Chapter Text
The dawn of the third day is grey and silent and desolate. No birds sing in the trees, because the trees are all burnt and the birds are all gone. No shops fronts come to life, and no one is there to mourn over the ashes of the Louvre. The world itself has ended, or so it feels. It may as well have done. It looks like it has.
Then, from amidst the smoke and rubble and the smell of death, life shines through. Several lives shine through. Ladybug's chosen heroes - those who remain - creep out from their temporary shelter and take in the monochrome wasteland Paris has become.
"This isn't working," Chat Noir says. "We need to think of something else."
"Like what?" Ladybug asks. He can't answer, because he doesn't have one.
She doesn't tell anyone about finding Luka's body. They're going to beat Mourning Star, she will cast the Cure and Luka will be restored. No one else ever has to know about what happened to him. It will be her burden alone to carry.
Turning to Chat Noir she says, "We just need to think outside the box. All of our usual plans have failed but something has to work. We could - I don't know. Ryuko still has Lightning Dragon left -"
"Are you suggesting that we electrocute her?" he asks sharply.
"No. I mean - I don't know, possibly, if everything else fails..." He scoffs and shakes his head, and fire shoots through her. "So tell me your plan, Chat."
"Roi Singe could use Uproar -"
"He already has. She incinerated the doll before she could touch it."
"So we'll do it again!" he bursts. "Distract her, have Roi Singe use Uproar when she's not looking and take the locket."
Marinette sighs. "I guess it could work. Are you okay?" He doesn't reply, but she can't blame him. "Tikki - or, you know, the spirit of the Ladybug - she's starting to get restless."
He looks at her, eyebrows raised. "Oh yeah?"
"What about - I mean can you feel the Black Cat in your head?"
One of his fake ears twitches. "Kind of. Maybe. I don't know. There's something there."
Smiling weakly, she says, "I'm glad it's not just me."
He shoots her a reproachful look. "It's never just you, LB. I'm always here." Are you? she wants to ask. Looking at him now, there seems to be less and less of the boy she thinks she knows and trusts. His eyes seem to have dimmed over the last day or so.
"My mother died, you know," he says out of nowhere, a million miles away, and before she can say anything he pushes himself to his feet and walks away. In the distance, a sonic scream makes her mind start pulling itself apart.
Roi Singe casts Uproar for a second time and receives a Baby Anabelle doll. His jaw clenches as he looks down at it, but he still nods to Ladybug, perched and waiting up above, then starts waving it in Mourning Star's direction.
"Come on," he mutters. "Just come after the damn thing." It takes a minute, but Kim is desperate; they all are. They need this to work.
And it does, at first.
Mourning Star's eyes land on Baby Anabelle and from a distance, he sees her lips forming the word Jacques, then she bolts for him. At the same time, Ladybug swings down towards her, one hand outstretched -
The akuma looks up at Marinette, her lips curl into a snarl that rips from her throat, otherworldly, like a thousand souls crammed into one person, and they crash together, rolling to the ground. Mourning Star sets herself on fire. Ladybug doesn't care, doesn't feel it, just tries to force her hand towards the locket, though Mourning Star's scalding grip is resisting her.
Someone is screaming but it's not her and it's not the akuma either. Ladybug's skin is searing, her eyes and throat and nostrils burning and it doesn't matter. Get the locket. She pins Mourning Star with her knees and strains, strains -
The akuma is screeching again and Ladybug's ear drums burst and she's reaching -
Someone latches onto her, claws dig into her shoulders and they rip her away from the flaming woman, shouting and screaming, desperately resisting -
She's so close, she's right fucking there, goddamn it.
"Ladybug, stop!" Chat Noir, angry and frantic, holding onto her so tightly that she can't move. "You're hurt, Elise is hurt - Just stop!"
"That's not Elise!"
"YES SHE IS!"
That roar, and only that, brings her up short, snaps her from her frenzy. She's breathing like she's sprinted a marathon and she's - she thinks she's in pain, but there's no one point to it so she can't be sure. Her hair is singed and she can smell it, just, through her burnt nostrils. She's radiating heat and on the ground, Mourning Star is smoking, crying out in that awful, echoing voice, and Marinette's heart drops to her stomach.
