TAGS: CANON DIVERGENCE, CHARACTER DEATH, VIOLENCE, ANIMAL TENDENCIES,
NEVER REVEAL, SLOW BURN, LOVESQUARE, FRIENDS/ LOVERS/ ENEMIES, SEXUAL CONTENT
THIS IS AN EXTREME DIVERGENCE FIC. IT IS EXPLICIT. THERE IS NO TIKKI OR PLAGG. CHARACTERS ARE ADULTS/ "OOC". MIRACULOUS USERS HAVE FRENCH NAMES, DIFFERENT OUTFITS, WEAPONS, AND SIGNATURE MOVES. DON'T LIKE? DON'T READ.
CHIAROSCURO
Chapter One: A Way Out
Shouts and cries of a Confederate defeat played from a battered Panasonic box sitting in the atelier's corner. Electric flashes of fluorescent orange and red ignited office walls. Actors' screams shot across workstations. With unholy clamor, the sound of church bells wobbled while their towers burned. Rhett Butler was escaping a torched city, proud and naive Scarlett O'Hara in tow, and Marinette Dupain-Cheng sat transfixed as bullets cuffed their carriage.
"Ma ballerine," Sylvie Cavey warned Marinette in a sing-song voice. As the première couturière, Cavey held no favor for the distracting motion pictures. However, being Sunday morning, she allowed the atelier's skeleton staff to liven their day in small ways despite occasional infractions. Marinette hinged on 'occasional'.
She flushed with embarrassment at her superior's disapproval, nickname aside, and tried to blink away her imagination and the film's mesmerizing bursts of color. She sat safely in the real world and couldn't afford to lose focus while double-folding chiffon binds. It was delicate work and even tiny lapses were glaringly apparent; with a grimace she began to redo her seam.
"Coffee's made," someone called from the back. Marinette pursed her lips.
"It was two hundred contacts by seven o'clock, and the conference started at ninety-five! There's a binder on my desk―" Nathalie Sancoeur, the tailleur's creative director, knocked her hip into Marinette's station as she whipped past. Marinette clenched her teeth through a muted growl.
"As God is my witness, they're not going to lick me! I'm going to live through this―" the television was somehow loud again and Scarlett, with cheeks dusted by dry earth and fists clenched at her side, framed a silhouette before a ruby sunset. A burning sky reflected in Marinette's eyes. "―if I have to lie, steal, cheat, or kill, as God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again―"
"Are you kidding me, really?" Cavey snapped. "Someone just turn it off already!"
Marinette blinked. Her trance broke on the small screen smothered to static, then black. One of the new hires was holding their thumb into the worn television casing, the wails of crying women and children fading from ears, replaced by the giggles of her coworkers. Blushing heat again seared across Marinette's cheeks.
She ducked her head low against the feel of Cavey's eyes on her. Jumping back to work, she rapid-fired eighteen binds through gauzy fabric― then her cell phone buzzed through her purse.
Cavey positively growled.
She could ignore the call. She didn't have to answer. Nothing was going on. It was Alya's ringtone. Her friend gave up after the third ring or so. She'd call back on her lunch break, or shoot her a text that night. Alya knew she was at work right now, she never called during the day― the ring went dead.
Then it started again.
"Marinette," Cavey snarled―
"J-Just a moment!" Frantic and luckless, Marinette quickly confirmed the textile was tightly held before snatching her cell. She wedges it between her shoulder and ear. "Alya, Alya― Hi! Hello. What's up? I can't talk long. What's going on?"
"Where are you? Are you okay?!"
Marinette blinked. Her agition vanished with her friend's raw concern. "Um, yeah, I'm fine."
"Where are you?" she repeated.
"I'm at work right now." Marinette adjusted her phone to glance over her shoulder. The atelier was business as usual, nothing amiss. "Is everything okay?"
"No, it's not. There's an akuma on the loose and―"
"Chat Noir?"
"I don't know. It doesn't look good. You need to go home right now!"
Marinette went quiet, confused, wondering what in the world Alya was talking about; the sudden silence put her friend into a panic. "Mari? Mari, are you still there?! Can you hear me?!"
"Whoa, Alya, whoa. I'm here. I can hear you. What's going on? Tell me slowly. Do I have to warn people?"
A positive mm-mm sound rumbled back at her and Marinette caught the hard scratch in her friend's voice. It sounded like she'd been screaming. "It's all over the news but you shouldn't waste another moment. Get out Marinette. Get your mom and dad and go to safety!"
"Okay," she promised, setting her fabric and supplies quickly aside. "I'll head home now."
"Marinette― I―"
With her purse half-slung over her shoulder, she paused to listen to her friend hesitate. "Yeah?"
"Marinette, if something happens―"
"Alya?"
"Just be safe, okay?!" she snapped. "Be careful! Don't do anything stupid! I'll never forgive you!"
Marinette's didn't hide her blossoming smile. Those were usually her lines. "Fine, I got it. I'm leaving right now. I'll text you when I'm home, okay?"
An audible sigh answered her. "Okay. I'm gonna try to get a hold of Nino now. Promise me you'll text," she growled.
Marinette laughed. "I said I would. Love ya, bye." She ended the call feeling cherished Alya contacted her before Nino. Whatever came of them dating on-and-off again since lycée ended, she was assured her friendship would always have shining moments where she eked out ahead. Not admitting, perhaps, this time was because Nino had a terrible habit of ignoring his phone.
