World On Fire: No More Heroes

by DrTwit

Marinette never thought there'd come a time where her only ally was Hawkmoth, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Three years after his death, Gabriel Agreste awakens to a Paris ruled by akumas and no heroes left to defend it. To save his son, and perhaps even his soul, he must team up with his arch nemesis, Ladybug, to save a future built by their mistakes.

50. Adrien's Dirty Little Secret

Past

It was dreary to think about just how many times Adrien had fought his friends. Whether it be pinned down by Lady Wifi, facing the onslaught of jealous tears of Rocketeer, having his voice ripped from him by Silencer, stuck in Gamer 2.0's tournament, or almost losing it all to Miracle Queen; he was no stranger to fighting people he held dear.

This should be no different, but it was. He wasn't Chat Noir, he wasn't Adrien Agreste, he wasn't a mask. He was Graviton, a manifestation of something honest and raw. He didn't dive into this fight worried. No sir, he weaved through the air rolling off his own gravitational field with the freedom he desired for so long, carefree even as his right hand brought a car crashing down upon Carapace's head.

He wasn't even frustrated when the fake Chat Noir came crashing in to save Carapace from the blow. He was more annoyed at how clumsy the save was. If it were him, he'd have thrown his baton mid-extend to land at the perfect angle to hit the ground and the car or just extended it to sweep Carapace out of the way. Luka? Luka tripped over his own tail and tumbled into Carapace, sending them both into a pile of junk that collapsed on top of them.

Was it rude to say that this was making him feel more secure as Chat Noir than years of being Ladybug's partner?

Graviton was in no rush to end the right early, so he waited patiently in the skies above, objects orbiting around him in a spinning wheel, ready to be plucked from the sky and turned into a meteor shower.

Did he mention how nice it felt to be weightless? Adrien was so weighed down by everything, all those legacies, all those responsibilities, all those expectations. So much gravity that he couldn't control, until now. It would be so easy to get lost in this feeling, let Chrysalis into his mind completely and open her up to every juicy little secret he has for her. But he resisted, because this was his day, he had the all the control here, and he wouldn't give it up until he was done with it.

That didn't mean Chrysalis wasn't still there, tugging on their connection even while she was ambushed by the remaining trio.

"Are you sure you're up for this?" Her voice wrapped around him, the gentle touch of her fingers down his cheek. "Like I said before, I'm not sure how effective the kimiko is gonna be."

He dropped down onto the boot of the car, now standing straight up with the hood stabbed into the ground. His crouch was lopsided, curving his body over the edge and folding himself into a hook shape just to get a good look at the boys' heads popping out of the junk pile, rubber wheel limbs over their necks.

Graviton cocked his head to the side. "They're not going to do any serious damage to me."

"You don't know that." He could imagine her pouting as she whined, his mind catching a snippet of hissing air, Rena's flute missing Chrysalis' head by inches. "They're angry and they're incompetent."

The local sound was a pop and an energetic hum behind him, alerting him just in time to clench his fist and bring the car skyward as Pegasus came charging through his portal. Graviton pulled his feet up to break his connection with the car, Pegasus's misled strike punting the makeshift platform over the billboard at the boundary of the property.

Graviton's movements were smooth, matching the grace of a swimmer. He let his body fall back, bringing him to weightless spin before he adjusted his left hand and let gravity turn him into a sledgehammer. His feet crushed the air under his heel, nailing Pegasus in the back of the head and slamming him into the ground.

From his new position, Graviton admired that the action was so quick that Pegasus hadn't had time to close the portal behind him. The window into the other end offered a useful view of Queen Bee facing off with Chrysalis in what looked to be a black void, hand raised high with venom glowing on her fingertips.

"And I'm calm and backed by the best dance partner in Paris." He shrugged. "Just give me the rundown. You always have a process, Lila."