"Oh god..."
"Stop, Ladybug," Chat Noir says in her ear, and she nods frantically.
"I have - I have now."
He doesn't let go of her; she stays wrapped tight in his arms, panting, dragging each breath into her punished lungs like it's a job. His forehead touches the crown of her hair, and he breathes out, low and shaking.
It takes the combined the efforts of every hero Paris has left to corner her, but it’s Chat Noir who finishes it, in the end. They corner Mourning Star in the square where the Eiffel Tower used to be, only because the inevitable is happening; even the immense grief that powered her is beginning to tire as well. Chat Noir is the one to approach her, slow and quiet, doing what Chat Noir always does for the victims of akumas: provide comfort. Marinette's seen him do this before; sitting with victims while they wait for an ambulance, chatting away to them, making them laugh or even just crack a smile. It's what he does. It's what he's good at. There are no smiles to be seen here.
Mourning Star is too tired to lash out at him and so he manages to walk right up to her, to hold her hands in his and look into the now dimly glowing orbs that are her eyes, and speak. (Ladybug lets him go, but she’s right at his back, ready to move if Mourning Star hurts him.)
"Ms Bisset - Elise - If you can hear me in there, I'd like for you to know that I - I am no stranger to grief either." He's stammering. "I lost my mother only a few years ago, you see, and I'm familiar with the pain you're in, even if I can't understand it completely or pretend to know the immensity of what you're going through." Mourning Star stares out at him, with the visage of a lost child that makes even Marinette's exhausted heart ache. It's like the woman inside the akuma is hearing Chat speak and reaching out in hope of rescue.
Marinette had hoped to provide it, but she hadn't thought of this.
"No parent should lose a child, and I cannot begin to tell you how s-sorry I am. I want you to know that you are not alone; my heart is with yours."
Mourning Star stares, and stares, and then she opens her mouth and Marinette tenses to withstand another sonic boom - but none comes. Instead, it's a wail. An ordinary human wail. The wail of a mother whose child is dead.
All of a sudden a wave of a new kind of horror washes over the remaining wielders and to her left, Ryuko is crying openly, her tears carving clean tracks down her grimy face. Roi Singe is looking away from the spectacle, his face contorted and gritting his teeth while Queen Bee holds her stomach and gapes, like she is trying to cry her feelings out but they just won't come.
Chat Noir has let go of Mourning Star's hands to instead take her in his arms and he holds her tight, painfully tight as she cries out in human voice, cries for her boy, her Jacques, who is gone, and for the part of herself she was before Hawkmoth. His shoulders heave with emotion and Marinette knows he is crying. She is too.
But she is also Ladybug, and it is her duty to protect those unable to protect themselves, so she gathers herself together as best she can, and approaches the huddled duo on the ground. Neither take notice of her.
"I'm sorry," Chat sobs into Mourning Star's shoulder. "I'm so - s-sorry, Ms Bisset. I'm sorry for what's happened to you. I'm sorry." Marinette is to Chat's back now; if Mourning Star opened her eyes she would be spotted right away. "But you're loved though," Chat continues. "So loved, and - and strong too, and while the pain might never leave, I promise that one day - one day it won't hurt quite as badly as it does now."
Mourning Star is listening, hearing what Chat Noir is saying, and as he has her in his arms, safe and yielding, Ladybug reaches for Mourning Star's neck and snags the locket hanging there. She breaks it and watches with a hatred that burns sudden and bright as a purple butterfly flutters out. She catches it in a sharp motion, she purifies it, and then all that's left to do, as the visage of Mourning Star vanishes, replaced with a thin waif of a woman, is for her to gather her remaining strength to release the butterfly; cast the Miraculous Cure.
She can't do it. The Cure is a bridge too far. Marinette sways on the spot and tries - she tries to say the words but she can't even force them out. Chat Noir, still wrapped up in Ms Bisset, doesn't notice, but Queen Bee and Ryuko are soon at her side.