"Madame Cavey?" Marinette withheld a grimace. Right. Cavey was already glaring at her. Hidden by bloated cheeks and seaweed hair, her beady eyes burned through like fire coral. They struck Marinette with a glower as if she was disturbing the universe. "I apologize to interrupt, but um, I received a call about an active akuma and I'd like―"
"An akuma? Now?"
"Yes, and I'd like to head home."
"I haven't heard anything about an akuma."
And thus, it didn't matter. She was starting a new dress today. Client body proportions and mock-up notes from their creative director surrounded Cavey's workstation like a whelk home. Bolduc ribbon crisscrossed between her ragged claws and the mannequin, a lattice pricked by glass pins spewing from her forearm's barnacle pincushion. In a way unique to octopoda, she seamlessly rotated between her soft measuring tape, calculator, graphite pens, drafting curve, tracing paper, and Marinette's persistence.
"I just got a call about it." Her thumb swiped her phone's home screen to the news app where she skimmed for information. "I'm sure there's a report somewhere."
"Finish the chiffon. Then we'll see."
Marinette bit the inside of her cheek. "I'll finish it tomorrow before lunch but I need―"
"Oh là, ma ballerine, listen to me." Cavey set aside her bolduc and scissors and pins and stared down her protégé. "You are very refined. Your work is elegant and feminine, never juvenile. Madame Sancoeur likes your touch. But you have strayed into the world of fashion. You are new here."
She wasn't. She'd been an apprentice for three years and a deuxième qualifiée for two. But that perception was the difference between her and a head seamstress.
"I understand Madame," Marinette quietly conceded and tried, at least, for a compromise. "I'll finish the chiffon first."
"And then look at the organza on #7."
She gnawed her lower lip. "And then I'll look at the organza."
"Good. You may leave afterward."
"Thank you Madame."
Purse slipping away, Marinette returned to her station with head bowed. She staggered through mental riptide, swimming thoughts caught between Alya's warning and the empty gulf of media coverage. She looked at her news app: 7°C, late sunset. A new hire, Mireille Caquet, joined CNBC 25. Education faculty benefits were driving up tuition. There was a podcast for the new tax code.
How sincere was her friend, Marinette wondered, if there was no news? How could Alya, living in Québec, truly know of an akuma otherwise?
She looked out the small window to her left, eyes unseeing as she turned inwards, resisting the churn of uneasiness and the memory of her friend's strained voice. Maybe it was a mistake, she thought. Maybe Alya saw wrong, mixed up her spots and heroes, and called without thinking. For all best intentions, there was someone, something, somewhere, but Alya was mistaken. Marinette wasn't in trouble. There wasn't an akuma. And if there was, the mysterious hero Chat Noir certainly―
Like a child's toy playing in another room, a distant ringing caught her ears.
She blinked at the gentle din and refocused her gaze upon avenue Montaigne, the allée des Veuves, a place made famous by women in black. Scattered across its one-way street were abandoned cars piling upon each other and its tarmac laid decorated with discarded shopping bags. Through the white noise of mechanical whirrs and shuffling fabric, Marinette caught the dim burst of frantic screaming from the street below. People were running.
No, she thought. People were fleeing.
"I thought I told you to turn that television off!"
But it wasn't Atlanta, Georgia this time. It was Paris.
Marinette leaned over her table, hands pressing upon the small window. A wailing of sirens cut through muted ferment and she felt glass reverberate against her palm like an invisible pulse. It was growing stronger. An upsurge of fear clogged her throat and she gasped through a pinch of air, "Madame Cavey―!"
A deep collision jolted her heart. She took three steps before an echoing boom, closer, shook the atelier. Pitched backwards against a workstation, Marinette fell against a woman crumbled to her knees. She whimpered and stared in disbelief.
"It's an akuma!" someone screamed.
"W-Where's Ch-Chat Noir?" her coworker dribbled.
Marinette didn't know. "He's fighting the akuma."
Her coworker's eyes squeezed shut and she held her temples. She was shivering with fear.
"It'll be okay," Marinette promised. "He's going to save―"
Bright shrieks bore through Marinette's reassurances. She looked up and saw a funnel of women scrambling for the exit. They fought each other to push through the narrow doorway but one woman was caught, defying all the force pressed against her. She coughed and sputtered and Marinette thought for a breathless moment she was being crushed until she heard her plea clearly: "―don't let it take me!"
Marinette's hands covered her mouth, withholding a silent gasp. The woman was lifted from the ground, torn between the clutches of the atelier staff and a monstrous stone fist. One was clearly stronger. It wasn't a competition. There wasn't even a chance.
From Marinette's angle, she watched the woman simply disappear into the stairwell. Her hollers bounced within the hallway's echo, then stifled.
"Oh― Oh my god, it took Claire. The akuma took Claire," another coworker, Seline, whispered.
Marinette trembled.
She couldn't stand. Her legs gave out as she tried to rise from the cold floor and she grabbed desperately at desks and mannequins to keep balance. Alya's distant urging steadied her: they had to get out. They needed to go somewhere safe. Laboriously she moved forward as her coworkers withdrew. They were terrified, some sobbing in fear, gathered tightly in the doorway but unable to step beyond. Marinette weakly stumbled through them.
She stood on the cusp of horror. Through a gaping maw in the atelier's siding, she looked upon a broken city. Her lungs fell to the razor of March air, of smoke, of hazy debris that streamed from broken buildings. She saw the road decorated in slabs of mortar and concrete ripped straight from its foundation. Wrought iron balconies bent astray like thorn-bush veins. Every window of the Parisian storefronts was gone, blown out, and broken sprinklers gushed water aimlessly, ruining merchandise. Crackling embers fell on the breeze.
