MiracuCrack #44CB: Terms of Surrender
by DFC
(Timeframe: Post-Season 4.)
It was a night like any other.
Any other since the great betrayal of Ladybug, that is. Tikki had become accustomed to Marinette pacing the floor half the night, scribbling feverish notes and battle plans on any available scraps of paper, and barely managing to sleep.
"For the tenth time, Marinette," she scolded her young friend. "Burning the candle at both ends like this isn't going to get you closer to defeating Hawkmoth. It's going to leave you worn-out and half-dead when he does show his hand."
Marinette scowled back at her, not out of personal animosity but more from frustration. "I know that," she murmured. "But this is the most dangerous situation we've ever been in, and I need to be ready for anything!"
"Yes, but..."
"At any moment, he could open a portal underneath my feet to the bottom of the ocean. Or worse," sighed Marinette. "Or do it the other way and drop a live shark into my bedroom. He could muck around in the timeline and change history, he could give himself any power he desires, he could do almost anything. And as handy as your Lucky Charms are, this time I don't think a bicycle pedal or a tube of glue is going to cut it."
"Those are valid concerns, I agree. But you're sort of skipping a step, aren't you?"
Tikki motioned for Marinette to sit down and hear her out, at least.
"Just because the other Kwamis are in Hawkmoth's possession doesn't mean that your identity is in danger. You know how it works; even if they tried to speak your name, bubbles would come out of their mouths," Tikki argued. "The protective spell's rules are a little funny that way, but it should hold up. He can't just order them to say your name unless they know that he knows it first... and he doesn't."
"That's not much comfort," countered Marinette. "I've been around them for months now. I love them all, but... some of them aren't the most careful."
*BREEEP!*
Marinette's phone rang at that moment. Seeing that it was an unknown caller, she let it go to voice mail.
"They will do what they can to keep you and your family safe, I assure you," smiled Tikki. "You know that they will."
"I do-"
*BREEEP!*
"Again?" muttered Marinette, staring at the same caller and choosing to ignore them again.
"So, for now, you need to rest and get back into a better frame of mind," Tikki urged her. "It's not as if Hawkmoth's going to show up at your front door in costume, or call you on the-"
*BREEEP!*
"Someone's persistent," Marinette declared. "Let's see who it is..."
She was utterly unprepared to see the familiar face of Gabriel Agreste staring back at her.
"Good evening, Marinette," he intoned. "I apologize for calling at this late hour... but we must speak. Urgently."
"M-m-m-mister Agreste?" a shocked Marinette stammered. "I can only im-m-magine that you have the wrong number..."
"Oh, I do not," Gabriel replied, flatly. "Perhaps I should have begun my call with... good evening, Ladybug."
A dead silence filled the room... and, perhaps, all of Paris. If birds had frozen in the air in mid-wingflap, it wouldn't have seemed out of place to Marinette in the moment.
"I... beg your pardon?" she managed, feebly.
"There is no point in avoiding it any longer. I am aware that you are the heroine known as Ladybug. No doubt remains in my mind about that," Gabriel declared. "And so that we are on equal footing here... I will tell you that I am the man you have known as Hawkmoth."
It was a good thing that Marinette had been sitting down when she took the call.
He watched her process that over the video call, speechless and overwhelmed on every level, and sighed. "Take a moment," he suggested. "This is not easy for either one of us."
A tiny part of Marinette's will reasserted itself. "I knew it," she gasped out. "Months ago... I had you figured out, that it was you. Because of that book... the Guardians' book... there was no other reason that you would've had it. But, then..."
"But then a necessary deception threw you off the trail," Gabriel agreed. "Just as you have been on my radar for some time now, but had not been confirmed for me as Ladybug until this evening."
"...So what happens now?" Marinette whimpered. "I... I don't understand what is happening right now."
"Simply this. I wish to negotiate terms of surrender."
"If you think that I'm going to simply surrender to you, and hand over my Miraculous..." she snapped back, setting aside any last pretenses of denying her alter ego. "That is just not going to happen."
"No, Marinette. I wish to negotiate my surrender."
"Abuhwhat?"
Marinette felt as if she was somehow lost in a dream, flights of fancy and bizarre circumstances supplanting her reality. She listened for the next ten minutes as Gabriel told her the story of how he had obtained the Book, Peacock and Moth, how his wife had suffered a terrible accident, and how reviving her was his one and only remaining goal in life.
"This... wow. Okay, a lot of things make more sense to me now," Marinette mused. "Not that you are to be forgiven any time soon for all that you've done... but at least I understand it better."
"My terms are simple. I will surrender the Moth back to you on three conditions," Gabriel declared. "None of them are negotiable. I will assume that ending this pointless war between us will be worth honoring them."
"G-go ahead," breathed Marinette.
"The first is that this age of the Miraculous ends tonight, and my career as Hawkmoth and Shadowmoth vanishes as if it had never been," stated Gabriel. "No police, no INTERPOL, no superheroes breaking down my door. You will take what you know about my activities with you to the grave. And, no, that is not some sort of thinly-veiled death threat."
"...Okay?" she frowned. "You're suggesting that you should just walk away, like none of this ever happened?"
"Have I caused lasting damage?" he smiled, faintly. "Granted, I have you to thank for the vast majority of the repair work."
"Oh, you are kidding me right now," snapped Marinette. "Do you think that my Miraculous Cure fixed people's memories of everything that happened to them? The trauma?"
Gabriel handwaved that away. "We have plenty of time to discuss such things another day. I do suspect that we have much to talk about."
Silently, Marinette motioned for his second condition.
