Chapter Fourteen
Hawkmoth and Chat Noir lost Volpina several times. It was difficult to tell whether she was being purposefully erratic, or if the Sorcerer, who they had not once even spotted during the chase, was the one intent on shaking the pursuers from their trail.
"I don't know if I've ever faced an akuma as difficult to pin down as this," Chat Noir grumbled.
Glancing at his son with a raised brow, Hawkmoth replied, "I suppose that's the advantage of having a solid motivation, as opposed to being torn between one's own emotional impulse and the mission imposed upon them by someone else."
"Oh, so you're also realizing the practical drawbacks of your previous style of akumatization?" said Chat teasingly.
"In addition to the ethical concerns, I suppose there is an inherent detriment to employing someone who doesn't want the same thing as yourself."
To see his son smile offered the slightest bit of relief from the tension in his chest. The events of that morning had happened in quick succession and he knew he had yet to process the weight of them all; however, Hawkmoth felt that the burden of gravity had pressed harder and deeper into his bones than usual, making each movement of his both weak and heavy. His breath was short, lungs feeling compressed, and each pulse threatening to launch his heart up into his throat. The intensity of the situation was enough to evoke these sensations, and Hawkmoth had yet to allow himself to feel the devastation of the loss they had experienced several minutes earlier, when he and Chat Noir discovered Marinette without her miraculous. If it set in now, he worried he wouldn't be level-headed enough to continue the current mission.
He could only assume that Chat Noir, who crouched catching his breath on a lamppost several meters beneath Hawkmoth, was more distressed than he could ever feel by such an occurrence. As his son glanced away - the half-serious jest having been made and left to hang in the humid air - the smile pulling at his lips drooped slowly into a frown. Hawkmoth understood that his son had already spent two years fearing the loss of his partner's and his own miraculous at the hands of numerous unpredictable supervillains, a few of whom had come frighteningly close to victory. To witness Marinette suffer such a momentous defeat was going to sting, purely because Chat Noir loved her and because secrecy was fundamental to their safety, but Hawkmoth knew the impact of this loss was deepened by the long history of fighting to protect the miraculous that had come before.
Hawkmoth swallowed dryly and pressed forward again, figuring it wouldn't be best to dwell in the guilt. He'd barely had the opportunity to observe how Marinette was affected by her defeat, but he was followed by a heavy, silent gloom now, a son whose mind ravaged itself out of fear and shame and why-wasn't-I-there-to-stop-it? He could read it in his eyes. He could feel it in his own blood, rippling with each gentle throb of the brooch under his throat.
Every now and then he wondered if he had done enough to mend things, if he had even been capable of an adequate apology, simply for not fully understanding all that he had made Adrien endure. When he gave up on Emilie and the miraculous, he had chosen to distance himself from his son, convinced, as much as it made him anxious, that space and freedom were what Adrien needed from him. In part, he did, but Gabriel started to ask himself later if the reason he was truly willing to step so far back was because he was too much of a coward to face the rift between them head-on. Could he bear to look Adren in the eye and admit more guilt than was already obvious? Was he strong enough to acknowledge each and every way he had wronged his child? Evidently, he decided, he wasn't. He wasn't because a piece of his past had risen from the darkness to viciously snap at his heels and threaten the new life he created, shocking him as though the old one wasn't still beating.
Hawkmoth paused again. He was trying to track Volpina's emotions in order to find them, but his son's were currently drowning out the steady anger now growing stale.
"Chat Noir," he called, wiping the sweat from his upper lip. The hero stopped not far ahead of him, still facing out towards the city, searching for any promising movement. "I'm sorry."
At this, an ear flicked. Chat Noir sighed, his shoulders slumping forward as he replied, "I know. It's awful what happened to Marinette. I keep worrying over whether she's okay, but we need to focus on finding the Sorcerer and Lila right now."
"I don't mean that. I mean, I'm sorry."
"What?" His son turned around, green eyes flickering with confusion. "What for?'