Everything was silent.
She reached forward towards nothing.
"Move! Move! Move," barked Cavey's command. Marinette jolted and gasped as the swell of bodies surged forward, a precipitate to a stampede. Someone shouldered her back and carelessly knocked her aside; she clutched at the staircase's mangled handrail, boneless. She would have stayed there if not for a stranger's hand clasping her wrist and wrenching her along. Without choice or thought she followed the group bleeding into the ruined avenue.
Exiting to the curbside, tripping on scattered rock, tipsy, Marinette looked back at the atelier on instinct. Other than the massive hole punched in by the akuma, the building was fine. A strange relief tickled through her stupor followed by insurmountable guilt; the street was in ruins and one of their staff was dead.
Forget the atelier, she cursed. She needed to get to her family―
She startled to hear a groan. Turning left, she saw a man slowly approach. Half his face had been dipped in wet cement, fused shut, and there was blood splashed across his open chest. Next to him a businesswoman limped forward. She dragged a leg of pure stone.
They reached out to Marinette and the other seamstresses. "Help," begged the woman. "It's heavy― Help me!"
"My dears," sobbed Seline. She broke from their crowd and embraced the man and woman in solace. "Come, lie down," she tended. "The SMUR will be arriving soon. You can rest now."
But they wouldn't. The woman immediately grabbed at Seline and fell to her knees. The shirtless man struggled forward, face frozen in speechless agony. His one good eye darted wildly over the girls. No one besides Celine had dared move forward and, as if possessed, he turned back and rounded on her compassion. Wrapping his arms around Seline's shoulders while his cohort closed around her knees, the two ferociously wrangled her to the ground.
Seline screamed as she was caught. Collective gasps and shrieks broke around Marinette. Half the staff backed away but half darted forward to save one of their own. Marinette teetered between, unable to do more than sway in nausea. Hands fell upon their coworker. Pulling, twisting, screeching in panic, they set her free as the couple went stiff and bloodless.
As if cast into their own kiln, they tightened and became rigid. Rudiments of organic form and imperfect shape sloped and arched into artisan craft. Without muscle or skin, blood and body drained away to the strict chisel of human and, in the manner of divine decree, distorted and morphed, their own faces faded away.
With arms domed and extended, encompassing air, they didn't topple. The man and woman were captured in the rigor mortis of their transfigured bodies.
Seline collapsed into her coworkers' arms in bawling tears. Her hands gripped their stark white sewing coats, frightened wails wracking her body.
"It hurts, it hurts," she bayed. Marinette thought she meant her fear or if she'd broken something squirming free. But as people backed away and Seline was given space, the cause was apparent: her hands were slabs of stone clamped into atelier coats. From directly touching the victims, Seline too was condemned.
Marinette recoiled. Bile and breakfast hit the back of her throat and she turned away, hands holding her mouth shut.
She jostled as her coworkers ripped away, clamoring as they realized this was the second coming. The preliminary attack by the akuma was nothing to this morphed torture: the population was infected and there was no antidote. It was every man for themselves. Surrounded by her associates, Marinette realized this was the sound of a half-hundred people breaking into panic.
"Don't leave me!" Seline cried, reaching out. Snot and spittle ran down her face. White atelier coats, ripped from her friends, were abandoned in her granite clutch.
They all ran.
Their stampede cut across Rue Francois to keep northbound on Montaigne but no loyalties held. Devil taking the hindmost, women darted down alleys or sequestered themselves in broken storefronts. Others stopped to fight with friends. Two hundred paces in, Marinette was digging her fingers into a crippling side stitch and sparing no breath. Push through, she hissed at herself. Get to Caulaincourt. Get to mom and dad―
Wheezing, she collapsed behind a fallen slab of building mortar. Deco bombs bedecked the sidewalk and more hung precariously overhead. It wasn't safe but she couldn't move. Her lungs burned and she felt a white-flash fever. Helping herself to gasps of dusty air, she leaned back and rested. Her eyes closed. Faintly she could make out the sound of distant fire, a far-off lion's roar of flames, and the strange whale song of city sirens. She shook her head. The word hadn't gotten out in time and now it seemed too late to bother.
Get to rue Caulaincourt, she repeated. It was a 45 minute walk home. She could run it in 30.
But she didn't know if she could sprint again. Her abdomen was twisted into an awful cramp. No, she absolutely couldn't―
Do it, she hissed. There wasn't a choice!
Standing on fawn legs, she protested the pain by imagining her parents desperately waiting for her: her father's caring hand reinforcing her mother's shoulder, her pinched eyes searching, searching, praying their only daughter simply round the corner―
Because they had to be waiting, and not something else―
Weak steps turned to a trot, to a jog, to an ambling race. She maneuvered between abandoned cars clogging the one-way street and their soprano alarms, keeping to the middle of the road until she came upon the open circle of the Roosevelt Metro.
She hardly recognized the roundabout. A battle had clearly swept through the well known destination and a police triage was trying to reconcile the damage. Men and women mingled, recovered victims off the street. A line of citizens sat upon the curb waiting treatment. Lungs burning, heart soaring, Marinette lifted her arm and waved enthusiastically as she rushed to greet them.
An officer caught her in his periphery. He dropped his stance to defensive guard and raised his gun. "Halt!"
Marinette tripped over her own feet. The barrel swung towards her chest. She saw it with her eyes but didn't believe it.
"Stay where you are," the gendarmerie demanded. Other officers organized in formation against Marinette. "Raise your hands―"
She slowly raised them but felt nothing, only able to think of her own shock.
