Gabriel couldn't help but feel pleased about how things seemed to be going recently on his side of the akuma attacks. Unexpectedly, Nathalie seemed to be progressively less affected by the Peacock's curse, no longer at the brink of collapse after each transformation. It suggested that either she had somehow developed a strong enough will to miraculously shake the effects off, or (more likely) the curse was finally wearing off, who knew how many years after being cast. She was becoming a stronger strategist as well, figuring out where Ladybug and Chat Noir's weaknesses might be and how they could be exploited.
They hadn't won, not yet. But Gabriel was sure that it was only a matter of time. Eventually he would get an akuma that was strong enough that, combined with the Peacock's boost, would be able to take Ladybug and Chat Noir down.
And they would need a very strong akuma now. Ladybug and Chat Noir had somehow worked out how to do several (thankfully lower-level) power-ups and they sometimes- more and more frequently now- called on additional users for backup during fights.
(And wasn't that infuriating? The superheroes were clearly making frequent trips to the Guardian's home- during the akuma attacks-and somehow he was missing it. So many opportunities to find the Guardian and pull more kwamis into his employ, just missed.)
Still, he was optimistic. If the curse wore off fully, perhaps Nathalie could use some of the Peacock power-ups on top of the basic power and turn the tide of a fight fully. With the two of them out there with the akuma- if they could contain the two superheroes before they went running for their three back-ups- they could win.
In the meantime, Gabriel continued his routine of akumatizing whatever citizens were available. After all, all he had to do was have one lucky break, one time where Ladybug and Chat Noir were tired or sick or distracted and could be defeated.
"Sir, I have taken the liberty of telling Adrien that you won't be available to see his fencing match." Nathalie's voice cut through his thoughts. "Shall I schedule a Skype meeting in that time slot?"
"If you could." Gabriel gave himself a shake and turned back to his work. He had a stack of designs from the streetwear design team to review, and there was no reason to slack off on it. "The last time I left the mansion, I missed a prime akuma target and had to settle for a second-rate one. There will be time after when I can attend the matches."
After Emilie is back went unsaid. It was obvious.
Nathalie nodded and went back to her desk. Gabriel turned back to his work, making a couple small alterations and suggestions in the margins of the designs. A couple designs he knew that he would have to watch to make sure that his suggestions were followed- Madam Laurie was a talented designer when it came to shapes and patterns, but had no eye for color- but most were ready to go to production.
He and Nathalie worked in silence for nearly three hours before his brooch started warming up, becoming hot to the touch. Gabriel reached for it, gauging the suitability of the target before nodding decisively.
Yes, this would be a strong one.
The elevator whirred as it brought him down to the basement, over, and up. Gabriel stepped off at the top, in case Nathalie decided to join him and needed to use it. It didn't take long at all for Gabriel to transform and send an akuma off, fluttering over the rooftops. While he waited for it to reach its target, he kept one finger on the brooch.
It was blazing. Someone in Paris was raging against something, probably protesting an injustice or furious at a bully. Their rage would fuel their powers, making them strong.
He waited. Then, just as the akuma was drawing closer to its target, the brooch dimmed and cooled. The (former) target was still irritated, but no longer akumatizeable.
Hawkmoth gritted his teeth. This had been happening too often as of late. He had found a perfect target, only to have the butterfly diverted or rebuffed at last minute. If he could figure out who was doing it and how he could get to them before they calmed themselves down…
If it was the same person (or the same people, even), they would make a formidable opponent.
Still, Hawkmoth waited. His butterfly was out there, and there was no point in recalling it. It would find another target soon enough, and even if they weren't ideal, anything to pull Ladybug and Chat Noir out was good.
...well. Almost anything. Hawkmoth groaned as the akuma found a sobbing baby and transformed it into...well, a sleeping superpowered baby.
Unless the baby had some sort of amazing power that he didn't know about, that was a complete waste of an akuma.
After several minutes of nothing happening, Hawkmoth detransformed and headed right back downstairs. There was no point in wasting his time watching a baby sleep.
He had done quite enough of that when Adrien was young. It wasn't that interesting.