The utter bewilderment in Chat Noir's voice reflected the remorse now stirring in the butterfly brooch, remorse for his actions of the previous night that had sent the household into its swift downward spiral. By his tone, Hawkmoth could tell Chat Noir didn't perceive there to be anything his father needed to apologize for, but he worried nonetheless that any remaining resentment was buried beneath the immediate stress of the situation, and would inevitably be realized with enough time to process.
He said, "For everything I had never properly apologized to you about, which would be practically everything I had ever done to make you unhappy, like subjecting you to the enormous pressure of defending your miraculous and defending your partner's."
Hawkmoth received a slow, astonished blink. "Father…"
"When all of this came to light, my reaction was to shrink away. I figured you'd seen everything you needed to see and that my regrets were apparent enough. But I should have said more. Instead, I stood back and waited for things to mend themselves, and I'm lucky they worked out the way they did." Hawkmoth shook his head. "They could have festered. They could have worsened immensely. Even though they didn't, that's no reason to be content with my feeble reparations."
"Father, please," Chat Noir pled, scrunching his eyes narrow, "you need to stop blaming yourself."
"Just seeing how you and Marinette have reacted to her losing her miraculous, I'm only understanding now how much I was putting on your shoulders by constantly pursuing you and Ladybug. I'd always known the horror of battling my own son, but I never truly comprehended the ways it burdened you."
"Why are you-?"
"I never knew how hard it is to be a hero," Hawkmoth finished.
Chat Noir watched his father silently for several seconds, appearing to be holding his breath, as if waiting for more to be said, but Hawkmoth felt deflated now, empty of any remaining explanation. Then, he ran his claws through his sweaty blonde hair and took a couple steps forward. "Father, first of all, none of this is your fault, okay? You can't keep taking on the weight of every bad thing you see happen in this family - we don't want that. Second of all, I've already forgiven you. Don't you understand that?"
"I know you've forgiven me - you've never said as much, but I recognize that you did. My concern is that the reason you did is because neither of us have acknowledged the full extent to which I've hindered you."
"Enough. You're not being fair to yourself." Chat Noir, appearing to remember the reason they were standing on an angled rooftop, peered at his surroundings and flashed his father an apologetic look. "I don't know if we have time to be having this conversation right now."
"I know."
"I get it. There's a lot on your mind. We saw a lot of horrible stuff in the last nine hours, but can we talk about this later?"
Hawkmoth, scolding himself for letting his mind drift so far from the task at hand, gave a silent nod. Within his mind, he continued to struggle against the tides of his grief. Chat Noir's assurance should have been enough for now, but it was all too easy to let himself think those words were given out of haste. He simply couldn't afford imperfections among his relationships, not while so much was hanging in the balance, not while his enemies knew his identity. He was terrified now, there were canyons between them repaired with bandaids rather than filled with steady earth.
But Chat Noir tossed a remark over his shoulder while they were on the move once more, gently telling Hawkmoth, "To be honest…" His voice was barely audible over the rush of their movement, "it's kind of a relief to hear you talk about it."
At long last, something changed.
The rage Hawkmoth had been tracking lost its heat over time as the emotion failed to ebb and flow. Where he had been once been able to pinpoint the direction of the person from which it originated, the clarity of the emotion lessened the more he became used to it, to the point Hawkmoth knew Volpina was in just a few blocks of them, but not where to turn in order to follow her. But finally, that blazing fury surged once more, sharpening Hawkmoth's senses. He called out to his son and turned west.
"This way! I feel her again."
As they started their pursuit, however, the anger started to fizzle away, reacting with a new emotion sprouting narrow as a needlepoint in the center of his miraculous. Within seconds, the sensation burst outward, and Hawkmoth felt every inch of his skin crawling beneath the pressure of thousands of thorns. He grit his teeth and rubbed his hands down his arms, trying to soothe the feeling.
"What is it?" Chat Noir asked, noticing his father's discomfort.