"It's back―"
"Get down!"
"Fire!"
Marinette's bravery buckled against the discord of gunfire and she dropped to the ground faster than gravity, cracking her knees against the road. A sob of intense pain broke from her and she collapsed into a ball without care for the spattering of bullet casings. They pinged against her back while shots and recoils deafened her like thirty baking sheets crashing to the floor. She dry heaved. Something wasn't right. Clasping her left shoulder, she rolled aside until something sharp, broken glass and limestone, stopped her.
She laid on her back and withdrew her hand. It dripped red. She'd been hit by a stray bullet. Everyone was screaming.
A shadow blanketed their group. Marinette looked skyward.
A mound, a goliath, an ogre of black alumen loomed before her, casting the entire Metro and her pitiful company into darkness. Bullets sank harmlessly into the monster's body of earth and stone; a simple earthquake shudder dropped the iron fragments away like sequins, nothing done to corral its ire. A bellow rippled from a cavernous maw of grotesque design, an endless concave pit of gnashing stalactite fangs and flowstone. Chunks of basalt and sand spewed forth while slippery, hot lava drooled down its body. Without eyes, careless to its path, the titan advanced. Its swollen elephant legs hammered the ground to tremors. It was coming right for her―
A terror froze Marinette where she laid, the fear of death in her heart.
But something gentle dipped beneath her knees and neck and lifted―
Chat Noir. He looked shocked―
Marinette pulled on his lapels. "Watch―"
The exploding battle's treble reverberated to her marrow and, although Chat Noir made to leap high, the full push of momentum never carried through. A hesitation in slow eternity, her position dropped from his arms. She felt the gradual shift of weight like a slow yawn, her hands releasing his coat and slipping down, grasping uselessly for a hold against the blood drenched jacket. The tumble was slow, awkward, her head leading her doubled over descent―
A very fine pain spun from her shoulder and neck as it collided against the sidewalk. A watery pop liquified somewhere in her inner ear. Chat Noir fell on top of her, groaning as his ears flattened against his head. She blinked at the sluggish, fuzzy outline of a black cat struggling to balance. Someone had set off a stun grenade.
"Are you all right?" she croaked and regretted. Every word sounded like it was beneath water. Every thought hurt.
"Eh," he mumbled against her collar, "schist happens."
No, she didn't hear that right. She definitely didn't hear that right.
"Chat Noir!" a stranger cried. A black ear flicked to the voice and Paris's cryptic cynosure got his paws beneath him just in time. His signature claws swept to action against the malevolent force of nature, slicing deep into the monstrous roughcast fist as it descended. The Gigas howled and withdrew, a volley of rock bleeding from its slashed palm and spraying the people below.
Nothing hit Marinette. Weight leveled protectively over her, Chat Noir bade his body as a shield. She could see him grimace as stones hailed from the akuma's repeated onslaught and felt the torture of every deflected hit reverberate down his shoulders, torso, to knees. She worried how long he'd been fighting―
Something dropped in her chest.
How long had he been fighting?
Chin set firm, metallic claws dual-wielded like ten razor knives, clothing deranged and dirty, Chat Noir stubbornly resisted exhaustion. His short blonde hair laid in sweaty tangles and shallow cuts wept from his exposed face and neck. They trailed down his throat to collect along his collar where his suit's protective ascot was stained a deep, poppy red.
Like an anvil dropping off the bow of a ship, Marinette's thoughts caught on the terrible halt. She couldn't breathe, could hardly think, as she lay motionless.
How long had Paris just accepted it would be saved?
"Chat Noir." That was his name. That's what he was called. But Chat Noir was a person and there, beneath him, she saw only the weakening shell of a man.
He looked down at her―
Bok choy, aurora borealis, matcha tea, venom. His eyes were emeralds, regalia magatama, caught on lantern fires. They shifted like ammolite, green with flecks of orange and red, slithering through shades like the bellies of kraits in tall grass. She felt a clasp upon her lungs as his vision hypnotized, a strangle as he captivated her within a tendril of attention―
Thunder clapped in the call of a hundred inhuman screams scoring through the Metro's circlet, resurrecting their Creator's strength. Stone men charged down the city's star-point streets to the campaign's apex, barrelling through barricades, smashing sidewalk Lindens, and compressing cars into something like throw rugs. Nothing stopped them. The converted beasts intended to crash into their Creator and Chat Noir alike.
Chat Noir leapt to his feet. Marinette fought her own paralysis. Her eyes took in their enclosing options and little filtered through her panic. Those citizens who could run had long since scattered from the sphere of danger. Too many remained though, trapped and vulnerable. They had to get away, had to get somewhere safe.
Chat Noir's bagh nakh disappeared in a softly luminous pop. Tail lashing in irritation, he had other ideas for the enemy's blitzkrieg. "The Artcurial!"
"What? What are you doing?"
"I'm going to draw them away," he shouted, already running off. "Get to the Artcurial! The Hôtel!"
Marinette didn't have much for argument. With little time to act, she wobbled to her feet. Her knees felt like shattered dinner plates and a dizziness lagged her sight. She distantly touched her injured shoulder, the wound shallow but still wet. Blurry outlines of the curbside and Hôtel Marcel's iron fence directed her to the entrance.
Much of it was already destroyed. The ground quivered with the power of the approaching akumas' charge and the old building's imminent, promised collapse terrified her. The noise behind her was growing fiercer, however, and a primitive thrill for survival won over. She hobbled for her life, passing a man on his hands and knees watching the akumas' destructive advance. His face was pale with fear.