Using poor Pegasus as a springboard, Graviton launched himself through the portal. He came down like a pinwheel, spinning into the fray, only to stop when he hit the ground, his outreached hand catching Queen Bee by the wrist before her venom could hit true. Chrysalis couldn't look more smug. Bee couldn't look more hurt.

Adrien had enough petty issues with the other to lose himself in Graviton's attack against them, even if he wasn't aiming to hurt them seriously. But Chloe's wide, betrayed gaze was good at sobering Adrien from behind Graviton's mask, enough that he thought against going for the gut punch he planned.

Instead, Graviton just took hold of Chloe and threw her into the void, immediately shattering the illusion and revealing them to still be in the junkyard. She managed to stay on her feet, turning his throw into a hard shove that had her skidding across the ground. A little distance that she could cover easy.

Graviton slipped behind Chrysalis as Bee pounced once more, Rena's illusions splitting her into four deadly stingers all splitting off into different directions to close in from all angles. Rather than testing his luck of catching the real one out, Graviton took hold of Chrysalis' waist, spinning her around with the sway of his shoulders, sweeping her up into a dance.

She was held up high over him, just long enough to flick her wrist and let her rapier break away into a whip. He continued to spin her, and she let her weapon lash out in wide sweeping arcs, quickly reducing all the fakers to dust before catching the real one by the neck. One yank, aided by Graviton's right hand making Bee's weight comparable to a wrecking ball, slammed her into the floor.

He could feel her sigh of delight rippling through their connection as she sank in his arms, their dance dropping into a dip with her head angled at the floor. "You're starting to sound awfully cocky there, Darling."

Both bodies moved together, one arched up, the other lunging down, to bring them tantalizingly close. Her hand trailed up his cheek, urging him closer where her lips waited, pushed out, perfectly pink and inviting. They twitched and puckered, begging for those last few inches to be closed, but he denied her for a little longer.

"You love it, don't you?" He chuckled, his fingers combed through her hair, reaching down for the roots and tightening his grip until her coaxed out a disappointed mewl.

Graviton could practically feel Carapace vomiting in his mouth long before his shield came to split them apart. He didn't need to worry about throwing her, she so easily let herself slip from his grasp, landing a handstand while he leapt backwards, leaving the shield to cut through the gap between them.

"You know, Hawkmoth was bad." The shield curved perfectly to swerve around them and return to the hand of its owner as he landed. "But he never used his akumas to be a creep."

"Now, now, Turtle Twerp; we both know that I'm the empath here." Chrysalis' voice didn't so much as stutter, even as she was mid-roll, curving like a snake to slide into a perfect sitting position before lashing out with her legs. It wasn't a whip, but Graviton could still hear a leather crack strike in his head. "I can feel all that jealousy bubbling up inside you. Tell me, is your own pathetic love life envious?"

Carapace's answer was to charge ahead. Graviton moved to intercept only for a portal to snatch Carapace from underfoot, depositing him right in Graviton's blind spot. The charge was unbroken, the shield slamming into Graviton's side and knocking him into Chrysalis, sending both of them tumbling down a hill of rusted metal and broken appliances.

They hit the ground hard.

Graviton barely felt it, twisting with the fall to keep Chrysalis from taking the brunt of the impact. Metal groaned and screeched beneath them as they skidded down, dust and rust kicking up into the air. He landed first, back smacking against the debris-strewn ground, with Chrysalis sprawled over him in a tangle of limbs.

For a moment, neither of them moved.

Then Chrysalis groaned dramatically, shifting so she was straddling him. "You know, as much as I love being thrown around by a bunch of sweaty, desperate men, I do prefer it when they at least buy me dinner first."

Graviton snorted, not even bothering to push her off. "You're the one who wanted to be my dance partner."

Her hands splayed over his chest, fingers drumming against his suit. "True." She admitted with a little smirk. "But if this is the kind of choreography we're going with, I'd like a little more of a warning next time."

He rolled his eyes, finally gripping her waist and tossing her off him. She flipped mid-air and landed lightly on her feet, brushing non-existent dust off her clothes as he pushed himself up onto his elbows.