"Back already?" Nathalie inquired as Gabriel reappeared. "That was fast."
"Yes, well, my target vanished and a baby appeared." Gabriel flopped down at his desk. "It wasn't worth spending my time on, so I cut my losses."
Nathalie frowned. "It would have been more efficient to recall the akuma and re-use it."
"I wasn't feeling any decent targets."
"Anything would have been better than letting it stay with a baby." Nathalie didn't look pleased. "Ladybug and Chat Noir have become accomplished at taking down those akumas quickly, and then Nooroo has to recharge before he can go again at full strength."
"If I had felt a decent target, I would have recalled my akuma and sent it elsewhere." Gabriel frowned at Nathalie. It wasn't like her to be so argumentative. Perhaps there were some still-lingering effects from the Peacock Miraculous that were flaring up today and that was why she was so snappy. Perhaps they should reinstate the once-a-week transformation limit, even though Nathalie had been transforming twice a week for the past two weeks, seemingly without a problem. "If nothing else, the baby will force Ladybug and Chat Noir to use their powers and it could wear them down a little."
"Which will only make a difference if you send out another akuma as soon as they defeat this one."
"I'll keep one ear to the ground for any possible candidates."
Nathalie nodded, but she looked displeased as she went back to her work. Gabriel woke his computer back up and pulled up a news feed to play in one corner of his screen while he returned his attention to his designs. As predicted, it didn't take long for Ladybug and Chat Noir to defeat the akuma, and then they were returning the baby to her mother and vanishing over the skyline.
His brooch remained cold, so Gabriel shrugged and wrote the akuma off as yet another lost cause. Frustrating, yes- once he won against Ladybug and Chat Noir he was going to rub his victory in their faces to make up for all the times when they had won against him and celebrated- but not nearly as rare of an occurrence as he would have liked.
"Are you going to akumatize another person now?" Nathalie wanted to know, almost as soon as Gabriel had fully returned his attention to his work. "Or are you going to let yet another opportunity slip by?"
"There aren't enough options," Gabriel protested. "Or, rather, there aren't any. There's not a single viable candidate in range right now."
"Send out another butterfly anyway and create another weak akuma, then. Wear them down."
Gabriel blinked, taken aback. "Nathalie-"
"Are you trying to win or not?"
He frowned at her, letting his voice turn icy as he responded. "What are you suggesting, Nathalie?" Gabriel watched as she shrunk back. "I am doing my best. But the baby was a lost cause from the start. I need to be ready for any actual prospects that come up. We both know that Ladybug and Chat Noir will not be worn down by a parade of sleeping akumas, but Nooroo will be."
This time, Nathalie didn't respond. Gabriel spared her a look before returning his attention to his work, putting the incident out of his mind almost immediately. It was a one-off, a fluke caused by exhaustion.
Except then it wasn't. Nathalie was more snappish on a regular basis, getting irritated whenever Gabriel did anything that wasn't up to her standards. An underwhelming akuma? She was mad. Designs taking too long to finalize? She was annoyed. Ladybug and Chat Noir taking down an akuma that had potential way too quickly thanks to a dumb error? She was seething.
An angry Nathalie was not a Nathalie that Gabriel wanted to spend his time around.
And then after several weeks of increasingly snappish behavior, during one of their weekly Planning Meetings, Gabriel could no longer deny that something was very, very wrong.
"If we hit the Eiffel Tower at mid-day during a holiday with no warning and your most destructive akuma, Ladybug and Chat Noir will be too distracted by evacuating people to deal with the akuma," Nathalie told him. She had somehow taken over the meeting, directing it instead of simply contributing information and then sitting back to let him lead. "Then the akuma can move in and take them by surprise-"
"I would rather use an akuma with mind-control powers or something similar- one that turns people to ice or stone, perhaps," Gabriel said at once. "Ladybug and Chat Noir would still want to get people evacuated, and people scream and panic just as much as when there's an akuma that could, ah, cause deaths." He hated it when that happened, but sometimes it just wasn't avoidable and he didn't want to hold back or compromise promising akumas. It would all get erased in the end.