"Run!" she screamed.
He didn't move.
The wail of his death throes came on her heels and she thought a stony hand brushed her shoulder―
Marinette threw herself past the lobby doors just before their frame collapsed with the building's broken foundation. Akuma screamed as they were crushed beneath two stories of concrete. Marinette spat and heaved, dust coating her tongue. She grabbed at her face, frantically clawing at whatever was in her eyes. It burned and she was going to vomit and― and― and―
Chat Noir hadn't diverted the entire charge. Some akuma subordinates remained. She could hear them feeding on the helpless left behind.
People didn't die quietly.
Shivering, she laid down. She touched her forehead, her neck, shoulders, hips, and thighs. She couldn't bend her knees and the wound in her shoulder throbbed to the point her entire left arm was numb. She let it lay uselessly at her side.
"I'm alive," she whispered. But for how long, she despaired.
She was painfully aware of the screaming outside, the darkness, the smell, the fear, like a snare tightening its looped cord around her throat. She was in hell, she thought miserably.
Chat Noir was supposed to end this. He was supposed to save them!
Fat tears collected in the corner of her eyes, threatening to spill down dusty cheeks. He was. He absolutely was saving them. He was out there risking his life, pushing past the boundaries of human strength and stamina, as their miraculous herald.
Sitting there alone, doing nothing, was Marinette.
"Marinette?"
She gasped and flinched at her own name. She thought she recognized the voice.
"F-Fu-yishēng?" she coughed.
"Marinette, is that really you?" he gasped.
She could hardly see him. The man's small outline seemed to be laying a few paces away beyond an aperture of light. Particles of dust stirred by the building's wreckage glistened between them. Summoning what little strength she had, Marinette laid her weight onto cold forearms and army-crawled to his side.
She pushed herself upright and fretted. "Fu-yishēng, what are you doing here? What's happening? Are there others? Are we safe?"
"Are you all right?" he quietly asked.
Marinette nodded yes, dazed. She was anything but. Sickness churned in her stomach and her throat burned with dry soot. Her eyes were encrusted with whatever powder came from collapsed walls. Her hair was errant and clung to a sweat drenched back. Her left arm was matted with blood. Her clothing could do no more to absorb the bleeding. But sitting next to a friend, she felt a little warmth. She was all right.
"Good." Fu reached out to gently squeeze her hand. "There isn't an exit… but there is a way out."
That didn't make sense. It hurt to think actually.
"Marinette," he lifted her hand towards him. "It's going to be you."
Something dropped into her palm. She instinctively brought it to her side. The lacquered box glowed in the low light.
"Put them on."
Her head throbbed. "Put what on?" she wondered and clicked open the box―
Like a chrysanthemum unfolding to the long morning, her heart awakened.
It opened to soft candlelight flickering upon crystal fragments, bursts of blazing light and color that caught fire to dust motes in a glittering swirl. Hazy fog of satin and silk caressed her, entwined her, thickening and convalescing as if alive. Song captured her, masked revelers chanting as they danced a spell, a vow, entrenching her within their writhing weave. The vow, iridescent with the promise of all desires, coiled around her throat. The serenade was suffocating, painfully thick as it clenched her neck. She gasped and felt the words slipping past her lips, inside her, down to her pulse.
Her heart fluttered, and her soul sang― Marinette! it was caroling. Marinette! it was a choir―
A crescendo of monsters screamed at the revealed lorelei, their wild belting breaking beyond the wails of dying men. Marinette's microcosm popped like a soap bubble, the rushed return to reality like finding herself mid-crosswalk, car horns blaring, a smash of steel and squealing tires burning rubber over her leaking brain.
She looked at Fu, half-crazed, once-upon-a-time in another world.
His look was knowing. "The earrings are a miraculous stone, Marinette. You must accept it and save us!"
And her world went upside down. A miraculous stone was the ethereal benefactor of Chat Noir. Every Parisian― man, woman, child― knew this, just as they knew of his manic duel against Papillon. But now she held one? In her palm? Like that? So simply?!
"Me?!" The box dropped from trembling hands.
"Papillon is too powerful! He has grown in strength with every akuma possession. Chat Noir can no longer fight without his other half," Fu rushed to explain. "You're the only one now."
Marinette hardly caught a word beyond the akumas' bellows. The descant drummed and reverberated over her pit of smoke and ashes, festering into a rabid roar. A feverish clamor racketed the building's collapsed entry. She could hear them scaling the building above.
"Marinette!"
The frame of the lobby's ceiling whined and groaned as steel cantilevers overhead were ripped away. A support beam crashed to the floor.
"Y-Yīshēng Fu!" she cried out.
Dust showered over them. The pierce of light expanded their hideaway den. Fu cursed and clutched for the earrings where they'd fallen free, but only gathered a single ruby gem from where it rolled his way.
He couldn't reach the other. Marinette could see now. He was crushed beneath rubble from the hips down. He was pinned. "Fu," she whispered.
"Marinette, you must!"
Light illuminated her citadel in rivulets. Conspicuous, the yet free earring lay in a shrine of dust, small and still.
Marinette picked it up. She didn't pause. She didn't think. There wasn't time.
