Haha guess who's back on the Angst Express? Me. It's me. Rated T just because, I don't know, it's scary kinda?
oOo
Even as his muscles ached and his bones felt like liquid led, Adrien trudged down the empty, echoing hallway, physically unable to do anything but obey. His tired eyes traced over the walls, the torches engulfed in blue flames, the eerie shadows cast in all directions. They moved with every flicker of firelight, looking as if they could lash out and swallow him whole at any second.
He stumbled as he was shoved onwards, a voice hissing behind him, "Move!" Adrien bit back a surge of anger, fighting the urge to whip around and slam his captor against the nearest wall over and over until he collapsed. The chains binding his wrists pinched, reminding him of his place, of his position. Here, he was a criminal. A traitor to his own.
His breath hitched when he felt the tip of what could only be a knife press right next to his backbone. Adrien doubted the thin fabric of his tattered t-shirt would protect him should the blade slip. He was sure to walk with careful footfalls, back painfully stiff and straight, stepping in time with the three guards surrounding him.
Forward they marched, on and on and on. His head clouded with a hundred memories, a thousand what ifs, a million listless wishes. If only he had done things differently. If only he had been there in time. If only he hadn't had that stupid photoshoot. If only he had kept his eyes shut. If only she had left when she'd had the chance.
To face the sun and allow the shadows of his mistakes to fall behind him. To start over and face a new day. To turn back time and undo everything.
The procession stopped in front of two, looming doors, old-fashioned knockers adorning the wood paneling. One guard stepped up and wrapped a liquid-like black hand around a single knocker and beat it against the door. Once. Twice. The sound echoed down the long passage, pounding in Adrien's ears like a base drum in an empty auditorium.
The knife tip at his back shifted as they waited for a response. It took only a few heartbeats before the doors parted and swung inward on their hinges with a loud creaking sound.
They crossed the threshold with no hesitation. As they walked, Adrien's eyes raised and were met with a grand, cathedral-like room with walls that rivaled skyscrapers and large windows concealed behind thick, dark blue curtains. A narrow, velvety carpet cushioned their footsteps, the same color as the drapes and wall sconces. Lining the room were inky shadows in the shapes of men, clad in spotless silver armor and holding weapons sharp enough to split hairs.
It was ridiculously big, Adrien thought, for a room that held nothing but two chairs.
At the far side of the room, a grand, lavish throne supported the weight of a young woman of noticeable power, who leaned to one side with the back of her hand resting beneath her chin. From the hem of her black dress to the top of her delicate silver crown, she radiated beauty, but not the kind Adrien was used to. This beauty was dark and striking, alluring and repulsive all at the same time. Even as Adrien decided he hated it, he felt a strong impulse to fall on his knees before her and beg for her approval.
The other throne, although just as extravagant, was empty.
Closer Adrien came to her. Closer and closer and closer with each shaking step, each shove at the back, each impatient growl from his captors. They only stopped when they reached the foot of her throne. Her eyes, now of a violet color, watched Adrien with something akin to amusement. He kept his head high, despite the fear and guilt that twisted in his stomach.
Her lips, painted a blood red, stretched into a smile that might have been deemed teasing in some lights. Familiar, yet too restrained to recognize.
"Kneel."
Adrien collapsed beneath two heavy hands on his shoulders that forced him to his knees. His jaw tightened as his head dropped forward, blond hair falling over his eyes. He wasn't used to being weak, to being shoved to the ground and having no strength to fight back. It made him feel all sorts of strange. She knew this.
"Step back," she told the inhuman guards. She spoke in such a honey sweet voice that her commandments sounded like innocent suggestions.
The heaviness on his shoulders disappeared, but the weight embedded deep in his bones did not. He supposed he could have stood if he'd really wanted to, but given his sore muscles and the thickness of the air, he gathered it wasn't the best idea.
He could hear his blood pulsing in his ears, his shallow breaths keeping in time. He could feel the guards at his back, ready to run him through with a single wave of their superior's hand. Once again, he longed for the sun, for normalcy.
Gentle footsteps sounded as she descended from her throne, just as an angel of death might step down from heaven onto earth. He watched her dress sweep the floor, elegant little shoes stopping in front of him. Fabric folded as her knees bent and she crouched down to his level.
