Present
It stood on four legs with a body as thick as a car, the stone road turning to dust underneath it's three toed feet. The first thing Gabriel could gleam from the creature was that it resembled something reptilian.
Prowling through the front gate, the gleam of the akumatized sky highlighted the dull blue hide that stretched over it's body like leather, the top half adorned with an extra layer metallic scales like armoured plates. It's crooked square-shaped head, topped off with bulbous pin heads that dug into the creature's scalp, darted forward.
An elongated jaw hung open, showing off a dreadful row of jagged, inconstantly proportioned teeth above tufts of twisted, thin wires that almost looked like a beard. As the head rose, Gabriel caught sight of it's neck, looking more like the circuitry inside a machine rather than flesh and bone.
Gabriel spent too long looking for gleaming, ominous eyes to find a sight line to duck out of, but he found nothing. Instead, there was the symbol of the peacock was carved into the inner layer and stretched around the head.
"It's a sentimonster?" Gabriel spluttered out, sounding none too sure.
"Does that really matter right now?" Marinette hissed back, tugging on Gabriel's sleeve to join her in backing away slowly.
A low rumble escaped the beast, the sound making the two come to a dead halt as they watched the tiny slits it had for ears turn in Marinette's direction. With every step a cloud of dust rolled off its body, an excess of rubble, overgrown plant life and mud hanging from every crack.
"Why is it looking at me?" Marinette said in a low growl, "You were so much louder!"
"Maybe it senses you as the easier prey?"
Marinette shot him an appalled look, "What's that supposed to mean?"
"This isn't the time for-"
A roar, filled with a primal intensity that felt like glass cutting into Gabriel's ears, tore through the atmosphere, leaving an unsettling resonance that echoed in the back of his mind long after the sound stopped.
The beast reared up on its hind legs before slamming its front feet down, the resulting shockwave of force rippling through the ground and spitting out stone shards in every direction. A long, patchwork tail curled to hang over the beast like a scorpion's tail, complete with a metal stinger in the shape of a tuning fork.
Marinette cried out, covering her ears as she pivoted her entire body on her heel and bolted for the front door. "So much for slow and steady!"
Gabriel took off after her with less success, the mud-riddled and uneven ground making for difficult terrain to navigate. With such a slippery surface, every step carried the risk of tripping him up and sending him sliding back into the danger nipping at his heels. The best counter he could manage was angling his foot to come down toe first, digging half his shoe into the mud and scraping it away on the rise back up. This also meant he kicked half the dirt back into his face with every stride.
An unstable roar ahead, his muscles already crying for him to stop this feeble effort at exercise, the mansion door feeling like it was twice the distance away from him as it was originally; and the make it worse, his own damned curiosity compelled him to look over his shoulder.
The sentimonster didn't bound after them, it stood rooted to the spot it had chosen with it's front feet planted deep into the earth to act as an anchor. Before Gabriel could dare to hope that this was an advantage, the beast raised it's tail up high and the tuning fork stinger began to glow, rumbling with an unknown, white energy. The creature wasn't giving them an unintentional head start, it was lining up a shot.
Marinette, the younger and fitter of the two, easily cleared the distance. She stopped behind the open doors and, for a moment, Gabriel's heart stopped, watching that familiar temptation flash through her eyes as she looked back over to him, with so much distance left to cover. She could close the door right there, leave him to be ripped apart by the creature; it was no less than what a monster like him deserved. If he were in her position, he'd probably have done it just to protect himself, wouldn't he?
But, of course, Marinette Dupain Cheng wasn't Gabriel Agreste.
"Hurry up, Old Man!" She cried out, propping herself up against the heavy doors as a door stop, everything about her screaming stress.
One last glance over his shoulder showed him the tail lashing out like the crack of a whip, the tunning fork slashing across the ground, viscously vibrating and, in it's wake, unleashing a tide of sonic screeches that took the form of a wall of crackling, white energy. Everything in it's path was ripped apart, turned over or cast aside, a wall of destruction as far as Gabriel was concerned. A wall that, to his horror, was much faster than him.
When his body lost any hope of closing the distance, he found himself closing his eyes tight, leaving him in the void while the devastation behind him echoed through the world in monstrous tremors. He heard Marinette scream out his name, felt the ground beneath his feet split, tasted the polluted air on his tongue.
It was an experience of forceful impact and disorientation. A sudden pressure like a powerful gust colliding with his body, striking him in the back. No balance or stability to be found as the invisible force broke through him, scooped him up and took him airborne. It wasn't as painful as he anticipated, more akin to being shoved, the real pain would come from when he hit the ground.