Above them, the fight still raged on. Carapace was already sliding down toward them again, shield at the ready, while Queen Bee and Rena were hot on his heels. Chat Noir hung back, hesitant and curious.

Then the sky exploded in white.

As it turned out, it didn't matter if it was an illusion, bright white flashes were hell on the eyes. The sudden burst of searing light forced Graviton and Chrysalis to recoil, arms snapping up to shield their eyes. It only lasted a second, but a second was all the heroes needed.

Something heavy slammed into Chrysalis, tackling her clean off her feet.

Graviton barely had time to process Rena's snarl as she pinned Chrysalis down before a portal shimmered open right in front of him. He caught the briefest glimpse of Chat Noir's baton shooting through—

CRACK.

Pain flared across his skull as the extended baton struck him right between the eyes, the force making him stumble.

A shadow loomed from behind—Carapace, charging at full force. His shield slammed into Graviton's back, knocking the air from his lungs. Before he could regain his balance, another set of hands grabbed him from the front. Quickly, Chat Noir locked his arms, the key to his power, down.

With a growl, he twisted, gravity rippling around him, but Carapace tightened his grip from behind, locking an arm around his neck, while Chat Noir reinforced his hold.

"You're making this way harder than it needs to be, dude." Carapace gritted out.

Across the battlefield, Rena and Chrysalis were still going at it. Rena had the advantage, having pinned Chrysalis to the ground, but only for a moment. Chrysalis managed to connect her elbow across Rena's throat, loosening the hero's grip enough to wriggle her legs free and shove her back with her feet.

Chrysalis grinned with the glee of a predator, her rapier-turned-whip snapping at the air, forcing Rena to duck and weave between strikes. "Ooo, so angry. I must have really hurt Carapace's feelings to get the whole group worked up."

From an outsider's perspective, this must have looked rather ridiculous. Two heroes dogpiling Graviton to keep him in place while they desperately tried to feel around for the akumatized object, Queen Bee just standing back and watching knowing neither fight wanted her interference, and then Chrysalis and Rena. Two fighters who were clearly geared around keeping their distance or running interference, dropping all pretences of playing to their strength in favour of beating on each other like feral animals.

Pegasus kept his distance, standing on a vantage point to watch the battle and effectively use his portals. Max was good at keeping his head on straight, even in the most emotionally charged situations.

It seemed everyone, even Graviton, silently agreed to give Rena her moment no matter how tactically poor a decision it was. She had some bad energy to work through.

Chrysalis's whip snapped through the air, coiling around Rena's flute like a venomous serpent. With a sharp yank, she tried to rip the weapon from her hands, but Rena held fast, bracing herself and yanking back.

They clashed in the middle, locked in a tug-of-war, their faces inches apart, teeth bared. Wild animals ready to rip into each other.

"He's not the one who has to akumatize someone to go on a date with him so he can grope them like a love pillow." Rena spat, her grip tightening on her flute.

Chrysalis's lips curled in amusement, her fingers flexing against her weapon. "Oh, please, I've made it clear that Adrien came to me of his own volition. And is it any wonder he called for an upgrade?"

She twisted her wrist, loosening the coil of her whip enough to let it slither back into rapier form. "Is it so hard for you to accept that he needed me? Even wanted me?"

"Yes, it is." Rena sneered, lunging forward and slamming the butt of her flute toward Chrysalis's ribs.

Chrysalis sidestepped, narrowly avoiding the hit, but Rena was already twisting, bringing her weapon up in a sharp uppercut that cracked against Chrysalis's jaw. Chrysalis stumbled back, fingers brushing over her chin where the impact had landed, not quite frowning, but not quite grinning either.

"Adrien's a lot of levels of stupid—"

"Oh. Wow." Graviton grumbled. "My heroes."

"—but he isn't blind, deaf, or stupid enough to be interested in you."

Chrysalis threw her head back to laugh, her teeth glinting in the dim light. "And what do you know of what Adrien wants?"