"Ladybug?" the Dragon asks. "Can you do it?" She tries to shake her head, no, but she can't do that either. All of her strength is vanished and before she knows what's happening, Queen Bee is the only thing holding her up, because her legs are giving out.
"Do you want us to help you?" the Bee asks, and that's how you know it's serious, Marinette thinks to herself, half-delirious. When Chloe Bourgeois is concerned, everyone should be.
She can't cast the Cure. She's too tired. She thinks of Luka, who needs her, because right now he's dead. She can feel the butterfly humming around frantically inside the yoyo, trying to escape.
"I can't do it," she manages. "I'm not - I'm not strong enough." The two wielders exchange an alarmed look and Chat Noir, a collapsed Elise Bisset in his arms, finally looks up.
"What's going on?" he asks. "Ladybug? Cast the Cure."
"She can't do it, Chat," Queen Bee spits. "She's exhausted."
Kagami - Ryuko - whoever she is - takes Marinette's hand in her own. "You say the words, Ladybug. I'll do the heavy lifting."
And indeed she does. Ryuko lifts Marinette's hand into the air, releasing the cleansed butterfly as she draws in a breath and mutters, "Miraculous Ladybug."
The three of them watch the thing fly away into the sky, vanishing from sight. A small shock of ladybugs have spread across the city and fixed the place up, but the hero who controls them is too tired to make a complete job of it, so some walls remain collapsed, some craters are left behind. People who had, seconds ago, been going cold find their eyes blinking open, their heartbeats restored. They stumble to their feet, dazed beyond words, and grapple desperately for order, but as of yet there is none to be found.
Queen Bee vanishes and returns a short while later with a shock blanket, which she presses close around the shoulders of Elise, who shakes apart in Chat Noir's arms, completely catatonic. The Bee looks like she wants to say something, but she can't find the words and so she crosses her arms and returns to Ladybug's side.
"It's done, Ladybug," Ryuko says. "It's over."
"Yes," she agrees all the while thinking, as Queen Bee tries to quell her shaking, that really, it's just beginning.
It's past midnight, and Elise has been free of Hawkmoth's control for twelve hours. At first Marinette had gone home, held her parents in her arms - well, she did her best to hold her dad, but he did most of the heavy lifting there. There had been more than a few tears shed, that she wasn't ashamed to admit. She fell asleep on the sofa, in their cozy little home above the bakery, wrapped tight in her mother's arms.
"My mother died, you know."
It's this that has her eyes peeling back open hours later, to stare at the ceiling. Three days worth of fighting, and in the end all it took was someone reaching out. She sighs and leads out into the city again with a shudder. Her mind his chaotic and racing, but she knows where she's going.
What she doesn't expect is to find Chat there when she arrives. She lowers herself onto the roof ledge beside him but he shows no sign of knowing that she's there, even when she says, "Elise looks - comfortable." That's the best she can come up with.
The woman is laid in a hospital bed in a room crammed full of loved ones. A man who looks like her husband holds her hand tight, and in amongst them all Elise looks like a corpse. An unearthly sort of pale and breakable, drained of life. But she does look comfortable.
A warm summer's breeze drifts on by and makes goosebumps erupt along her skin, even beneath the suit. She wills it away but like the image of Luka's dead body, it doesn't leave. She went and found Luka, by the way. He was drinking a beer and helping his tearful sister compose a new song for her band, Kitty Section, presumably to distract her from the lingering destruction all around. Juleka had offered her to join them but Marinette had taken one look at Luka's warm, living face and bolted for the door, ready to be sick.
From there she wandered Paris, through places that hours ago had looked like a war zone, and now looked - well, not unlike a war zone, but certainly not the one it had been. Had she been stronger, she would have done a better job of the fixing up, but the Cure's power was dependent upon how much energy Marinette had in her, and at the time she had next to none. Finally, she had bit the bullet and headed towards the hospital. It wasn't the same one that the nightmare had begun in, thank Tikki, but it still made her nervous.
Chat Noir, already there when she arrived, was yet to speak a word.
"How're you doing, Chaton?"
