Ladynoir/ angst/ set during Chat Blanc

You know, I write a lotta angst. It's kinda... kinda concerning. I think I'll stick in some fluff after this one haha. Anyway, enjoy.

oOo

He was a murderer.

That had been his first thought upon finally realizing exactly what he had done. Singlehandedly, he had destroyed everything and everyone in the whole world. Marinette was gone. His friends- Nino and Alya and Chloe and Kagami- were gone. Nathalie, his bodyguard, his father, all his teachers, everyone he had ever laid eyes on was now gone.

And it was all his fault.

The shockwave that had stemmed from the sheer power exploding from Chat Blanc's small form had been enough to knock him out for an unknown amount of time. He had been confused upon awakening, thinking that the whole day had merely been some sort of twisted nightmare, but upon feeling the concrete beneath him and seeing the pallid white clinging to his hands and arms, a jolt of horror shot through his veins and memories flooded back.

One of the first things he saw upon sitting up and looking about himself was Ladybug. Marinette. She was frozen in place, eyes wide, hand outstretched to him with pure fear etched into her features. Panic flooded his entire body, pushing him to scramble to his feet and rush over to her. He had called her name, placed his hands on her face, clinging onto hope that perhaps she could hear him. Perhaps she was still alive beneath that stony exterior. Perhaps the shell would melt away and she would shift and blink and give him her signature smile before making everything better again.

These hopes died rather quickly.

The second thing he saw was his father in a feeble, cowardly position. Protecting himself from the monster he had created. Mixed feelings stirred within him. He felt betrayed. Hurt. Angry. Heartbroken. The only parent he had left turned out to be a traitor. A cruel, selfish, heartless person who had beaten his own son and demanded he betray everything he'd ever been taught just to bring back Emilie (who Adrien knew would never approve of her husband's means). It was enough to make him aim a growing, glowing sphere of pure energy at the husk of what remained of his father. He wanted to wipe him and any proof of his existence off the face of the earth for what he had done.

But he didn't. Because he knew that deep down, he still loved his father, no matter how much he wished he didn't.

After realizing that he needed to get help, Chat Blanc shifted his attention to the rest of the city. Unfortunately, it seemed he had managed to absolutely annihilate Paris. Everything was in shambles. Buildings were overturned. Windows were shattered. Cars and street signs were completely destroyed. And the people… the people were no better off than Ladybug and Hawkmoth.

It had made his stomach lurch. Nausea quickly overtook him, causing Chat to close his eyes against the apocalyptic scene before him. After the wave subsided a bit, he allowed himself to look again. It wasn't any easier the second time.

Of course, he had quickly taken off, thinking that perhaps his destruction hadn't touched everyone. However, after about two hours of scouring Paris and seeing all his friends and their families with the exact same expression of shock upon each of their faces, Chat finally understood that somehow, he was the only person left in all of Paris. And maybe the entire world.

A knife ran clean through his chest. He recalled breaking down in the middle of the street- right outside his school- falling to his knees, screaming, shaking, gasping, sobbing. They were all gone. Everyone was dead. He was a murderer. It was all his fault.

After another few hours of crying his heart out and desperately trying to push the air back into his lungs, a bleary-eyed Chat stumbled to his feet (vaguely realizing that it was dark out) and dragged himself back to his own house. It was a long walk, but his home was really the only familiar place he knew hadn't been entirely destroyed. There were no gates to climb over, no doors to open, so it didn't take much effort to get where he needed to be at that moment.

He only stopped when he was in the doorway of his mother's old bedroom.

This room had always been his comfort spot. Whenever he felt sad when he was younger, his mother told him to go crawl into her bed until she came to give him numerous hugs and kisses. So that's what he did. Tears blurring his vision, Chat Blanc climbed onto his mother's bed and pulled the now tattered covers over his head, trying his best to hide away from the world. However, he supposed that the only person he had to hide away from in the world was himself.

The next morning had been rough. It took Chat a total of two seconds to remember everything. He hadn't wanted to move. What was the point of moving, of getting up and facing a new day? Without Nathalie knocking on his door and telling him to get dressed, without his bodyguard opening his car door and driving him to school, without his teachers assigning homework and his friends complaining about a lack of sleep and meeting up with Ladybug for patrol, it wasn't a new day at all. It was the same day as it had been yesterday, stretched out into the longest day he'd ever experienced.

Sunlight and moonlight began to blur together. And it was funny how different the sunset looked when he was the only one watching it.

For about a week (he guessed) Chat Blanc roamed the city and adjusted to the new sights, eyes rarely dry. He developed a pattern of sorts. Wake up, cry, recover what he could from the damage, cry, return to the scene of the crime, and finally, cry until it was time to go back home and fall asleep, only to wake up the next morning to repeat the whole thing all over again. He could have laughed. He tried to once, but it came out broken and humorless and was cut off by a choking sob.

After collecting an abundance of objects (notebooks, pens, pencils, books, memorable trinkets, etc.) he stored all of these priceless objects in his mother's room. This worked wonderfully, considering that his mother had always been fond of little shelves and nooks in the walls to put things, but it didn't last long.