Light reflected off of the purple gem at her throat, strung from a silver chain. Her hand—divine, delicate, deadly— reached out and slipped under his chin. An icy chill tickled at the front of his neck as she tipped his head up. His eyes met hers, like two gleaming amethysts shrouded in darkness.
Her sweet, sinister smile remained intact.
"Hey, Kitty."
Adrien swallowed down the bundle of nerves caught in his throat, eyes narrowing.
"Hello, M'lady."
It disturbed him how heavenly and lethal a being could look all at once. Worship seemed not reverent enough, yet murder seemed too lenient a punishment. Of course, this wasn't truly her. It was merely who she was while infected by that poisonous butterfly, stripped of her goodness, controlled by her darkest desires and most twisted capabilities. Princess Justice was neither Ladybug nor Marinette. She was another creature entirely, capable of overthrowing all of Paris and capturing the very villain who had created her in the first place.
However, despite all this, Adrien knew Paris' savior was still in there. Somewhere. He just had to find her. Find her before she wrecked him.
Her gaze traced over his features, the scrape running down his cheek, the soot and sweat clinging to his brow. She wasn't looking for anything in particular, just cherishing her moment of victory.
"At long last," she murmured. "I finally got you."
At long last, indeed. At the expense of the citizens, the city, their friends and families, and his unlucky ring, she finally had him right where she wanted him: at her mercy, and dependent upon whether she would extend it or not.
"So you did," he responded without a trace of his characteristic amusement or joviality. "Now what?"
Her bottom lip puffed out.
"Oh, come on, Adrien," she pouted. "I know you can do better than that. What happened to the witty cat I knew?"
Her voice hadn't changed in pitch or volume or cadence, yet she sounded like a total stranger.
"You could say he's tied up at the moment," Adrien retorted.
This response pleased Princess Justice. The pout she wore soon faded away, leaving behind a satisfied smirk. Her hand shifted, fingertips and fingernails scratching beneath his chin in gratitude.
"There he is," she crooned, ambrosial and unearthly. "Sweet Kitty."
Her touch was hot and cold, familiar and foreign, sending chills shooting across his skin. Too much like her, yet not like her at all. Unable to handle the overwhelming contrast, he yanked his face away from her hand, biting back a cry when a tight muscle in his neck pulled taut and screamed in protest.
Her hand drew back, brows raising in surprise at his resistance, at the scowl on his face.
"Don't… drag it out," he said, slowly, bitingly. "Just get it over with."
Her startlement melted away, as if it had never been there in the first place.
"You're no fun, Chat," she scolded. "You used to make fun of me for not having a sense of humor. Who's the humorless one now?"
He puffed out a weak, half-conceived laugh with a small grin at the corner of his mouth.
"Still you."
She watched his expression with half-lidded eyes, gaze traveling, analyzing. She hummed in interested acknowledgement.
"Touche," she muttered.
The princess then straightened out and stood to her full height, towering over him so suddenly that his breath caught in his throat. He could do nothing but stare up at her, afraid she might kick him back down should he try to stand.
She turned away from him and paced back over to her throne, talking as she went.
"You know, Adrien," she mused, "I thought about how to deal with you for a long, long while. You did a magnificent job at evading my guards and that does give a person time to think."
On the flat armrest of her throne lay a set of silver scales, perfectly evened out. On each scale there sat a single black marble. She reached out for the display, delicately tracing the rod that held it all together. Adrien recognized the instrument of judgement all too well.
"I thought about giving you what you deserve. Just taking this little marble and letting it dictate your fate." Her fingers hovered over said marble, close— too close— to touching it. Adrien watched her with wary eyes as her finger grazed the trigger. "It would've been so easy. To take it… and exact revenge… But then," –her hand retracted, allowing Adrien to breathe again— "I realized that it wouldn't be fair to ruin your entire life for one little mishap. Despite your wrongdoings, I could never give you an eternity of punishment. Not you."
The princess' hand moved from one scale to the other, fingertips stopping just above the opposite marble. A far less lethal action, though hardly comforting.
