. Otherwise, Alya would never have let her go.
But since she was early, she made it back down to the waiting car, and off they went to the Agreste household.
She didn't care about her classes, and she could barely bring herself to care about her projects. She was supposed to be working on designs to add to her portfolio... but that wasn't going to happen. Over the course of the next or two, she put forth a token effort to getting back to work, but ended up just staring blankly down at her books when she tried to read them, and shoving her fabric aside when she tried to work on her embroidery. She didn't even pick up the half-finished purse she'd been working on.
The spark seemed to have gone out of her. She ate and slept as she needed to, but it probably wouldn't be ignited again without prompting.
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... the one place he was present was Adrien's room, and it was usually at night, once he got home from his many appointments.
Gabriel almost always brought work with him. He answered emails on his laptop, or worked on details in his sketchbook, but it was always something small and mindless.
The third night, Gabriel came to where Marinette was sitting and offered her a clipboard, a set of copics, and a sheet of thick paper with a design sketched out on it. The colors had already been started, but it was far from finished.
"This pattern needs to be filled in," he told her quietly. A few minutes later, he spoke again.
"You stopped attending class."
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An incomplete design. What did it have to do with her? She wasn't one of his employees, though before all of this happened, she would have given nearly anything to be.
She didn't set them aside, but she kept them on her lap. Her expression dropped the puzzlement and just became a frown when he spoke up again, though, and she shifted in her seat a little uncomfortably. Her first reaction, denial, wasn't at all credible. She couldn't say "You don't know I haven't been going!" because she had practically not moved from this room in the last three days.
"...I wouldn't be able to focus even if I went."
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"You may not be able to focus long enough to create," he ventured, "but you can do something. You need to."
He paused, then handed her one of the pens. "Start with jade green."
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That was the crux of the matter, when it came down to it. Fear of failure. Even knowing that she was good at designing wasn't helpful; she'd been good at being Ladybug, too, once she'd had time to find her footing. That hadn't kept her partner from paying the price for her own stupidity.
She uncapped the copic and began to fill in the pattern with slow, hesitant strokes. The usual confidence with which she worked with any sort of design was lacking, and she seemed nervous about laying the colors down lest she put something in the wrong place, but at least she was doing it. At least she hadn't put the design aside when he handed it to her.
She had been sorely tempted to.
"...what color should I do next?"
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"Work your way from green to blue and violet," he instructed her, but didn't tilt his page to show her his own progress. Part of this was going with one's gut, and he needed her to focus, to accomplish, to move forward in the flow of time.
Marinette would never function, never live if she couldn't get out of her head, if she remained paralyzed. Though Gabriel had never emotionally dealt with his own pain and loss, he did this part very well.
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Marinette knew, on some level, that in order to make the combination of colors work, she had to blend them properly. They'd gone over this just recently in class - it was one of the techniques designers relied upon to make things work. She'd done it a thousand times before even having been taught about it. It should be easy.
It wasn't. Her gaze wandered from the paper, to the green pen she was holding, to a blue pen lying between herself and Gabriel. Put the green pen down. Pick up the blue. Blend it, she tried to tell herself, but her hand just wouldn't listen.
How can you do this?
The voice in the back of her mind came unbidden, and Marinette flinched. She knew it was just her own guilt playing tricks on her, but the voice sounded a lot like Hawkmoth.
How can you go on designing and living your life like you're not responsible for Adrien's injuries?
Marinette set the jade green copic down, and she did not pick up the blue.
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The room smelled faintly of antiseptic and saline. Yesterday, they'd found that fluid was creating pressure on Adrien's brain, so the doctors had performed an emergency procedure to relieve it and allow it to drain.
There had been a long, tense conversation in the other room about the possibility of a tracheotomy. Adrien had been in a coma more than 48 hours, and breathing was a main concern. It was the safest course of action for complications that could arise in the future, though they hadn't yet surfaced.
Gabriel picked up the blue copic and placed it in Marinette's hand.
She seemed like a shell of herself. One more ghost in a house full of them.
"What you do now does nothing to change what happened," he said quietly. There was nothing comforting about his tone, but nothing cruel either.
"We made our mistakes." The both of them. All of them. "The reasons don't matter. But when my son wakes up, he will need you."
There was a click as he set down the copic, picked up another.
"You. Not your shade."
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Adrien shouldn't have to need her - he could do so much better. Someone who could actually keep him safe. Someone who hadn't turned him down for three years straight because she was too hung up on one possibility to even see another.
She had probably caused him a lot of pain over the years. If they'd just talked things over sooner, maybe she could have spared him some of it.
But... it would be bad for her to vanish from his life now, and it would be worse to only be half-there. As Gabriel said - a shade. As Chat Noir, for better or for worse, he had depended on her. She hadn't been able to be the support that he'd needed in the end - that he had ended up like this was proof enough of that...
But maybe she could be that support for him now.
Marinette swallowed the lump in her throat and uncapped the blue copic.
"I just..." Her voice was brittle. "It doesn't... seem right. His life is on hold right now. Mine should be too. We're... we're a team. It's not fair that only one of us got out of that..."
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Perhaps someone else would have given her encouraging words, or reminded her that life was unfair, but Gabriel was not that person. Marinette was a smart girl, and she knew these things. But this was also her first experience with world-shattering grief, with the guilt of living destroying her will to do so.
"But this happened to him, not to you."
Gabriel lined out the next section, faltering slightly. He pulled the pen from the page, closed his eyes.
Finally, he opened them.