He wouldn't deliberately cause deaths, though. That- that was crossing a line that he just wasn't willing to cross. It was something that Nathalie wasn't willing to cross, either, so maybe she just hadn't considered her idea all the way through-
"It won't be as effective without the more serious consequences, but I suppose it could work," Nathalie said, and suddenly Gabriel's rock-solid belief that the two of them shared the same supervillain boundaries was shaken. Her expression was cold and calculating, and Gabriel hastily repressed the urge to move away from her and the dark aura that seemed to suddenly appear around her. "Or instead of ice and stone, we could turn people into monsters- then they would run from both the monsters and the akumas. It would be panic. Chaos. Ladybug and Chat Noir torn between being annoyingly heroic and saving civilians or going after the akuma-"
"Okay, I think we've made a good bit of progress for today," Gabriel said before she could say anything else and before her expression could get any more unsettling. "And we- well, you- came up with some very good ideas for me to incorporate in our next few akuma fights. So I suggest that we end this meeting and get back to work. We're falling behind on the business, and we need to catch up before we can spend an entire day trying to make progress with the Miraculous."
"We can hire more people to do that for us-"
"That's a good idea, if you can write up a job description then you can send it to me to review later. For now, uh." Gabriel let one hand drift up to his Miraculous. It was hardly warm at all, so there was no using it as an excuse. "I need to use the bathroom. If you can look over the proposals from Manufacturing, that would be great."
And then he escaped.
"What- what was that?" Gabriel asked once he had locked himself away in the master bedroom's bathroom. He was feeling unsettled, more than he thought was entirely warranted from just Nathalie's words and expression. "Nooroo, you can sense feelings. What's going on with Nathalie? She wasn't herself today. Her behavior hasn't been normal both during our meeting and just in general recently, and then today she suggested, uh…" Gabriel struggled to find the words. He didn't think that he was reading Nathalie wrong. "Unethical supervillainry via too-dangerous akuma battles?"
Nooroo didn't look impressed by that. Gabriel…. Well, Gabriel couldn't blame him, exactly.
It was hard to put it into words, properly, but he couldn't deliberately cause deaths. That would make him a real supervillain.
"Anyway, she's always been concerned about the potential for people to get seriously injured or killed before," Gabriel continued. "And all of a sudden she's actually suggesting it."
Nooroo nodded. "Yes, there's been a definite decline in emotion in her as of late. There's still annoyance there, but it's very muted. Almost as thought something was… missing."
"As of late…" Gabriel mused. Then he frowned. "What constitutes as of late?"
Nooroo thought about it. "A few weeks?"
"Since she started transforming more?"
"Yes!" Nooroo exclaimed. "Since she's started transforming more, it seems like she's lost her empathy and her feelings- oh! She's lost her heart! That's what it is! She's stopped using Body and has been using Heart instead!"
"What do you-" Gabriel started, then he froze as Nooroo's words sunk in. Of course! How hadn't he seen it before? He of all people should have recognized the symptoms, considering that he used Heart when he tried transforming with the Peacock in an attempt to revive Emilie, right after she fell into a coma. He hadn't dared to use Body, not after what it had done to Emilie, and he had figured that one use couldn't possibly do that much damage.
Except it hadn't just been one use. He might not have used the Peacock's power- he wasn't going to push that far- he had still transformed several times, trying to see if doing so would help him gain some insight on what he might do to break the spell. It hadn't helped at all- which he perhaps should have expected, since Emilie had certainly tried to figure out how to break the curse before- but he had needed to try something.
(And yes, sure, he had tried again a few times since then, to see if he could pick out a difference while actually transforming now that he was used to what it was supposed to feel like with Nooroo, but that- he hadn't transformed much, and he had never done it for long. He knew what he was doing and he knew the risks, and Nathalie- Nathalie did not.)
"But how would she have figured out that she could do that?" Gabriel wondered out loud. "I didn't tell her because I saw what it was doing to me and I could tell that it was dangerous, so I made sure to limit it. And I made sure to never mention it anywhere where she could have heard."
"You have ears all over the mansion, Gabriel," Nooroo reminded him, gesturing to the intercom installed on the wall. "And Nathalie is a smart woman. Surely she could have rigged one to listen in if she really wanted to. Or perhaps she followed you but you didn't realize it. There are many options."