However, he quickly found the physical pain secondary to the true effects of the creature's power.
The world around him shifted to the texture of rushing water, every ripple showing a person, a place, a memory reaching out towards him. Their fingers were cut from glass, razor sharp edges that slices into him upon contact, ripping him open and pulling out threads of emotions, polluting them with a cold emptiness.
"You've already given me everything." Emilie's voice, her beautiful voice, cut into his heart like a knife. "All I want now is to make sure your eyes are the last thing I see for all of eternity."
"What life could you possibly give her?" The gruff voice of Emilie's father, in-between threatening to shoot Gabriel, always knew how to get under his skin. "You're gutter trash, a charlatan stitching up holes for pennies and hanging around with low-lives and scum."
He felt Nathalie's presence long before her memory reached him. "You had the Time Miraculous. You could've chosen to save Emilie! You could've chosen to save me! But instead, you chose your obsession with Ladybug and Cat Noir. You're insane, Gabriel!" Her voice, fighting back tears and letting the betrayal sit raw, might as well have been slapping him in the face. "You don't deserve my help. You don't deserve anyone's help!"
"I'm trusting you on this." The final memory, the one that greeted him as he hit the ground, was odd. It was unstable, playing out for him like a corrupted video. There was the clear image in his mind of a man's trembling fingers clasping his hand in the confines of a dark room. The man's face was gone, erased, blocked out. Something important, something terrible, had just taken place, but he couldn't pinpoint the details of the memory. "It's you and me against the world, just like always."
The memories converged on him, a horde of disappointed stares and bitter sensations clambering over his body. Pulling. Prodding. Ripping. Tearing. Digging.
And it all shattered under the power of one decisive slap.
"Hey, snap out of it!" Marinette slapped him again before his could respond.
"Son of a Parisian whore!" Gabriel cried out so loud, and so viscous, that Marinette squeaked and fell back. "How does such a tiny woman have such a powerful backhand?" He groaned, sitting up with his hand over his bright red cheek.
Marinette looked him over hesitantly, as if she feared he was about to explode. "I thought you were having a seizure or something back there."
He peered back at her through disbelieving eyes, "So you decided to slap me?"
She looked around sheepishly, "It worked, didn't it?"
He narrowed his eyes, but found no suitable reply, instead just grunting as he got back to his feet. Looking around, he found himself back in the main hall, the front door slammed shut with furniture tipped over and used as a barricade. "I… Made it?"
"Good News: The blast launched you through the door." Marinette shrugged, pausing to watch the barricade shudder as something hit it from the other side. "Bad News: The door isn't gonna hold for long."
"So, we have maybe five more minutes to live." Gabriel said with a sharp whistle.
"What happened back there?" Marinette asked, turning back to look over the hall, hoping to find some sort of weapon or inspiration. "Did that thing shock you or something?"
"It's hard to explain." Gabriel put his fingers to his chin, feeling a shiver run down his spine as tried to recall the strange experience. "The creature wasn't just emitting energy at us, it was projecting… Emotional echoes. When it hit me, it was like re-experiencing a highlight reel of moments where I felt my lowest as fresh as the first time."
Marinette nodded, "I didn't get hit by it, but I was close by when you did. Didn't get anything intense, but I heard my parents, my friends, Adrien."
"So, the sentimonster's power is to paralyze you with your own emotional turmoil, a reverb of regret."
The front door lurched forward again, the beast's snout sticking through the thin opening and letting it's shrill cry beat against the blockade. The two looked upon their ever-crumbling shield wearily before turning back to each other, a similarly unwelcome sight.
Marinette groaned, "We need a plan."
In her time as Ladybug, Marinette had seen many strange, insane and senseless events unfold before her very eyes. But never, not in a million years could she have ever seen herself working alongside her greatest enemy, trusting her life to the man she despised the most.
Her brain wanted to dull that bitter edge to her thinking by bring up Betterfly as an example, but alternate reality versions don't count. Betterfly, while technically Gabriel Agreste, wasn't the man who stood in front of her with a permanent scowl etched into his face. It was like comparing someone to their evil twin brother.
Betterfly was remorseful, compassionate, heroic and hopeful. Sure, he'd said he made mistakes that cost him dearly before he became a heroic figure, but she couldn't imagine the man who broke out into tears over the beauty of Paris and the hope of a better tomorrow sharing any substantial similarity to Hawkmoth. Warmth wasn't simply absent from Gabriel; it flat out wasn't welcome.