She just closed her eyes and hooked it through her lobe―
Incandescent light exploded around her, twisting into a piercing drill that bore into her sternum. She felt burst apart but warm, skinless yet satiated, innards ripped out and pressed together until she choked on her own heart in her throat. She needed to run. She needed to breathe. She needed to know words, the language that would allow her to ride stars and dance stairways. She needed to move forward, lift to the light, and―
And the slate wasn't wiped clean. She saw them immediately, others with leering faces, and saw herself through them. Fixated on her every move, they tracked her like a predator, attention undivided, fractured pupils wide and absorbed. In the thousand gem cuts of their eyes, she saw her own glowing reflection, bloodless and tense. She was naked, screaming, burning against the atmosphere's friction, shining in intense light, traveling faster than sound, wreathed in wishes, a―
A saccharine song of consecration, an abstraction whipped in icing, she was an elevation without title. She spun out of control, arms outstretched like a five year-old catching on the balance of a tipsy bicycle. The conflagration of her arrival was brilliant and beautiful and bodily mutilated, Burmese neck and Congo fangs, a puddle of flesh and organs smelling like cooked cinnamon. She was stilled in grace, without reign or power beyond the touch of human hands. But they sawed and soldered, molded in golden gilding, found her state of existence like architecture, an elegant solution to a problem, and crafted her a body that drifted along a solar Nile of past benefactors while she―
She thought she'd lost her mind.
Unable to reclaim that which eluded her, unable to remember faces or the inclination of bodies beyond red, she was the―
The chalk of white pumicite on black skin, a saffron-spotted bournous tightly clasped, the―
The canvas of cinnabar paint calligraphy, a bespeckled obi belt firmly knotted, the―
The steel of an arming sword raised for conquest, a dappled duelist gauntlet confidently donned, the―
The tumbling ground rising up in turning over Fortune's dial, peaking, as she stumbled onto that first step of rising flowers, blooming, the promised waltz sailing her to helium dreamscapes of pillowtalk and down feathers, flying high, soaring above, surging on the wishes that fell to her name, that made a path for her, above the cacophony of man, an orchestra of diminishing keys to rise Up―
Up, where all else faded and fell upon the major lift to that aka God―
"Coccinelle!"
Like a foam topped waterspout cast down, headlong into the sea, she fell.
Her eyes flashed open.
Two akuma wailed as they charged, brandishing iron beams like swords. One slashed down and she leaned back, dodging the mad strike by supernatural instinct before grabbing the aggressor's overextended wrist. With a pull forward, she cuffed the back of its head and sent it lumbering into fallen debris. Its counterpart didn't hesitate. It charged straight-on, whipping its weapon left and right with relentless strength. She pounced high, firmly grappling its shoulder with one hand and snapped its head up and back with a powerful knee to the face. A painful crack met her ears. The akuma dropped.
She looked up. A third akuma, far larger than the others, forced its way through the broken ceiling. She gave no pause in attack. Just as it fell to the stone floor, a dynamic punch connected with its gut, sending the monster tumbling backwards. Something sandy but viscous coughed from its mouth. She flicked the spittle from her cheek.
It felt like grout.
Were they even human anymore?
She gasped as she was tackled from behind. She fell hard on her face, arms restrained in a new akuma's surprise attack. Despite its size, the small beast's grapple was impenetrable. It held firm around her back, snarling and biting her shoulder. She cursed and rolled to the side― in time to see a plummeting stone foot. It smashed open the baby akuma's cranium where hers had just been.
The grip went lax. Eyes wide, heart racing, she looked up at the lumbering, largest akuma. Ankle next to her temple, it slowly wiped its foot of cement muck― of brains and blood.
The foot lifted, its second attack coming much like the first. She tightened her torso, hands pushing herself into a curled handstand and back handspring to avoid the quick ten-tonne drop of heel. The akuma roared and rounded on her with a heavy bolo punch. She dodged the fist but caught its chiseled arm against her sternum with a wheeze. The akuma couldn't withdraw; arm clenched firmly against her body, she retaliated with a swinging axe-kick. Her boot's steel toe sharply collided with the back of his head and crushed its knee joint on her descent. It collapsed, tongue lolling, moaning―
She hesitated. The akuma's arm was held firm and wrenched unnaturally as he sprawled in pain. It wouldn't take much. With so little effort she could twist it clean off and end it― end him―
No. She had to think―
"Coccinelle," rasped Fu. She looked up. He was dredged from the wreckage and looking worse for wear, legs askew and broken. His dark eyes were studying her.
When she dropped the arm with mercy, his look was dashed.
"It is not over yet," he warned. "You should―"
"I'm getting you to safety first," she interrupted and gingerly approached his injuries, cautious where to touch or lift. Fu clearly disagreed but said no more, leaving her to work through the shaky technicalities of carrying him in a fireman's save. With only one hand free, she grappled, leapt, and hoisted them from the hotel's cemetery pit.
Her breath caught at the first glances of despair; shades of grey cast the Metro in a strange palette of stark undertones. If she hardly recognized the place before, it was an alien planet to her then.
"You can fix this," Fu promised through gritted teeth. For all his pain, he was trying to reassure her. "You are Coccinelle, the benefactor of rebirth."
She nodded, hearing him, but not quite understanding. He noticed. "We will speak later. The akuma has called its remaining children for protection. Chat Noir needs you now. He cannot win alone. Find him and work together to destroy Papillon's signet."
She looked at him, unsure.
"I am fine. The streets are safe for now. Go," he bit out with waning strength.
Uneasy, she placed him in an abandoned enclave along the Metro's empty streets before heading northeast along avenue Matignon. It wasn't difficult to see what path the miniature akuma took with destruction in their wake.
With a super-powered sprint, she quickly came upon the prominent panorama of the Église Saint-Augustin at the end of boulevard Malesherbes. Jeanne d'Arc cut the vista with a forward charge, heels deep in stirrups and sword brandished high― Marinette involuntarily shuddered. Shaking her head of silliness and ghosts, she crept forward until she stopped beside the bronze cast heroine.