In fact, if he had done what he meant to, it might have never happened at all.
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That was survivor's guilt, plain and simple. She knew her parents would have been devastated if their roles had been reversed. She knew Chat Noir would have absolutely flipped out. Alya probably would have tracked Hawkmoth down and beaten his face in with a tire iron.
And yet... She couldn't help but think it. He had protected her for three years. She should have protected him for once.
"I didn't... I didn't even think. I thought that once we had the Miraculous, he wouldn't be able to hurt anyone anymore." She took a shaky breath. "I never thought he would have had a gun..."
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Gabriel knew, because that was what he was prepared to do, when he found him.
"You were fighting a battle you were never meant to fight, one that should have been decided years ago." Gabriel outlined another section.
"You should have never been put in that position to begin with."
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It was slow going, and not her best work.
"...but if I wasn't in that position, who would have been?" She bit her lip. "Tikki said..."
She faltered. Maybe Gabriel didn't want to hear about what her kwami had said, but the words were already out, and she couldn't take them back.
"...I was destined to be Ladybug. Even if I waited until I was ready, Hawkmoth wouldn't have... So many more people would have been hurt."
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It was Nooroo's voice that broke it.
"Gabriel would have."
The revelation fell, shattered around them, and Gabriel looked up, catching the movement of the butterfly kwami as he hovered, then landed on the footboard of the bed.
"You should tell her," he insisted softly. It wasn't accusatory. Just... sad.
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If there was any answer Marinette had expected, it wasn't that. She looked up from the pattern in shock, sought out Nooroo, settled her gaze on him at the bed's floorboard. A moment passed, and then another, and she looked to Gabriel.
The familiarity with which he and Nooroo had regarded each other at the hospital - the way he hadn't even hesitated to activate Chat Noir's transformation... the ease with which he'd accepted the existence of her kwami.
He hadn't even batted an eyelash at Tikki; he'd been angry, but he had never once insisted she couldn't be real, and he'd never once demanded an explanation for the source of Ladybug's and Chat Noir's powers. That should have been her first clue. If her parents had discovered that she was Ladybug, they would have asked so many questions trying to understand it.
"...you had a Miraculous of your own." Her brows furrowed. "Is that what Nooroo wants you to tell me, Monsieur Agreste?"
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Gabriel put down the pen, watching Nooroo's earnest eyes, and finally sighed.
"I did." His voice was quiet and heavy. There was a dense quality to it, like he was carrying too much, like the words meant more than the language he used. "And I rejected it."
Nooroo barely flinched, but the sadness in his eyes was even more pronounced.
The silence wavered, and Gabriel got to his feet, taking his clipboard with him. The door clicked softly shut behind him.
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My son. Her son.
There were bits and pieces of the puzzle that were starting to fall into place, but she didn't have enough pieces to form the full picture. As Gabriel swept out of the room, she held out her hand to Nooroo.
"...don't worry, I won't try and make you tell me," She said softly. "It's his story to tell when he's ready... right?"
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"You were chosen well, you know."
His voice warmed, and he half-smiled before he looked after Gabriel.
"He wasn't always like this. Back when I knew him, he wasn't so..." he trailed off, searching for the word. He never seemed to find it. Instead, Nooroo got lost in the memories, following them down the rabbit hole, somewhere he couldn't yet share.
Patting Marinette's hand apologetically, he looked back up at her.
"He might not be a kind person," Nooroo added, "But he does care. He cares more deeply than any human I've ever known."
Hesitating, he finally added, "It was why he was chosen." Nooroo's attention drifted towards the boy on the bed. "... but it was also why he gave it up."
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Or maybe it was that the Miraculous themselves were what followed trouble, because the people who were chosen by them were the ones who were best equipped to deal with it. It was hard to say - she just knew that since she became Ladybug, many of her classmates had become victims of Hawkmoth. That hadn't changed when she had moved from one level of school to another.
Either way, as she followed Nooroo's gaze to Adrien, the first inklings of understanding tugged at her.
"And if there's anything Monsieur Agreste doesn't like... it's trouble coming to his son."
Maybe it wasn't exactly how it played out, but she could imagine it. Starting a family, having Adrien come into his life... and then some kind of disaster. If trouble followed Gabriel's Miracuolus the way it seemed to follow hers and Chat Noir's, she could understand why he would give it up, if he thought it might stop danger from being attracted to his family.
Her brow furrowed and she bit her lip.
"Nooroo?" She whispered. "The Hawkmoth we fought didn't have you back then. So... why was the Miraculous given to him? What else is out there?"
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It was far from the whole story, but she had the right idea. Gabriel was a man of secrets and privacy, like the Miraculous holders so often were. Adrien, their Adrien, was an anomaly.
In the wake of Marinette's question, Nooroo quieted again. His wings fluttered.
"For now... hopefully nothing," he finally answered, "If all is well, you'll never have to have that question answered."
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But there was a possibility, a terrible possibility, that there might be something. It explained why Gabriel had told her to put the earrings back in. She imagined it probably had as much to do with providing her a means with which to defend herself as it did with providing her a means to not fail at protecting Adrien this ime, if things were to go pear shaped.
"I think I'd prefer not to have it answered," She agreed. "But if it has to be... I'll try my best to be ready for it. Whatever it is."
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Hawkmoth, terrible as he had been, was far from the worst.
He'd still managed to cut deep.
"If something truly awful were to happen, you wouldn't be alone," he assured her softly. "The others would be awakened. The Master would see to it."
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