The flooding happened.

One morning, Chat woke up and went outside, only to find water accumulating everywhere in the city. At first, he thought it had rained while he was asleep, but after realizing that there was nothing else wet but the ground, he began to panic. It was saltwater. That much he knew. But he had no idea how much time he had before it rose up and became a problem. So he frantically gathered together all he could and ran across Paris to the tallest building he knew of, traveling all the way up to the top floor and storing everything inside. This would work. His things would be safe for a while.

That night, he didn't sleep in his mother's room. He dragged a bench and a blanket through the seawater to sit right in between Ladybug and the Eiffel Tower, falling asleep to the sound of his own voice going on and on about the wonderful blue-eyed girl he had once been allowed to love.

Somewhere between day one and day one hundred, Chat Blanc decided to begin writing down what he could remember about his life. He planned to begin right away, but the literal weight of the world on his shoulders had plunged him into a deep, dark void of nothingness for weeks, rendering him useless. Admittedly, it was hard for him to settle his pen and begin, but it got easier day after day. After a while, he had filled up three notebooks with stories from his childhood. But he began to grow tired of straining his mind to think back so far, so on the next clean sheet of paper, he skipped forwards and began writing about recenter events. The true beginning of his story.

As he pulled his pen down the page and watched his time as a savior of Paris come to life before his eyes, he felt himself flip through a million different emotions. Happiness came when he described his partner in full depth and detail, comparing her to the moon and the stars in the sky. Bitterness welled up when he told of his adversary and his plans to steal the miraculous for personal gain. A sense of failed duty quickly seized him when he recalled his lady's faith and trust in him. And gradually, he realized he wasn't writing the story of a hero, but of a downfall, of a broken dynasty. Of a villain.

He didn't write for a while after that.

And every day, he would take a little time to sit before Ladybug's slowly deteriorating form and talk to her, imagining that she were looking upon him with her bright bluebell eyes and soft pink smile.

"You know," he said one afternoon, standing before her and examining her face for the millionth time. "I wonder if things might have been different if another Chat Noir had been chosen instead of me."

Of course, there was no response. He hummed to fill the deafening silence, the silence that followed him even in his dreams.

"I wonder if you could have loved him. I'll bet he never would have allowed anything to happen to you." Chat swallowed the thickness in his throat. "He could've protected you. He could have saved you from all this."

The tears didn't come like they usually did. He supposed that was the day he finally realized that he was hardening to his new reality.

Unfortunately, weeks turned to months and gradually, Chat felt his grip on his senses slipping. He began to see things, to hear things that weren't actually there. One time he swore he'd seen a flash of red from behind the fallen Eiffel Tower, but upon further inspection, he realized that he had merely wished the color into existence with his own tangled mess of a soul. Another time, his mother's voice called his name from a distance and suddenly he was a little kid lost in a grocery store, looking for his mom. Of course, he knew deep down that she wasn't there, but a little voice in the back of his head told him that one day, she might actually call for him and then everything would get better if he waited and prayed and believed with his whole heart that it would.

Isolation can do strange things to the mind and Chat Blanc was no exception. Slowly, the glimpses of scarlet and the voices whispering his name grew too much for him to handle. Too loud. Too real. They surrounded him, drowning him in his own thoughts and feelings until he couldn't breathe. For a lack of better words, he went clinically insane. It was truly a sad sight to see the former hero of Paris turn into a mumbling, deranged lunatic. Sleep became an acquaintance. He destroyed remaining buildings to occupy his time, getting the feeling that no one would mind. Mood swings became a normalcy, taking him from happy to sad to angry to numb, inside out in a single hour. His emotion- or lack thereof- held him in a chokehold. And the hallucinations strengthened to the point where for a solid week, Chat believed that Ladybug was actually alive again.

And then.

Then, the very day that he was seriously considering just ending it all with one flick of his wrist, it happened.

"Chat Noir?"

Her voice came from behind him, like a dream of a dream. Soft. Cautious. Sweet-toned. Real.

Chat's absentminded humming stopped. He turned from his place on the edge of Montparnasse Tower. There she stood, looking as beautiful as he had remembered. No, even more so. Her big blue eyes like two bottomless galaxies were looking right at him, fair skin glowing like moonlight and wispy dark hair reminding him of a midnight sky.

He could hardly believe his own eyes. She was here. She was alive. She could fix everything. His friends and family would come back to life. He would go back to school. His father would return to being just a fashion designer. He and Marinette could be in love again. The world would come alive in full technicolor, flowers would bloom, the moon would be whole, the stars would shine, it would all come back in greens and blues and oranges and yellows. And red. Beautiful red.

He would do anything for that.

"M'lady?" he asked, getting to his feet and dropping down to her level. Immediately, fear lit up in her eyes and she began to back away from him, hands lifting to shield herself. He didn't even notice her shock in his crazed, irrational, desperate state of mind. "I thought I'd lost you!"

oOo

*Shudder* Dang. Watching him go crazy is creepy. Terrifying, kinda. I could have done a little better with this concept, but it was old and begging to be published so I thought, why the heck not? Lemme know what you thought!