When all she knew of him was his relation to Adrien and the stories he sold in interviews, she was willing to be charitable, willing to let the bright glimmer of her admiration blind her. Now that she knew what the man truly was when the cameras weren't on and he didn't need something from you, knew what he'd do the moment she let her guard down, there was no such room for the benefit of doubt.
He was a snake. A liar. A bastard. A monster.
She had no choice but to work with him.
Even as she desperately tore out draws and dug through clutter for anything she could use to defend herself, she kept her body tilted away, only half leaning into her work while one eye remained trained on him. "Don't suppose you have any hidden escape tunnels?"
He towered over her even when he bent down to follow her rummaging, his view framed by cracked glasses and empty eyes. It was suffocating, his body and presence easily making the giant hall feel like a tiny shack.
Gabriel tilted his head up towards his atelier, making a thoughtful hum as he pondered. "We could drop back down into the lair; the water tunnels below connect to the sewers."
Marinette found her face scrunching up at the thought of diving head first into whatever depraved muck made up sewer water in an even more polluted and corrupted Paris. "If what we've found on the surface is anything to go by, I don't think we want to see what's going on underground."
She shook her head. Even if they were prepared to brave the sewers, the path down to the lair was probably even more treacherous than facing the monster. One slip was all it would take to plummet to a gruesome, bone-shattering end.
She still remembered how close she came to losing her grip the first time she came up, breaking her nails digging into the dented seams and cutting herself on sharpened edges. Really, without some sort of rope, she doubted she'd ever be able to climb down or up that shaft again.
Her body stiffened.
Wait a minute…
The gears started turning, slowly but surely, until the grinding of her thoughts shouted over everything else and- Aha! The idea, simple yet effective, lit up the dark smog of her mind. "Why don't we send it down there?"
"Down there?" Gabriel stepped back with his eyes drawn together, watching Marinette hop to her feet, point up to the atelier and then drew her finger down to point at the ground. "Drop it down the elevator shaft?"
"We barely climbed up there ourselves. I doubt the big lug on four legs that doesn't even have apposable thumbs is gonna handle a narrow shaft much better."
He stroked his chin, nodding. "It's as good an idea as any, I suppose."
She gritted her teeth, biting back a growl. "Good to hear." Even when he was agreeing with her, he managed to make it sound like a thinly veiled insult. Had he always sounded like this? Did she just block it out before? Maybe it was just because this was one of the few occasions she caught him in a comparably mundane setting. Every other memory she had of greeting the man usually had him positioned under dramatic lighting, or at a distance, where his glasses easily hid just how hollow his stare was. "Once we trap Senti-Sentry downstairs, we'll finally have breathing room to… Process all this."
"Senti-Sentry?"
Marinette crossed her arms, finding a small pleasure in hearing the undercurrent of annoyance that leaked into his voice. "What? Everything needs a name. Much easier than just saying 'the beast' every time."
"Alright. Fine. And how do you suppose we get our new friend to take the plunge?" As if to punctuate their lack of time, the door, and the barricade, shuddered once more, the hungry roar even louder. "It doesn't need to get close to attack us, just a sight line to fire at. There's little reason for it to follow us."
"Yeah, but it won't need to take pot shots at us if we're in mauling range." She took a moment to enjoy Gabriel's face paling and the dumbfounded expression breaking through his stone mask, sending him a devilish grin. "And I've seen how big that blast gets, and how it travels. It needs a straight shot at us, if we're above it, or on an incline, it'll have to chase us down."
Gabriel frowned, failing to find a flaw to pick at. "I'm finding it easier and easier to accept that you used to be Ladybug."
"I still am Ladybug." Marinette stated firmly.
"If you say so." Gabriel sneered, pushing past her to place himself at the foot of the stairs.
She rolled her eyes, "You know, if I weren't Ladybug, I'd probably have left you to die out there."
Conflict washed over his face, a thought to be more careful with his wording, but that thought was fleeting, and Hawkmoth's pettiness shone through. "I seem to recall Senti-Sentry being the one to get me through the door."
Marinette stomped her way up the stairs, tearing her eyes away from him as she found that sickening feeling in stomach growing the longer she looked at him. The nerve of this dirt bag. Alas, what else did she expect? Gabriel Agreste did not have one kind or appreciative bone in his body, she was sure of that.