There was an attempt at a casual shrug that was easily betrayed by the tension in Rena's shoulders. "I know that the guy could stumble blind down a dark alley and still find several willing and far better options than you."

Another strike, this time a swing toward Chrysalis's shoulder. Chrysalis parried with her rapier, but Rena was already twisting again, her flute whipping around for a second strike at her opponent's ribs.

Chrysalis dodged, but just barely.

"And guess what?" Rena grinned, lunging forward now that she had Chrysalis on the backfoot. "None of them have to lie about every aspect of their life to make up for how sad it is."

Chrysalis cocked her head, eyes glinting as she smoothly sidestepped another attack, but she didn't respond. Yet, that didn't stop the sharp tug of her emotions on her connection to Graviton, making his hiss. Alya was out for blood, and Adrien was getting caught in the crossfire whether he was apart of it or not.

That just gave room for Rena's grin to grow, pushing on as close as she could get, flute gripped between both hands to be slammed against Chrysalis' throat. "On the bright side, I suppose that makes you the most special of unique snowflakes, doesn't it?"

The mocking lilt in her voice hit its mark. Chrysalis' body shuddered with the twitch of her eye, lips peels back to bare grounded teeth. "You got a lot of mouth for someone whose devoted leader just got outed as a morally bankrupt hypocrite." She growled.

Rena's grip on her flute tightened, her jaw tensing—but she didn't hesitate. "I misspoke; you have to lie about yourself and your betters." She spun her flute in her hand, dropping into a defensive stance.

Then she smirked. "Don't worry. I'd be jealous of Marinette if I were you too."

Chrysalis let out a slow, measured breath, eyes narrowing. "That would burn if it didn't reek of desperation."

Graviton might have let it play out a little longer if he wasn't feeling the full strain of their connection with every scathing comment Rena made. It was like a hook in his brain yanking out a headache.

Still, he had to admit; he felt terrible about driving his knee into Luka's crotch.

The hold broke with Chat Noir doubling over with a high-itched groan and, with the front no longer covered, Graviton broke his hand free from Carapace. His fist shot up high, following his gaze to find his target. It went higher than a few mounds of scrap, higher than another car. No, Graviton didn't need a projectile; he needed an avalanche.

The junk pile groaned as Graviton clenched his fists, twisting the gravity around the rusted metal and broken appliances. The already unstable heap lurched, a low rumble building beneath their feet.

Chrysalis saw it first, her eyes flicking up to the teetering mass above.

Then, with a final pull, Graviton let go.

The junk pile collapsed.

Metal shrieked as it caved inward, the weight of the debris plummeting toward them. It wasn't a precise attack—he wasn't trying to crush them—but it was more than enough to scatter the battlefield into chaos.

"MOVE!" Carapace shouted, throwing up his shield overhead. He shuffled over to shelter both himself and Chat. Rena and Pegasus both darted back, just barely avoiding a chunk of scrap metal the size of a dining table.

In the confusion, Graviton reached out, fingers closing around Chrysalis's wrist. With a firm yank, he pulled her out of harm's way, guiding her through the collapsing debris with the ease of someone who knew how the battlefield moved before it even settled.

By the time the dust settled, the heroes had been scattered, forced into new positions, separated from their previous allies. Graviton and Chrysalis had disappeared into the wreckage, slipping through the maze of collapsed metal undetected.

And then, her voice curled into his head.

"Me and Felix usually have a hierarchy."

Graviton hummed, adjusting his gloves as he crouched low, scanning the battlefield through the gaps in the debris.

"Oh?"

"Viperion first. Every time."

That made him pause. "Really?"

"Second Chance is cheating bullshit. You take that rat bastard out of the running the first chance you get."

A small smirk played at Graviton's lips. "Noted."

"Rena and Pegasus are next in line. They're good at using their powers to control the battlefield; knock your enemy off balance with delusions and then portal a haymaker into the perfect spot."