"Fear," answered Hawkmoth. They kept forward. "Dreadful fear."
"Is it someone else?"
"No, still Volpina. It's coming from the same place. We should hurry."
The warmth pumping through Hawkmoth's veins had made it even more difficult to bear the heat of the morning, but now, with stabbing sensations pressing into his flesh, Hawkmoth also felt his blood grow colder. Colder and colder the closer they got. Eventually, a bolt of horror seared through his body that was his own. Hawkmoth's eyes stretched wide and he pressed on desperately.
Chat Noir called, "What's wrong?"
"It's...it's coming from-" Hawkmoth zeroed in again, to ensure he wasn't mistaken. "It's coming from the old house!"
Maybe it wasn't Volpina after all - maybe it was Nathalie. Maybe Volpina had given up on following the Sorcerer and was threatening his family that very moment. Hawkmoth went blind with fear. He followed his other senses, the ones he could barely distinguish now from his own wild terror. With Chat Noir right behind him, they scaled the front gates and crashed down onto the stone walkway on the other side. The impact of his feet on the ground slackened the clench of emotion in his chest for just a heartbeat of relief, before the feeling once again snapped shut around his heart, pulling him tight enough to displace the heat in his body and leave him a man of ice preparing to barrel through the door.
But as he and Chat Noir bounded up the front steps, Hawkmoth came to another sudden halt, his head tilting back to gaze up at the roof.
His son prompted once more, "What's wrong?"
Hawkmoth could feel the location of the emotion. He could feel the movement of its energy, the way it swelled through a wide empty space, the way it rose and rose high until it bounced off a barrier far above the head of the person it belonged to. It was like he could hold the room in the center of his palms, feel all its edges and corners, and all he brushed up against was smooth surfaces - no furniture, no obstacles, just uninterrupted space.
"They're not in the house, they're…" Hawkmoth grabbed Chat Noir by the wrist and led him up to the roof, where they crossed from the front facade towards the back, coming upon the curve of a large rose window, on the other side of which remained a room Hawkmoth hadn't visited since he'd transformed for the last time as Paris's most feared super villain. The hidden attic. His former lair.
One of the window's panels was open. Hawkmoth's miraculous pierced into his throat like a long, thin needle being quickly driven through. The way his head pounded, it mirrored the structure of the fear flying against the walls of the lair.
"In there…" he whispered. He and Chat Noir peered through the open panel, eyes catching the metal floors lit silver by the misty glare of the sun. Hawkmoth's breath leaped out of his body when he saw the shape lying beneath the light. At once, his mind told him this was Nathale, brokenly collapsed in the room, but within the next second, he realized it was somebody else.
Lila.
She was detransformed. Auburn hair spilled over her face, hiding her eyes and expression completely, but Hawkmoth knew now that the emotions he was sensing belonged to her, and they were enough of an indication for him to know that she was conscious.
But in the next moment, her soft cries rose through the dark and ensured him even more of that fact. Chat Noir glanced up urgently, meeting his father's eyes, asking the silent question, "What do we do?"
Hawkmoth did not immediately know. If this miraculous of his did not force his empathy of the girl's feelings, he might have been eager to spare no kindness at all and demand from the moment he saw her curled on the floor the reason for her presence above his old house. The fear prickling beneath his skin was so raw, so intense, that he could not bring himself to act on his anger so quickly.
Seeing his father hesitate, Chat Noir called gently through the open panel, "Lila."
The girl stiffened, and then swept her hair away with her arm to squint up into the sky. Red-rimmed eyes keyed into the figures above her head, and Lila pushed herself up to a seated position. "Oh, Chat Noir! Chat Noir, help me, please!" she begged. Her countenance now fully showing beneath the sun, Hawkmoth noticed that one eye appeared more swollen than the other, and that there might have been a spot of blood at the corner of her lips.
"Where's the Sorcerer?" asked Chat Noir, leaning further over the panel.