He swallows; his Adam's apple bobs. "I'm alive."
"Yes," she agrees. "That was - Well done, Chat. You were so - What you did there was amazing."
He doesn't acknowledge the compliment in any way. "You were right when you said we should think outside the box." He may still be alive, his heart may beat, but his voice and eyes are lifeless and this worries her.
Try as she might, she can't draw a single other word from him all night, and so their vigil over Elise Bisset's bedside is spent in silence.
When the clocks chime four o'clock in the morning and Elise is long since asleep, Marinette realises that Chat too is beginning to fall asleep where he sits, so she forces him home and to bed. She gets back to her own bedroom, warm and familiar, and not something she ever expected she would see again, half an hour later.
She's asleep before her head hits the pillow, never knowing that she wouldn't see hide nor hair of Chat Noir again for weeks.
"Ladybug, I -"
Alya slinks the chain of the Fox around her fingers, remarkably subdued. She hasn't said it yet, but Marinette knows what's coming. They're meeting so Alya can hand the Miraculous back over, but this is no routine exchange.
"I'm sorry, Ladybug, I can't - I just can't." Alya's trembling worsens the more she talks, she shifts from foot to foot but looks as though she wants to break into a sprint, as fast as she can. Marinette nods, fulling expecting this, and takes the golden chain from her friend's quaking hand. "I - I -"
"Thank you for your service, Alya."
Marinette doesn't know what more to say. Sorry? Should she be offering apologies to her friends for what she dragged them into? However enthusaistically Alya agreed to help, surely she couldn't have known just how much of herself she was signing over. When Alya's phone starts buzzing she fumbles for it, and her face changes.
"That's my friend calling, Ladybug, I - "
"Go. Talk to her."
Alya needs no more prompting, and as she nods and turns away, Marinette feels a crevice open between them. It's Lila Rossi on the other end of the phone, she knows.
Kim all but throws his Miraculous at her, the first chance he gets. He's making jokes that don't land and nonsensical quips all his way out of the park, and afterwards Marinette doesn't see him for two weeks. Max confides to Marinette that he lives at the pool now, pushing himself to his limit every night and going back for more when the sun rises. Sooner or later his body will start protesting.
"It's like he thinks he can drown out any memory of Mourning Star," he tells her. "N-Not that I remember much. I mean..."
When she doesn't see Queen Bee for a month she thinks that's another wielder who's thrown in the towel, but then a night watching over the city from the Eiffel Tower is interrupted by the sudden, jarring presence of her blonde haired team mate.
"Ladybug," she says. "It's good to see you."
"You too, Bee."
Marinette watches as Chloe settles beside her. She looks back on form; her comb is neatly nestled amidst a head of perfect golden hair but she knows that Chloe has been having her father shell out hundreds of euros a session on a world class psychiatrist and that only last week she had scratched a bloody line down Sabrina's face in her sleep, gripped in the midst of a nightmare. (Marinette has them too, but she does her best to cope, because bakers can't afford the best that world psychology has to offer.)
"No one else is here?" Chloe asks, and Marinette thinks that at some point she has to take the Bee back; Chloe isn't a permanent wielder - yet.
"Nope. Just the two of us. Roi Singe gave the Monkey up. Rena Rouge as well."
Alya has abandoned her in both lives, as it happens. She spends her days now swaddled by the comforting lies Lila whispers into her ear. It must be nice, Marinette thinks, to have someone who will do that for you. She doesn't even begrudge her for it, though she had expected to, given who Alya had turned to. If Marinette had someone around who would lie and lie and lie, until she began to feel less wretched, she would fall into their arms without thinking.
"Are you okay, Bee?"
Chloe's jaw drops, she blinks, and for a moment Marinette can see the vulnerability; the scared teenage girl Mourning Star left behind. Then the mask is back in place and she smirks. She tosses her ponytail with typical flair.
"What, me? I'm fine, Ladybug. I'm Chloe Bourgeois."
"Yes you are, Queen Bee," Marinette agrees, looking back out over the city with a small smile. "Yes you are."