Graviton leaned against a rusted car, peeking through the shattered windshield to see Pegasus standing high above, already scanning for them. Rena wasn't far behind, gripping her flute tightly as she checked her surroundings, eyes narrowed and shoulders swaying with heaving breaths.

"Carapace and Queen Bee are that low on the list?"

Chrysalis scoffed. "Don't get me wrong, their powers can be devastating."

A flash of gold and black caught Graviton's eye. Queen Bee was skirting around their spot, her venom sting coating her fist like a holographic lance.

"Problem is, those powers are wielded by idiots. Have you seen their battles? They're total jokes. Z-Listers."

Graviton shook his head, moving low through the wreckage. "Careful, Lila, underestimating people has never worked out well for you."

She snorted. "You'd be singing a different tune if you were there when they bungled the fight against Defect so bad that they ended up knocking out Viperion."

Graviton and Chrysalis slunk through the wreckage, moving with silent confidence, convinced they had slipped from the heroes' sights. The battlefield was still in chaos, with debris shifting and the occasional clang of metal settling.

From their vantage point, the others were too distracted—Rena and Pegasus were regrouping, Carapace was digging himself out of a collapsed heap, and Chat Noir was perched on top of a rusted-out van, scanning the field.

Perfect. They were clear.

Or so they thought.

A blur of black and gold dropped from above, slamming down between them with the force of a meteor.

Chrysalis yelped, stumbling back as a cloud of dust and loose pebbles kicked up around them. Graviton instinctively shifted the gravity beneath them, steadying himself just in time to see Queen Bee standing there, smug as ever, twirling her spinning top like she hadn't just ambushed them out of nowhere.

"Did I hear you right earlier?" she asked, her tone dripping with amusement. "Turtle Twerp? Really?"

Chrysalis narrowed her eyes. "Move."

Queen Bee just grinned. "God, your insults are almost as lame as your outfit."

Chrysalis's expression twitched. "Oh, go sting yourself."

"Or your hair," Queen Bee continued, tapping her chin. "Or your eyes. Or that nose."

Chrysalis threw up her hands. "I get the pic—"

"I'm saying you're ugly."

Graviton blinked.

Chrysalis clenched her fists. "I know."

"Like, really, really ugly."

Chrysalis's eye twitched.

Graviton coughed into his glove to hide his smirk.

Queen Bee tilted her head, watching the barely contained rage boil in the other girl. Then she hummed thoughtfully, tapping her top against her palm. "I mean, I've heard about how ugly you are, but I just had to see it for myself."

"Queen Bee might be moving up on the list."

He brought his fist down on the floor, letting his invisible field of effect expand around them like a dome, pulling various pieces of scrap together under their feet. Chrysalis hooked her arm around his waist and Graviton let the unified metal pick them up, forming a floating platform that shot them into the sky before Chloe could go for another attack.

"You haven't mentioned Chat Noir yet." He pondered, peering through the thick layer of smog that their sudden blast off drowned them in. "Is he that bad?"

He felt Chrysalis' body stiffen against him, wincing at the mere mention of Chat's name.

"I like to save Chat for last, after all his safety nets have been swept away." Her thoughts came out quiet and bitter, hating to recognise the smidgen of fear that tainted her. "But right now, I think it'd be best for you to stay out of his way."

Considering how much grief Lila paid his alter ego, Adrien had to repeat to himself that she would admit such a thing. Their last encounter had Chat Noir playing right into her hands, right? Shouldn't she be gloating about how gullible he is? "What, really?"

Her hand trailed up, her fingers coiling around his locks and pulling him close. It was oddly comforting for the moment. "You've seen his rampage on the TV. He came into contact with the malevolence, and who knows how much of it is still in his system." The other set of fingers pattered down his nose, drawing a line across his eye. "I don't want you getting a taste of what he did to Rena Rogue."

"CATACLYSM!"