She'd prepared a vicious come back but had to store it for later when she heard the final, dreadful crack of wood snapping into pieces and exploding outwards. She turned around just in time to witness her feeble barricade scatter across the hall, the coffee table ending up a bundle of twigs at the foot of the stairs.
Marinette lunged forward to snatch a gawking Gabriel's arm, yanking him back on her retreat up the stairs just as Senti-Sentry raised it's stinger. "Come on!"
Keeping her eyes ahead of her, she didn't see the tuning fork hit the ground, but she sure as hell heard that distinctive, echoing shriek that followed it even over the sound of the blood pumping in her ears.
She'd only just managed to snap Gabriel around the first corner when the voices started reaching for her again, telling her just how close the blast was to consuming them.
For a moment, Chat was purring in her ear, telling her how much he trusted her. Alya was telling her how much she deserved to be happy after beating Monarch. Sabine and Tikki were expressing how proud they were.
All these people she lied to, she betrayed, letting them buy into a lie because it benefited her. It hit her like an intrusive thought, the type of memory that strikes at random just to make you cringe and ruin your mood, but now it was multiple shots, multiple regrets pounding into her head all at once.
It was like Gabriel had said, like something was dragging you under the water, drowning you with your inner turmoil, but for her, it was only the length of her breathing in for air. She didn't break stride, even as she felt the missed blast slamming into the stairs and causing every other step to tremble, knowing that she couldn't afford to stop even for a moment.
Her body was on autopilot at this point. It made it easier to ignore the pangs of exhaustion from her muscles that still felt freshly wrung from her fight with Defect, made her less tempted to slow down to look back at her pursuer as she reached the top, focused solely on the door to the atelier. Most of all, it made it easier to not think about how much effort she was putting into keeping Gabriel out of harms way. It wouldn't help to run while feeling sick to her stomach.
In throwing her arm out suddenly to push open the door, she ended up pulling Gabriel with her and practically slamming him through it. No time to think about that either, just power on through, hearing the sharp woosh of the air tickling her hair as powerful claws missed her by inches.
A large, gaping hole stood in front of the ruined painting of Emilie, a deadly drop that felt all the more wider as Marinette rushed over to it with nothing but her dulled senses to stop her from falling straight into it.
As Marinette predicted, within the cramped quarters of this room Sentry didn't attempt to use it's firepower again, too close to it's prey to aim for anything less than charging the two. So close, in fact, that it's next attack, a claw fit to slice through metal, came down upon her. It was just a graze against her back, nothing that would kill her, but it was enough. Her shirt split open just as she felt her back skin do the same, retching a scream from her like lava was being poured into her veins.
Even worse, the impact of the pain was enough to make her legs buckle, tipping her over just enough to rip her off her feet and send her headfirst to the ground. No, not the ground, the hole in the ground. She peered into the hole, and the abyss that would be her new resting place, in slow motion. Powerless to change course, but perfectly able to witness her fall in all its glory.
However, just when she could feel her stomach drop to her feet and the abyss overtook her entire view, she felt her belt tighten as Gabriel's fingers, using the buckle as a leverage point, yanked her back. He didn't have the strength to hoist her up or even stop her from falling, but the pull was just enough to shift the angel of her fall, sending her just to the side of the hole, slamming her back into the wall with a loud thump.
From this position, laying on her side with her scarred back screaming in pain, she had the perfect view of Senti-Sentry blindly charging at her. By the time the creature's feet swiped at dead air and the realization that there was no more floor ahead of it dawned, it was too late. Senti-Sentry screamed, it thrashed about, and for a moment it even managed to slam it's claws down an inch from Marinette's nose, digging them in deep to try and keep itself up. But it's fate had already been sealed, with the weight of it's hanging body dragging it down, as well as the edge of the hole crumbling under it's claws, leaving Senti-Sentry to disappear into the void below.
A minute later, with not a word spoken between them, with not a breath released; the two heard it crash into the ground with a sickening crack.
Marinette fell onto her stomach, taking a moment just to let her body lie limp and for her lungs to just desperately gasp for all the air lost. "What do we do now?"
"I don't know." Gabriel sounded equally as breathless, doubled over with his hands on his knees, his life flashing before his eyes three or four times.
When he stopped wheezing, he raised his head, clutched his stomach, and sighed. Then, he looked Marinette dead in the eye, the beam of dark purple from the window hitting his back and outlining him with a sinister glow.
Gabriel shrugged. "Pancakes?"