Carapace is the next to quit, not that she can blame him; memories of crushing concrete and darkness stay with her even now, and then Pegase follows suit. Both are very apologetic as they break the news to her, but they needn't be. She understands. If she could escape into music or computers, she would do it too.
Ryuko remains, and Marinette had expected that she would. Kagami had nerves of steel anyway, and like Marinette, like Chloe as well, she felt that she had something to prove to someone that neither Turtle nor Horse did. Marinette had known that Ryuko would remain, and she was grateful. Viperion did too, because he remembered none of the battle. Had he fought in it, he might have quit as well.
Or maybe not.
"Marinette!" Luka is at her loft door, Kagami hanging around below. He's stuck his head into her room, like a Diglett, and is staring at her. From her chaise lounge, where she is curled up in a ball, she stares back.
"What do you want, Luka?"
"We're going for lunch," he says. "You're coming with us."
"Oh, am I?" she asks, raising an eyebrow half-heartedly.
"Yes." Kagami's voice is firm, and Luka just smiles and waits for her to move, which she does after another minute of silent protest.
"Okay, fine," she says. "But I'm going to complain the whole time."
"Wouldn't have it any other way, Ocean Eyes. Now move it! I'm starving; a growing boy!" Yes, you are now, she thinks.
Alya is gone, and so is Nino, with her. Max too, Kim as well, and more so than ever the rest of her class, but Marinette is not alone.
One thing still worries her.
She hasn't seen Chat Noir since the night it all ended. (Come to think of it, she hasn't seen Adrien either.) He doesn't reply to her messages or show up on her yoyo GPS and citizens have noticed that the hero is absent. At the same time, they note that Adrien Agreste hasn't left his father's cold, echoing mansion in weeks. Somewhere between these two facts lies a truth that Marinette has often wondered over the last few years, and inevitably she makes the connection.
Oh.
Akumas are beginning to crop up again, though none nearly as serious as Mourning Star, and she needs her partner back at her side but he isn't showing up to help her fight them. She thinks that Adrien Agreste is Chat Noir. So it's him that she delivers her ultimatum to.
"Where I... am, they've assigned us all a therapist," she says, perched on his windowsill one night.
He watches her out of black eyes and doesn't speak, but she knows. Now that she's here, oh, she knows. It's him. Adrien is Chat, Chat is Adrien. He watches her now with a thousand yard stare.
"Do you have a therapist?" No answer. "If you don't get one I'll have to do something." She doesn't specify what; she hasn't told him that she knows, but even in his current catatonic state he goes paler. The threat is there now, in the back of his mind. "Would you like a maracon? Take a few." She holds out the box in her hands and after a moment, he takes one, then another. She smiles kindly. "You know how to find me, Adrien."
Then she swings off to her second stop of the night.
Their job isn't an easy one, but she thinks she understands it better all the time. Adjusting the box of pastries under her arm, she puts on a smile and knocks on the door in front of her. The sun sets over the City of Light as Elise Bisset opens the door to her home, and allows Ladybug inside.
"You've gotta get down to the subway," Chloe barks in Marinette's ear. "The Conductor managed to find the entrance and he's stolen a carriage full of screaming morons who didn't run when I goddamn told them to -"
"I'm on my way, Bee," Marinette says. "See you soon." She cuts the connection before she gets a headache.
"Ladybug."
A voice she had thought she would never hear again shatters the momentary silence. "Hey, Chat."
"I found a therapist. Been seeing him a few weeks now."
"Good boy." Her lips are pursed, hands on her hips, and she stares at him. He looks healthier. Not happier. Nervous, sure, to be facing her again after so long, but...
But.
It's him. Chat Noir, in the flesh and ready to go.
"Are you with me?" she asks.
"Always," he says, solemnly, and her heart soars.
"That's more like it! Now come on. Hawkmoth's still out there, and in the more immediate future, an akuma calling himself the Conductor has stolen a subway car, along with all the people in it. Queen Bee's going to kill us if we're late."
His grin isn't what it used to be, but it's been so long since she saw one from him that it blinds her, and he says, "Well then My Ladybug... I'll race you."