The instant Luka's voice rang out, a sickly black energy ripped through the metal beneath them. The floating platform shuddered, its structure collapsing in on itself as if rotting from the inside. The moment Chrysalis and Graviton realized what was happening, it was too late. The entire thing shredded apart, sending them both plummeting through the smog-choked air.

Graviton landed hard, rolling across the ground with a grunt before flipping onto his feet in a crouch. He barely had time to catch his breath before he heard footsteps, the scuff of shoes on pavement.

He looked up. Chat Noir and Carapace stood a few meters away, watching him. They were all panting, sweaty, their bodies tense with exhaustion but still ready to fight.

Carapace broke the silence first, exhaling a long breath as he adjusted his stance. "Dude. You really need to calm down."

Graviton let out a short laugh, dragging a hand down his face. "I'm perfectly calm."

Chat Noir arched an eyebrow. "Yeah, you seem real chill right now. Completely in control."

"This?" Graviton gestured at himself, a little wild-eyed, a little unhinged. "This is more control than I've ever had in my entire life."

Carapace studied him for a moment. Then he took a step forward, voice calm but firm. "Then why can't you stand down?"

Graviton's expression twitched.

Because he had too much steam to let off.

Because he needed to hit something so hard he could feel his bones rattle.

Because he needed to stop thinking about everything he should be.

His fists clenched. His throat felt tight.

"Because…" His pulse pounded. "Because I need to do this."

Suddenly, he flexed his power—

—and smashed a toilet over Carapace's head.

Water splattered everywhere. Ceramic shards clattered to the ground.

Carapace stood there, drenched, pieces of broken porcelain sliding off his shoulders, completely still.

Then, in the most deadpan voice possible, he asked,

"Did you just hit me with a toilet?"

Graviton tilted his head. "Wanna see me do it again?"

"Not cool, man!" Carapace whined. "What kind of wimp throws a toilet?"

"Why don't you come over here and ask me that?"

Carapace rolled his shoulders, stepping forward. "Believe me, I'm gonna."

Only, he never got the chance, because Chat Noir beat him to the punch. Literally. In an instant, his fist planted itself so deep in Graviton's gut that his knuckles might have been visible on the other side. It was so sudden and so powerful that Graviton's entire body crumbled under it, throat desperate and strangled trying to puff all the air it just lost.

"You in control of yourself now?"

He sunk to his knees, doubled over and dry heaving. It was pain he couldn't ignore, pain Lila couldn't numb for him, pain that reached through Graviton and burned Adrien. The haze that clouded his mind, that euphoria that wrapped him in a perfect calm, it parted under that premise and let him gaze up at Luka and Nino. He could see them clearly now.

He coughed. He spluttered. He groaned.

And then he laughed, his lips splitting into a sheepish grin. "I think Lila bought it."

---

The mansion had been empty when they arrived.

1st July – You Have 1 New Message

5:00pm

SunshineAgreste: I'm sorry, everyone. I'm sorry I haven't called, I'm sorry I haven't done anything this situation, I'm sorry I dragged you all into this, and I'm sorry I was too stupid and blind to see the truth. Marinette may have betrayed us, but I let it happen. I've let all this happen. I've failed as team leader. Everything I've done has blown up in our faces, every time I think we've gotten a step forward or made a dent in Lila's plans she just bounces back like nothing we did mattered. We're playing a rigged game where our only move is to react to Lila's.

As is, our situation is spiralling out of control, and I can't see any of this ending well. If any of you guys wanted to turn in your miraculous and walk away, I'd understand completely. This isn't your fault; you don't deserve to be dragged into my and Marinette's mistakes. For the record? You guys are amazing. I can't thank you enough for how much you've helped with… Everything. Both in and out of costume.

I'd do anything to make all this right, but I can't, can I? So, I'm just gonna settle for getting us an actual victory. We need Lila's secrets, and there's only one way we're ever going to get them.

If any of you do decide to stay…

I left Plagg under my pillow.

Make sure to keep it convincing, okay?