Studying the scene, she noticed police cars lined the curbside. Mayor Bourgeouis was present too, hunched over the church's portico, wrist-deep in something that looked like red jelly. He was screaming a name and words she couldn't piece together. Corpses of akuma littered the streets around them, stragglers who had tried to approach and were mercilessly shot down.
Chat Noir and the titan were nowhere to be found.
Her eyes narrowed. Attention turned skyward, she surveyed the church's rose window. It was blown inward. The broken frame of wrought iron twisted like gnarled ivy seeking light. They must be inside, she thought. Yet no one entered―
"Hey, you! Stay where you are! Raise your hands!"
Like déjà vu, she instinctively raised her hands in defense from the battalion. Except now she wore a bodice of crimson carapace, speckled black.
"It's following orders?"
"Who are you―"
"Who cares, shoot it―"
A woman's scream echoed in the church's antechamber loud enough to be heard outside. The gendarmerie spooked at the wail and Marinette wasted no opportunity. She dashed towards the police ranks, vaulting into the sky with a powered leap. Attention recovered, the police officers shouted in disbelief at her forward charge and freely fired upon the perceived attack. But unlike before, the firecracker of artillery was dimmed and deafened in her enhanced dress. She easily dodged the errant ammo and hurdled over their police carriages before dashing to the colonnade of ivory church columns.
Mayor Bourgeouis looked at her. A bloody lump lay between them, its insides splattered outside of its body.
He trembled. "Please―"
An enormous crash and the akuma's reverberating bellow from within the church stole her focus. She didn't wait to listen. She couldn't, she told herself.
She sprinted into the church and immediately saw the narthex destroyed. The nave was little better: smashed pews were thrown into a corner, dark liquid spattered the floor and domed ceilings, and the wall draperies were shredded by long, claw-like lacerations. From the hallmark window, broken glass shattered over the floor like a thousand broken baubles, spread across the tile in a sparkling garden of white diamonds. She neared and watched the pale shrapnel and light fade into a refracted rainbow of reds.
A woman laid very, very still in the center aisle.
The akuma titan huddled over her, the low rattle of shaky breathing puffing against her hair. A limp hand was cradled in his gravely grip. Together they laid in a puddle of currant mud, the wellspring dribbling from fresh claw-carvings chipped throughout the akuma's body.
"Ah," the low voice rumbled and wheezed. It looked up without eyes. Four long fissures had split its high cheek into ribbons that rippled in speech. "You appear at last, Coccinelle."
Her skin erupted in a prickling wave.
It spoke?
"I am Stoneheart." The ogre stood in impending threat and smiled tight. Its teeth were a locked jigsaw of stone icicles. It slowly stepped over its hostage, delicately, as if protecting a treasured prize. A clenched fist of dripping blood belied no gentleness for Marinette, however. "Give me your Miraculous and I will spare you."
Where was Chat Noir? Her palms were clammy. She blinked but nothing changed the world around her. This was her reality, her ultimatum. Grim, she fell into a defensive stance. "Don't try to reverse our roles, akuma. You're the―"
It clocked Marinette's stars with a haymaker punch. She sailed backwards, falling on her ass, tumbling over, a wake of cleared glass cutting into her shoulders.
Her vision swam. Was her head still attached? Could she move? She had to get away―
The akuma's foot slammed to the floor, crushing one of her shins and breaking the tibia straight through. She screamed with all her breath― Stoneheart's stone fists clutched her toso and cinched closed. It lifted her into the air. She couldn't breathe―
"Listen to me carefully, bug…" She strangled and choked at his suffocating squeeze. "Because of you, innocent people have been hurt. They've been killed―" Her ribcage shuddered lightning arcs of pain, the only thing keeping her attention from strange black clouds rolling in like fog, "―and enough is enough! Give me your earrings!"
"N-no…"
The akuma roared with mad laughter in a spew of mud. "Then die―"
She dropped to the ground. Air snapped into her lungs like a vacuum. She gasped, sick, as the world immediately saturated into blinding white. She tasted charcoal, smelled dust from pulverized mortar, heard a crescendo of conflict around her. She felt hot, numb, sweating. The noise was growing, a stranger's curses and the akuma's roars cutting through her addled senses. The unseen battle battered her brain and she winced, peeking through pinched eyes to catch Chat Noir going toe-to-toe with Stoneheart.
She'd never seen anything like it. He evaded and parried with gymnastic excellence, dancing around their opponent like Art Noveau, the unpredictable slash and crack of a whip, against Akuma Deco, a stack of concrete bricks.
The church was suffering for it. The air was clogged with smoky powder and the walls trembled. The force of Stoneheart's body shattered the front chancel. The building was a century and a half old but Marinette didn't think it could last a minute and a half more. Time was important. She had to do something. She had to help end this.
Wobbling and weak, she stood and made four paces before her body remembered her cracked leg. Searing, blazing pain licked up her spine and she flailed, stifling a scream. She fell forward hard.
"What are you doing, clumsy girl?!" Chat Noir shouted at her, leaping and weaving around Stoneheart. She flinched, but not for his words.
Mylène Haprèle laid in front of her. Her childhood friend was right there.
Blood drenched her clothes. It dyed the dreads of her thick nemean mane. Marinette hoped it wasn't hers. Marinette prayed she was alive.
But what was she even doing here? Why wasn't she home safe with―
A piercing glint of claret gold sparkled next to the woman. It was an engagement ring.