"Oh, oh, they're going to be back soon. Get me out of here!" she cried. Her high-pitched shriek echoed off the lair's walls, amplifying the sound of her terror.
The hero's ears folded back against his head. He stole a glance at Hawkmoth. "What if it's…?"
"It's no trick," muttered Hawkmoth begrudgingly. "Her fear is genuine."
"Hurry! Hurry, damn it. They could be back any second!" Lila tried to rise to her feet, but putting weight on her left foot forced her back down to her knees as she let out a hiss of pain. "Shit. Help!"
"I'll go," Chat Noir told Hawkmoth. He leaped through the open panel and landed with a light grunt on the floor several meters before Lila.
"I think my ankle is twisted - or broken - I don't know!" she yelped. "I caught up to them, and they took my miraculous. Then I fell off the wall and they brought me here and -"
"Calm down," Chat Noir said. "I'm getting you out of here, but then you're coming with us, and you will answer all of our questions honestly, do you understand?"
"Fine, just -" Lila crawled forward, wiping the tear tracks from her cheeks. "Help!"
Hawkmoth watched as his son stepped forward, readying his baton to provide a quick escape out of the lair. Nothing appeared unusual down below, but his miraculous's steady pulses of fear did not vary, despite his expectation that Lila would begin to relax with the promise of rescue. Chat Noir's emotional signature was weaker, but Hawkmoth could sense his son's wariness when he tried, and sensed along with it that it seemed to beat towards him just slightly quicker than Lila's - a strange occurrence since the distance between them was rapidly closing.
Chat Noir extended his hand towards Lila, and she reached back for him. Slowly.
Too slowly.
Hawkmoth shuddered. There was somebody else in the room.
He could not say as much before a dark shape darted out from the shadows. Chat Noir's fingers passed directly through Lila's palm, and the girl vanished.
"Adri-!"
He turned around just as a hand thrust outward faster than Hawkmoth could register it moving. Chat Noir let out a panicked screech as the three middle fingers jabbed the space between his collarbone and underarm, sending a ripple of shock through his right arm. Chat Noir's fist went limp, and an attempt to use the other to land a blow on the Sorcerer was cleanly dodged.
Hawkmoth leaped through the open panel, thumping onto the floor the very same moment the Sorcerer's arm shot out again, this time to land another sharp, lightning-quick jab into Chat Noir's bicep. His son released a cry as his arm went numb. Avoiding a charge by Hawkmoth, the Sorcerer dove low, slipping nimbly under Chat Noir's legs and delivering a final attack - this one with the thumb to the inner thigh - after which the Sorcerer grabbed Chat Noir from behind and tossed him with a grunt into Hawkmoth, sending both to the floor.
"What did they-?" Hawkmoth struggled under the weight of his son, who'd just had three of his four limbs rendered temporarily useless.
Chat Noir called upon his cataclysm, but though the energy bubbled for a moment around his fingers, it ultimately could not hold.
"They attacked your pressure points."
A loud crack against the floor brought them both back to attention. The Sorcerer stood with Lila - the real Lila, detransformed and in even worse shape than her illusion - slung over their shoulder, and the miracle box on the floor between their feet. Hawkmoth couldn't believe his eyes: some drawers bounced open with the impact of the drop, and he could see very clearly that the miraculous were still inside.
The Sorcerer kicked the box towards them, and tossed the fox miraculous back with it, which had been dangling around their wrist. "Here," they said. "Give Ladybug my thanks for letting me borrow them."
Chat Noir clumsily reached for the box and pulled it close, his hands shaking, his grip too weak to lift it off the floor.
"And I suppose," they went on darkly, turning their face to the girl hanging around the shoulder, "you can have this too."