"I need for you to inspect my wife... and see what may be done for her. Wayzz suggested to me that Tikki's assistance will be required if there is any hope at all... short of a Wish."
"I am... not opposed to that," ventured Marinette. "If my safety is guaranteed."
"By then, it would be," parried Gabriel. "I need your assistance, not your life. That is all I have ever needed, to be sure, but it has taken this long for me to realize that. Not a soul will know of your involvement until the situation is resolved, for good or bad or in-between. That goes triply for my son."
The mention of Adrien threw Marinette's stomach into a new set of spasms. "You're... you're not going to tell him that his mother is under his house? That she might be alive?" she gasped.
"Or what role I played in her being there. Not now," sighed Gabriel. "I will tell him the whole story... someday? But I do not want to raise his hopes or dash them until I know how this will turn out."
"I do not like this. At all," Marinette's temper flashed.
"I will reiterate that he will be told the truth. But I insist on being the first to tell him that," Gabriel snapped back. "Fair enough?"
"...Fine. I can't believe that I am agreeing to this, but..."
Marinette's sense of unease returned to her. "I can't believe any of this, in fact. If you have what I know you have in your possession... you have world-changing power there. I have been beating my brains out for weeks trying to figure out what to do about that, and I've... I've got nothing," she admitted. "And on top of that, you've got the drop on me. You knew my identity before you confessed yours. Why are we even talking right now? Why are you surrendering when you hold all the cards?"
"Because of the cards. They are my third condition."
"Huh?"
"You will come here this evening, without delay. And you will take these blasted things away from me, Marinette. PLEASE."
Marinette watched his expression, still not understanding what was causing it... but sensing desperation on his part.
"You want me to take the Miraculous from you?" she repeated, scarcely believing it as she said it.
"The Kwamis. My sanity hangs in the balance, I assure you."
Marinette stared back at him.
"You possessed these before I did, obviously. You had a box to keep them in, some sort of special place for them to go when not in use. I do not... so I have sixteen tiny fluttering fairies from Hell itself chattering in my ear, all day and all night," groaned Gabriel. "Bouncing around my office, scattering my papers, filling my brain with ungodly levels of inane blather..."
Visions flashed before Marinette's mind's eye of her own time spent living with sixteen Kwamis... and some pieces slid into place.
"They can be a handful, can't they?" she said, allowing herself a small smile.
"I have not slept in two days. I have not thought clearly in four. My business is falling apart around me without my guidance. And as for being Hawkmoth, formulating a plan to seize your Miraculous... good lord, how did you even think with these howling, mewling things surrounding you?"
"I'm surprised, I'll admit," Marinette noted. "They behaved around me, for the most part. They must not like you, for some strange reason."
"I tried ordering them to be still and quiet, to go back into their Miraculous, to hide in the kitchen cupboards, anything," lamented Gabriel. "The turtle one informed me, smugly, that as long as I controlled one Miraculous I could order Nooroo around as I saw fit. Two, a bit more loosely. But sixteen at once? No human alive has the willpower to corral all of them at once. And that is before I pried your identity away from them."
"About that. How did you do that, if I may ask?" she wondered.
"As I said, I'd suspected it to some level. They couldn't tell me directly, but clues in what they could tell me about their recent history let me put the pieces together. I declared, 'Aha! Ladybug is Marinette Dupain-Cheng, isn't she?' in triumph... and they all just grinned at me. Evilly. And that is me saying so."
"Once I knew," he continued, "you are all that they have talked about for the last thirty-six hours. 'Marinette treated us so much better. Marinette needs an internship with your company' - would you like one, by the way? It's available... 'Marinette is so smart and so creative and so going to punt my ass into the Seine,' as the Ox put it, ever so gallantly. I thought that my son spoke of you often, Marinette, but this is beyond comparison."
"...Adrien tells you about me?" wondered Marinette, jarred out of her train of thought momentarily. "Seriously?"
"Again... we can speak of this at another time," Gabriel groaned. "Please. Get these sixteen hellspawn out of my house tonight."
Sensing the degree to which she had the upper hand in the situation, Marinette grinned.
"Mr. Agreste... I'm inclined to do that, purely for the safety of all of the people that you've put in danger. People that you've hurt, you've scarred emotionally, you've tortured in one way or another," she argued. "But there's a part of me that's asking, 'Why should I drop everything right now to do something to help you, of all people?"
"There's one other part of my reward. My son."
Suspicion rose up in Marinette, all at once.
"You are... not suggesting what I think you're suggesting," she accused him. "Adrien and I are... I am his very good friend, and I'm very happy to be so, and I'm... I'm a bit amazed that you know who I am because he told you about me. But if we're ever to be anything more than that, it won't be because you shoved him into my path or told him to date me."
"Actually... I have something different to offer you..."
He held up a silver ring. "Do you know what this is?" he asked.
"I do not."
"This ring... if you give it to Adrien, it will give him full control of his own life, perhaps for the first time ever," said Gabriel. "Or you can keep it for yourself."
The implications struck Marinette like a thunderbolt. "You're saying... that Adrien... is... is... that?" she gasped.
"Imagine, if you will. You are certainly well on your way to winning Adrien's affections, if my son's words are any clue towards that," Gabriel smiled. "But with this ring in hand, you could command him to do anything and he would obey. And I do mean anything. No matter how... physically intense that may be for the two of you."
Despite herself... a fantasy flashed before Marinette's eyes. It was not a fantasy that she would ever feel comfortable telling her friends, much less her mother. She was not proud of it, necessarily.
But the possibilities...
"...Mr. Agreste?" she managed.
"Yes?"
"You had my curiosity," Marinette declared. "Now... you have my attention."
~fin~