"Naturally, I considered the alternative. Rewarding you for the good you've done, not only for the city, but for me, as well. You've gone through so many trials and can't be faulted for being human, so a reward sounded like the perfect solution."
She stared at the scales, the deceptively innocent looking marbles, for an enduring moment. Eventually, her hand fell away from both decisions with a fluttering sigh.
"But that didn't feel right either," she explained. "You don't deserve inhumane punishment, nor do you deserve material reward."
She glanced over her shoulder with a look, an expression, that Adrien was sure would haunt him for the rest of his days. It was contemplative and desirous, like she wasn't looking at him as he was, but was rather looking at what he could be. What she could do to him.
"Then," she said with a growing grin that was borderline devious, "I had a wonderful idea."
Adrien wanted to flee. He wanted to fight. He begged his body to do something, anything, to just get up and move, but it wouldn't. He was stuck in place, on his knees, watching, waiting.
She spun fully around and stepped back down from her throne, approaching him with slow, painstaking steps.
"Over the weeks, without you here, I felt… strange," she related, fiddling with her necklace. "Like half of me was missing. As much as I hate to admit it, I actually started to miss you, Chat. No matter what I did, I couldn't get you out of my head. It's pathetic, really. This whole empire was created to destroy you. And yet…"
She stooped, dress shifting as she bent down to his level as before. Her vibrant, violet eyes demanded attention, keeping his gaze locked on hers. His heart thumped in the strangest of ways.
"And yet," she repeated, every word deliberate, "I knew I had to have you."
A shiver dragged up his spine like a cold finger was tracing the shape of his backbone. She was mad. He could see it in her eyes, in her smile, could feel it as she touched his cheek with her hot and cold fingers. She was out of her mind. He'd lost her to the silver crown on her head, to the expansive empire she had built, to the black butterfly corrupting her from the inside-out. It terrified him.
"Ladybug," he pleaded, voice rough and desperate. "Marinette, please, let me help you. Just give me your akuma and this nightmare will all go away, I promise. Please, M'lady. Come home. Please, please just come h—"
Two fingers touched to his lips, effectively silencing his stream of pleas and making his shoulders tense. She shook her head.
"It's far too late for that," she replied, eyes soft. "How could I go back to that life after I've gotten a taste of this one? It's wonderful, here. Almost perfect. There's only one thing missing…"
His mouth went dry as her hand shifted to cradle the side of his face. Her thumb brushed his cheek, magnetic and unnerving.
"This is my world," she went on. "A world where the good are rewarded and the evil are punished. Isn't that what we wanted? What you wanted?"
He shook his head in the subtlest of ways, but no words came out. She smiled a warm smile, one that stirred so many emotions within him, some long-familiar, some brand new.
"It could be our world, Adrien," she whispered. "We could rule, and everything would be absolutely perfect. Just the way we want. No more Hawkmoth, no more akuma. No more secrets."
Her hand slid down to rest at his pounding heart.
"Just you and me against the world, Kitty."
Her fingers splayed over where Duty and Desire fought a raging battle in his chest, yanking violently at his heartstrings and drowning him in that affectionate look in her eyes. This was wrong. Wrong and twisted and vile and illogical and everything Ladybug wasn't. This wasn't Marinette. It wasn't her. This was corruption beyond comprehension. This was a darkness that had swallowed her whole, allowing no light to peak through. This was a hero laying beneath a villain's heel.
However, this was also a thousand to one.
Adrien knew he was outnumbered. Devoid of armor or allies, he possessed absolutely no shred of a chance of making it out of this unscathed. He was stuck on his knees, chained at the wrists, caught beneath her gaze in a state of bittersweet opia. The hand at his chest was a delicate deadweight, luring him in, dragging him under. Even consumed by pitch black, her touch was golden.
He wondered, absentmindedly, if that was part of her powerset. The ability to sway emotion, to turn deceit into truth and citrus into honey, to speak in such a sweet, dulcet voice that any given listener had no choice but to listen and dissolve. Perhaps it was supernatural. Or perhaps he had just grown too tired to resist her anymore.