Lila was violently thrown down, landing very luckily on her thigh. She released a pained whimper, but made no effort to move apart from rotating her head towards Hawkmoth and Chat Noir. A chill ripped down Hawkmoth's spine when he saw the haunted glow in her eyes, a fear so bright and fierce that it was like watching the moment one's life flashes through their mind from the outside. A nasty collection of cuts poured threads of blood from Lila's collar bone into her clothes, and they reminded him of Nathaile's hand the night before, like glass had been broken against her skin. She also beared a split lips and a bruised brow bone, and despite everything the girl had done, Hawkmoth felt a swell of disgust towards the Sorcerer at the sight of Lila's injuries, her horror, and the vivid, piercing stabs of her emotion beneath his miraculous.
The Sorcerer wasn't unscathed. From head to toe they were covered but for a rip in one of their gloves, revealing a bleeding abrasion on their own. Carelessly, however, they used that hand to reach for their belt as Hawkmoth finally rose to his feet, drawing his cane out in front of him.
"You're not going anywhere," he growled. "Not that easily."
He charged at them, prepared to knock the mask clean off their face. The Sorcerer swerved to avoid the strike, catching Hawkmoth's wrist only briefly. He wrenched free half a second later, and would have landed a blow to the side of their head had they not brought their palm up just in time to block the end of the cane. A rasp of pain sailed out from under their mask, and they backed away swiftly, shaking their hand out and letting a couple droplets of blood splatter against their cloak.
"Shit!" they cursed. A bottle was pulled free from their belt, a green potion.
Hawkmoth struck them on the shoulder. Another was coming for their mask when they ducked and commanded -
"Shelter!"
Exploding glass made Hawkmoth jump back with a shout. A bright green forcefield, exactly like the one used by the turtle miraculous holder appeared before their body. With a wave of their arm, the Sorcerer sent the shield surging towards Hawkmoth, who wasn't quick enough to dodge it. In a rush of emerald, he flew across the lair and smashed painfully into the back wall. Darkness bloomed through his vision as the back of his skull banged against metal.
"Agh," he gasped, "No…"
The forcefield pinned him to the wall. Sharp, burning agony fired across his head, brought tears to the corners of his eyes. He would have slid down to the floor if he wasn't almost completely immobile.
"F-Hawkmoth!" cried Chat Noir. The younger man had risen to his feet and held his baton unsteadily, fingers still too loose for combat.
Bright green was interrupted by blots of shadow following his gaze every direction it darted. Hawkmoth felt weak, and the searing pain in his skull was the only thing keeping him alert.
"Stay back!" warned the Sorcerer, outstretching their other hand towards Chat Noir.
There was a strange tone in their voice that Hawkmoth could not quite make out, something bordering on dread and exasperation. Hawkmoth realized that unlike anybody else in the room, the Sorcerer's emotions did not read clearly through the miraculous. They felt diluted and distant, like they swirled in a sea of a thousand people somewhere far, far away.
The hand they were using to maintain the forcefield eventually fell to their side. Panel by panel, the shield disappeared, and Hawkmoth dropped down to his knees, clutching the back of his head. Chat Noir hesitated, glancing between his father, the Sorcerer, and Lila, still whining on the floor. Some time during the fight, she had curled her body into a tight ball, and lay shivering feverishly.
The Sorcerer never appeared to take their eyes off of Chat Noir. They faced the hero as they slipped their hand into the belt once more and pulled out another potion, one of the remaining few, a half-full bottle of some silvery-blue mixture.
"Don't move," they said when Chat Noir started to advance. "Leave me alone."
"Let me grab Lila."
"Fine," they spat, voice shaking. "Come any nearer and you'll regret it."
Moving slowly, Chat Noir advanced towards Lila. The girl released a blood-curdling shriek as Chat Noir set his arms around her.
"What did you do to her?" he demanded, tearing himself away.
"What she deserves. Now take her!"
Ignoring Lila's other protests, Chat Noir carried her across the room, as far from the Sorcerer as he could bring her.
Now, they backed from the center of the lair into the darkness from which they emerged. The contents of the bottle glowed from the shadows, casting a cold, harsh sheen of light across their mask.
