Probably not the chapter you all were expecting.
He's always loved butterflies. As a child, he would play with them in his mother's garden, sneaking up on those resting on her flowers and chasing the airborne ones, adoring the way their wings flitter in the sunlight, the way they twist and glide around every gust of wind. At his father's apartment in the city, he kept a small planter by his window, watching from his desk as the delicate creatures danced in an out of his room. As he grew, so too did his interest. He would spend hours researching the difference types, largest to smallest. Plain, dull wings and multicolored disguises. Their legs, joints, antenna. Biology, migrating patterns, native and invasive species.
He majored in biology, focusing on lepidopterology, and got a job at a small conservatory outside of Paris shortly after graduating.
He was planning on spending the rest of his life surrounded by butterflies and flowers. Quiet. Peaceful. His only stress the commute to and from work every day.
And it was. Four thirty years, his life was peaceful. Good. Quiet.
There was a girl, a young woman, maybe in her mid twenties. Pretty little thing even when she lay dying in his arms, a selfless act of heroism claiming her life in return for his. She asked but one small favor upon her death, and cradled a tiny blue sprite in her hands along with a purple brooch vaguely reminiscent of a butterfly. Please, she said, please send them home.
When she died, the little blue sprite disappeared into the peacock brooch pinned haphazardly to the woman's torn shirt.
Send them home, she said, and it was the beginning of his end. Because if the peacock had a tiny sprite, then the butterfly must as well. Butterflies were his life. He pinned it to his collar and grinned at the little purple butterfly. Nooroo. And was denied. Politely, firmly, inexorably denied. Refused.
He was not Nooroo's chosen, not special enough, not good enough. Which meant that somewhere out there, someone else was going to be gifted with the butterfly's power, someone who wasn't him.
He ripped the pin off and snapped all four delicate wings off one by one. The peacock he packed up and shipped to the address she provided.
The creature came in his dreams that night. It came in his dreams every night after for many long years. Insidious, sidling up from from the lightering feeling of resentment, guilt, inadequacy. He was content with his life until he knew there was something more, something better. And it preyed on him, slipping in intrusive thoughts when he wasn't paying attention. Thoughts that seemed oh so logical at first glance.
He always tried to do his best. He was doing his best. He was the best. It wasn't his fault he failed, messed up, made a mistake. Obviously someone else was incompetent. He's better than everyone else, always has been. He knew more, worked harder and longer and with more dedication than anyone else.
And as the years passed, the creature was no longer just in his dreams and his thoughts, but lurked in the real world. The more he gave in, the more he blamed others, the more real the creature became.
He looks up at the moon, hazy through glass and a night sky filled with smoke. He's almost sixty and around him, Paris burns with what he unleased. It's his fault. He knows that now. He wasn't careful, didn't want to listen when Nooroo said he wasn't chosen and his actions proved the kwami right. There's a shadow at his back now and it grins bright white with too many teeth, tangible.
Arms wrap around his waist, tepid breath prickling across his skin as the shadows leans on him, unbearably heavy despite not weighing anything at all. His stomach squirms, lurching and clawing at his throat. Its whispers feel like honey dripping cold and viscous down his neck and its laughter, hushed hisses of amused air rake down his spine, vertebrae by vertebrae, with shards of broken glass.
He unleashed this into the world. It was locked up. Trapped. And he unleashed it in a fit of greed, of jealousy.
It kisses his jaw and the spot burns.
Claws tap Nooroo's brooch, repaired almost a year ago by a talented jeweler, gossamer metal wings carefully soldered on to the back of the locket. The kwami still hasn't recovered. He's not able to fly for very long, little wings bearing scars where dark magic and molten metal brought him back into existence.
"Aren't they beautiful?" the creature croons. He looks down from the moon to the array of tiny glowing butterflies imprisoned in glass jars around the conservatory. He spent three decades caring for them and a year destroying everything by infusing his life's work with the purified akuma Ladybug released. Forty-nine jars, each glowing speck pattered pink and green with remnants of Ladybug's and Chat Noir's powers.
It's disgusting, vile, and he'd rather claw out his own eyes than gaze upon what he helped create.
In a few minutes he will be Hawkmoth. In a few minutes he will think them beautiful.
"Come now," the creature insists. "Don't be like that! Look at this! This is what we've been striving for, what we've had to settle for because you are weak. Pathetic. But that's okay! All you needed was my help. Yes. That's all." A facsimile of a hand pets gently at his hair. Soothing. Mocking. "There now, it's alright. Here." It slinks away, picking up the nearest jar and is back in a blink, standing right in front of him with that terrible grin. Long claws unscrew the lid, plucking out the butterfly within. It flutters helplessly within the creature's grasp. The creature presses delicate wings to his mouth. "Eat."
He's always been a coward. Or, at the very least, he's never been brave. A brave man would have looked for help when the creature first appeared. A brave man would have let the creature consume him rather than let it free. A brave man would never open his mouth.
He allows the creature to press the butterfly past his lips and into his mouth, tasting the bitter death of a toxic insect more than the putrid shadow lingering on his tongue. One after another, the foreign power curling, rancid, in his stomach.
"So good for me. I know you've been trying to do as I ask. It's not your fault you're incapable. I thought such a simple task would be easy for someone like you, but I suppose I overestimated you"
The last butterfly is offered and he opens his mouth to be fed. Maybe, hopefully, he will be dead by the end of the day. A nameless man aged beyond his years who lived a quiet life in a butterfly conservatory.
The creature slides into him, a shock of ice on fevered skin, pain akin to hitting frozen finger flooding in after. Lightning and bright light it comes, pushing, pulling, ripping as his consciousness, his conscience, his sense of self and memories, and he fight, instinctive, more animal than man, against the shredding teeth and wicked burn of electricity lighting up every single nerve in his body. Worse comes when the creature reaches the new power, the stolen power clustered in his stomach, but he has no mouth to scream with, the monster laughing inside and out, howling triumph to a room full of empty jars as he drowns in a lake of fire, unable to burn and lost to wave after wave of flame.
Hawkmoth stands, grin too wide.
"Nooroo, darling," he coos and feels the kwami shiver, tucked into the joint of a table leg. "Wings rise~"