He truly was exhausted. Two weeks of watching a city fall and a kingdom rise will do that to a person. His arms, his shoulders, his legs and back all ached from running, from fighting, from swinging kicks and punches till his limbs turned to liquid and gave out entirely. His mind, which had spun around nonstop and turned sleep into a distant acquaintance, had finally grown too dizzy to stand itself and collapsed, foggy and out of ideas. And his heart now lay beneath the very hand that had destroyed it, split in two yet somehow still managing to keep up a steady thumping for her.
"Come on, Adrien," she entreated, sounding as ethereal as she did in his wildest dreams. "It's what we deserve."
Adrien was not a quitter. He was not a coward. He wasn't one to feel a slight shifting of the tides and simply give up. But then, he wasn't the same person he had been two weeks ago. He was tired of fighting.
And she was so, so exquisite.
He looked to the twin thrones behind her, now understanding why there were two, before his eyes were pulled back to hers. Violet. Hypnotic and angelic and lethal and violet. His heart missed a beat. The princess smiled a sugary smile, as if she knew exactly what she'd done to him.
Then, her eyes flitted down, and those blood red lips were on his.
Adrien's stomach filled with flurrying butterflies, but other than that, his reaction was subtle. He was too sluggish and achy to shove her away, to put up a valiant struggle as he should have. He felt his heavy eyelids slide closed as her fingers grazed the back of his neck, pulling him further into the kiss. He allowed himself to slip, to fall further beneath whatever spell she'd cast over him. Apathy was a good word for what he was feeling— or rather, what he wasn't. It just sat at the center of his chest, in between the pieces of his shattered heart, dull and aching and longing for more.
At first, her lips were gentle and warm and persuasive. As alluring as she was herself. But suddenly, the warmth melted away and ice spread from her kiss, pushing past his lips and filling his mouth like poison. Cold. Freezing, freezing cold.
The sharp chill that shot through him shocked Adrien out of his daze. He wrenched himself away from her, sucking in a strangled gasp for air. He choked on the winter winds that rushed into his lungs.
Adrien shivered and shuddered as his very veins froze over, blood turning to slush. Panic shook him to the core. Something was wrong. Very, very wrong.
He looked down, catching sight of an inky substance creeping across his skin, spreading, spreading, spreading. Blackened frostbite.
His wide eyes snapped up to hers, hot tears gathering at the corners.
"Wh-what… d-did you do?" he rasped out, icicles scraping the back of his throat.
Her icy hands cupped each side of his face, bangs brushing against his forehead. The chains on his wrists rattled from his violent shaking.
"Shh," she coaxed, eyes closing, fingers tracing over his cheeks and neck and jawline. "It's okay, Kitty. It'll be over soon."
He was turning to black ice, bones trembling, teeth chattering, breath coming in ragged, desperate gulps for air. She was killing him. He knew it. He was going to die, and she was going to win, and his sweet, sweet Ladybug would be trapped in her mind forever.
He tried to speak, to scream out and beg for his life, for her life, but no words came. His vision was beginning to blur at the edges, the room tilting from side to side. Oxygen dipped out of his reach. Darker it grew. Colder. So, so much colder.
He forced his eyes to go as wide as they could, to move back and forth in an attempt to stay open and awake. He examined her whole form, searching frantically for their last hope: her akumatized object. It had to be on her. It was their only chance at winning and they were heroes. They had to win.
Although it was difficult to focus with the world fading and spinning as it was, Adrien managed to focus in on the necklace around her neck. The shining purple gem at her throat.
The odds were against him, but he had a habit of bending bad luck. He prayed it was enough.
Summoning every last ounce of strength he could have possibly retained, Adrien gave a violent yank at his chains and his newly freed hand lashed out, fingers clawed. He ripped the chain from her neck just before the shadows caved in on him. Clutching the gem in his palm, he collapsed against his lady, out cold.
oOo
"Is that it?" you ask. "Is that really the ending?" Probably. I might right a chapter two just to wrap up, but I feel like this is a solid cliffhanger, you know? The suspense is immaculate. *chef's kiss* I genuinely enjoyed writing this one. I was really on a roll with it and some of the metaphors just make me so proud and happy lol. Did you like it? Did it make you squirm? Let me know in the reviews!