But the moment they seemed about to give the magical command, the sunlight glaring through the rose window was obscured by a large shape hovering just outside. All but Lila turned to face the newcomer, but none were prepared for what they saw.
It was Marinette.
Marnette, dropping through the open panel in the window on the back of a red and black dragon. Hawkmoth snapped out of his daze at the sight, mouth falling agape, hands spreading across the floor to steady himself against the wave of shock passing over him. The creature's slanted eyes pierced sapphire through shadow, flicking cooly across the room every which way its rider directed it. And then, Marinette caught sight of the Sorcerer standing against the wall. She thrust out her arm and commanded, "The bottle!"
Ruby red light danced across the room as the dragon twisted its long, flexible body to face the Sorcerer. A blue tongue shot out from between sharp fangs, dashing the bottle right out of their grip.
"N-no!" they stammered, fumbling to catch it, but as their fingers grazed against the bottom of the glass, they only sent it further out of reach until it smashed into the floor. Liquid silver poured towards the feet of the dragon, who huffed in satisfaction, mirroring the rider above it.
With a growl of dismay, the Sorcerer dropped to the floor and tried to scrape at a palmful of the potion, but it absorbed into their glove instantly. "Please, please, no," they said, trembling. "No!"
The tongue lanced towards them a second time, striking the side of their face, but the mask stayed put. It didn't even fall crooked. The Sorcerer recovered and leaped to their feet. They freed one of the last two bottles remaining on their belt, a maroon potion, and quickly shouted, "Lightning dragon!"
Their words were spoken too clumsily. The bottle burst, and electricity crackled at their fingertips, but the power managed to do little else than temporarily stun the creature standing against them, and Marinette along with it. But those few seconds were enough for the Sorcerer to make a running vault. They dove over the dragon's head, grasped its horns, and flipped forward. Hawkmoth flinched as the Sorcerer's feet kicked into Marinette's shoulders, forcefully throwing her off the back of the creature. Chat Noir managed to catch her, but not without being brought to the floor once again.
Hawkmoth propelled himself towards the center of the room, scooping his cane back into his grip. The Sorcerer tossed their final bottle his way, caring not what it was for, and Hawkmoth found himself drenched in some now-useless pale pink concoction when he sliced his cane through the air and shattered the bottle above his own head.
Meanwhile, the Sorcerer snapped apart the dragon's leather reins with an enraged grunt, and fell to the floor as the creature disappeared, leaving behind nothing else but a plain silver necklace and a feather twirling up into the air.
Hawkmoth's heart skipped a beat. He stiffened.
A feather.
Of course.
A streak of blue soared down from the window. The Sorcerer hissed in pain as a fan clapped into the side of their head and sent them swiftly to their hands and knees. Before they could recover, the newcomer slipped her heeled boot under their chest and elegantly cast them down onto their spine, where they lay breathing laboriously.
Mayura glared at the Sorcerer. With her thumb and forefinger, she pinched the winding feather out of the air and emptied it of its energy. Hawkmoth couldn't believe the sight of her. The transformation was different from how he remembered it. The fur lining was gone, replaced with a lace collar to better suit the stifling weather; the sleeves were wider and delicately swirled with the movement of her arms; the pink in her eyes glowed lighter; her hair hung in a low pony-tail down her back, shaped and colored like a peacock feather. Hawkmoth's chest swelled with warmth and pride. He was speechless and frozen and he couldn't imagine the look on his own face.
"Whoa…" Chat Noir murmured, while Marinette grinned in his arms.
Whoa is right.
"You don't know what you're doing," rumbled the Sorcerer, struggling under Mayura's foot.
"Hopefully, we'll find out. Queen Wasp." The called-upon girl also dropped into the room, a small gathering of insects buzzing around her ears. "Paralyze them for now. Once they're secure, then we'll start asking questions."
The Sorcerer roared in anger, then promptly went rigid and silent under the stinger of a magic wasp. Only then did Mayura turn her head to meet Hawkmoth's amazed eyes.
"It's you."
She almost smiled.