Gabriel frowned. He didn't like the idea of being eavesdropped on in his own house. Perhaps he should order Nooroo to do a search later on, so that he knew what was wired and what wasn't. But that was a problem for later, so he decided to focus on something else. "If she's so smart, then why would she think that heart was a good choice?"
"Well, no one is going to do mind. The thought of losing your mind knowingly turns everyone off." Nooroo swirled around his head before coming to a stop in a midair hover. "And she had experience with what body feels like, and it was unpleasant. She saw the dangers of continuing like that. So she decided to explore the third option."
"She should have noticed the effects. I did."
"You didn't use the Peacock's power. She has, every time. The effects would have appeared faster, perhaps fast enough for her to notice but not care. Using Heart is very dangerous."
Gabriel frowned, turning away from his kwami as he started to pace up and down the length of the bathroom. He could hear the judgment in Nooroo's voice. After all, he himself had known that it was dangerous and had transformed anyway. But that had been different. He knew to limit his transformations, and Nathalie had increased hers. He had been careful.
Maybe it would have been considered more careful for him to use Body instead, but he had known even then that Emilie had been doing something to alleviate the effects of the curse and he didn't know what. He hadn't wanted to collapse as well and leave Adrien without any parents. Gabriel had never been a particularly cuddly person to start out with, so he had figured that there wouldn't be too much of a change from using Heart.
He hadn't known then that there would be lingering effects just from those few transformations, or that the effects would periodically flare up again.
"So what do we do now?" Gabriel asked after a few minutes of pacing. He turned on his heel and finally stilled, looking at Nooroo. "How do we stop her and reverse the effects? I can't see things improving if she continues like this."
Nooroo looked nervous. "Master, I don't know if-"
"There must be something that we can do!" Gabriel insisted, face twisting into a scowl. "I have superpowers! I will not be helpless!"
"But she has superpowers as well," Nooroo pointed out, flying back out of his reach. "And looking back at how far things have progressed… Master, she's probably keeping the Peacock Miraculous on her all the time, instead of taking it off and storing it somewhere where you could take it. You could try sending her on vacation for a week or two so that she is away from the city and has no reason to transform, but I would bet that Nathalie would take the Miraculous with her. And she would be very suspicious of that as well, I would think."
"She would absolutely pick up on what I was doing right away," Gabriel agreed. "And she would push back even harder. She might try to get me out of the city, or take my Miraculous. And I can already tell that it wouldn't be a good idea."
Nooroo nodded and tilted his head, clearly thinking. "You… could transform less, perhaps? Then she wouldn't have as many opportunities to transform."
Gabriel scowled at that, the ever-present irritation rising up as he realized that Nooroo was trying to take advantage of the situation. "And what good would that do? If I don't use my Miraculous, then I will have no chance of beating Ladybug and Chat Noir! And Nathalie only transforms for the strongest akumas anyway, so being more picky about how often I akumatize someone would make no difference. No, that's not the best way," he decided, slamming a hand down on his bathroom counter. Nooroo flinched. Good. That was what he had deserved for trying to take advantage of the situation. It was serious and the kwami had to treat it as such instead of trying to rebel. "I need to bring this fight to an end, and it's more important than ever to get it done quickly. I should push harder than ever to wrap this whole thing up."
"Master, are you sure-"
"This is an unforeseen snag in my plan, but I can use it, I'm sure," Gabriel decided, nodding at his reflection in the mirror. There was a lot more grey in his hair than there used to be- a side effect of all of the stress that he had been under in the past year- but it just made him look more distinguished. "If I can persuade Nathalie that I'll go along with her plan, then I can direct her again. I just have to adapt."
He could handle this. Perhaps it would take a few days, but Gabriel could get the situation under control and take advantage of the whole thing. Then he would win, get the Miraculous, and return his whole life to normal, no problem at all.
It was alarming, but everything would be fine.
a/n: Yes, Gabriel, working with someone who is slowly going heartless sounds like something that will turn out fine. Maybe. Not at all.
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