It was the signet.
"Oh, god," Marinette exhaled, feverish. Her abjection thrashed in her stomach and she bit her lip, desperately trying to swallow the rising cry. It felt like a flood smothering her heart with ardent memories. Pounding upon her in waves, Marinette recalled meeting in collège, their tender-shy hello, wearing matching barrettes, completing school projects together, painting each others' nails, playing with her shaggy wolf-dog, her father's treasured postcards from Mexico, Norway, England― knowing her friend for eleven years and, all the while, watching Ivan Bruel endure Mylène's flippant torture.
She bent over her friend, cradling her, crying, crumbling like sea-worn architecture. It wasn't Mylène's fault that Ivan chased her la bohème spirit― just as it wasn't his fault he'd suffered her to a breaking point, to becoming an akuma.
Marinette blinked through tears. So was this Papillon's power, then? All that he could accomplish? Twisting an unrequited love into a wrought prison, a death chamber in the sarcophagus of a church―
"Stay away from her!"
A body collided into her. Her partner's heavier frame, his clothing, armor, weapon, weakness, the weight of it all slammed into Marinette and smashed them against the crumbled iconostasis.
Marinette dry-heaved. She tried to sit up, struggling through the tangle and twist of each other's limbs. Dizzying blurs and a pounding throb through her vision kept her hunched over hands and knees; at least she couldn't feel her broken leg over a contending face―
"You bastard!" Like a flipped switch, Chat Noir charged: he leapt upon Stoneheart, slashing like a madman, dancing a game of shadow against the flurry of akuma fists. Marinette struggled in the background, slowly standing. She watched the scenario play in a strange, different reality.
"Wait, stop―" She wobbled, trying to steady her concussed line of sight. Blood dripped over glass-ridden tile.
"You'll never take Mylène from me!"
"Chat Noir―"
"Then join her in death!" he hissed and summoned his miraculous power.
"No!" Marinette screamed. Fu had bade her service to help Chat Noir, to defeat the akuma, to end Papillon's depravity― but not like this― "Ivan, look out!"
The human in Stoneheart stumbled.
The cat in Chat Noir struck. "Cataclysm!"
Uncontested metal claws sank into his arms, miraculous knives piercing a schael and limestone body like whipped cream. Stoneheart dissolved on contact: skin corrupted deep blue, then black, and liquified from chiseled marble to wet globs. Fibers of ashen stone-muscle oozed like lava, dark as ink. He recoiled, collapsing to his knees, wailing, clutching at his body. It waxed and waned in corporeal form as Papillon's illusion painfully wavered; he clamored in voice and vice as bubbling darkness dripped from him, screaming like never before― human.
She was by his side at an instant. "Ivan!"
"My-mylène…" he sweated. Cast from Papillon's favor, he puddled like hot tar. Marinette trembled and hugged his body, trying to force it upright, but the tension of his oblong limbs fell lax as the spell and life within him faded.
"Ivan! Ivan, no!" It was too much. She was already too late. She fell with him to the floor. His eyes dimmed. With mounting horror she knew exactly what that meant. "Ivan―"
"He's fine."
Cold fear and disbelief filled Marinette. She whiplashed around to face Chat Noir. "He's fine?" she doubted. "He's dying!"
"He's fine," Chat Noir repeated, firm and thin-lipped. He paused on the painful squeeze of bruised ribs and bit out, "I destroyed his ring. It's like this every time."
She looked back at Ivan and coughed through a sob; he wasn't fine. He was a mutilation. Long gashes split his face, arms, and chest, and his pulse dimmed with every harrowing breath. He was slick with blood, trembling in her hold. She could barely keep him braced against her as his body slid heavy to the floor. "We have to get help," she babbled. "We have to call an ambulance. Call the police― they're right outside―"
Chat Noir filled the narrow box of her vision. She gasped and startled, falling to the side, but he didn't relent. From the tarnished steel toes of his boots, to the long drag of his ebony coat, to the crisp fold of his lapel―
She stared at the smear of blood there and went still.
"Are you really her?" he breathed.
She looked up. Their eyes met.
Marinette choked. Her sight dimmed and her face collapsed into quivering sorrow. Through watery vision she saw it: a thousand color-specks flickering through the expanse of his green eyes like drumming summer rain. This was why she accepted the miraculous stone. It was for him. She would never hide that.
"Yes," she whispered. A settling of reverence reaffirmed upon her heart. "It's me."
A small, wary smile touched his lips. "Then you can heal your friend," he lifted a curled hand, "with this. Do you know what it is?"
Marinette didn't but Coccinelle did. She knew immediately and inherently. Dry-mouthed, wet-eyed, she nodded.
Chat Noir released his palm. Long fingertips unfurled slowly to reveal an insect pinched by its wings.
She stared at the struggling creature. Little legs danced free as its great, fat abdomen wriggled. Flicks of its curled tongue wormed to the air, tasting defeat, pleading mercy against Chat Noir's gloved fingers with attanea caresses. There was no pulling free of the cat's catch.
More than printemps beauty and flowers, more than a fairy stealing butter and milk, this was an ancient parasite. It was ruining her city. It was devouring hope and life. It was a miraculous effigy: a compression of wickedness and splendor.
It was a moth. It was one, tiny, singular thing.
Worldless, Chat Noir offered her the task. Her heart stilled as her hands robotically wrapped around the evil machination. Without instruction, beyond instinct, as a hundred benefactors before her, she knew what to do, knew to become Rebirth:
"Renaissance," her soul sang, and the color of her world became black and white.