---

Adrien wheezed, but accepted Luka's outstretched hand and pulled himself to his feet. Everything felt sore all of the sudden, as if painkillers were being filtered out of his system and the impact of all the bruises and aches he'd been denied were hitting him full force.

When people came out of akumatizations, they usually had memory loss. Now, as Adrien stood, he wondered if this was a small mercy in reality, that what he was feeling now was coming too from the butterfly influence before the form has been ripped away. Without the body being allowed to forget the damage inflicted, he was left with the consequences of his blind zeal until Chrysalis detransformed him.

The biggest worry of Adrien's whole plan was that Lila would take away his memory when she was done with him. He just had to bank on her obsession with showing herself as 'open' with him would drown out any temptation to protect her plans. After all, so brazenly revealing herself, Colt and Felix to him in the first place was a pointless risk to their operation already.

Luka's gaze went over Adrien's head, searching out any indicator of where ever Chrysalis had ended up; hoping she wasn't in a position to spot them. Of course, Adrien already knew she was fighting off the remaining trio on the other side of the junkyard. Snippets of taunts, grunts and her fleeting flashes of worry about him came out loud and clear across their connection.

Luka sighed; his breath unsteady. "I don't think Lila was paying your motives any attention, she was too busy drooling and bragging."

His fingers tugged on the leather of his suit, drawing Adrien's attention to how it looked as if he didn't fit into it. He wondered if something went wrong during the transformation, or Plagg was just being a picky little gremlin about anyone other than Adrien using the ring.

"Dude." Nino moaned, shifting Adrien's focus to watch the hero rolling back his shoulder with a sharp enough crack to make Adrien wince. "Did you have to wail so hard on me? I think you knocked my shoulder out and in its socket like five times."

Adrien rubbed the back of his neck, a sheepish grin covering up a guilty frown. "I had to make it convincing." He murmured, having very little power to project any conviction in his words. Nino shot him a sharp look, putting Adrien on the defensive as he waved his arms in front of him. "H-Honest, I had it all under control! I wasn't going to seriously hurt you guys."

He suddenly felt Luka's hands strangling his shoulders, Chat Noir's claws piercing the armour. "My testicles know that you are a liar."

The memory flashed in mind, burning him with sympathy pains that made him want to cross his legs together. Luka looked way too smug as he patted Adrien's shoulder and slipped past him, arms crossed, waiting for the inevitable admission with a silent 'I told you so' on his tongue.

Adrien's shoulders sagged. "Okay, I got lost in the kimiko a little…" He huffed, bringing his hands together to awkwardly fumble in twiddling his fingers. "But I'm good now, I'm promise."

Luka didn't make any move to continue berating him. Though that might just be for now, because Luka was mature enough to recognise that they didn't have time for it right now. When they were safe and sound, then Adrien could get properly chewed out.

Adrien cleared his throat, poking Luka in the chest. "Surprised you're not an illusion."

Nino planted his shield on the ground, propping his elbow on top of it to look over Adrien with a casual shrug. "Alya figured that a fake Chat was gonna get figured out easy."

Chat Noir flexed his fingers, a disgruntled look taking over him as he looked down at his ring. It was funny because Adrien knew exactly how he felt. There was only two times Adrien had used an entirely different miraculous from the cat. One had been swapping with Ladybug on a bet, and the other had been the very incident that brought Luka into the fold.

Nothing about Aspix, about being anyone other than Chat Noir, had felt right. Just didn't fit, and it just wasn't him. And now Luka was taking his miraculous for a spin and feeling the unwieldy rust.

Luka eventually spoke. "Besides, one of Weevil's goons shot me with some weird new gun, made my transformation start acting up. I didn't want to risk Sass until we had Su-Han's opinion."

He paused to snap his finger, a thought suddenly coming ahead. "Also…"

He then used that hand to—

CRACK

-Slap Adrien across the face with all the force of the destruction miraculous.

"Ouch!" Adrien fought to stop himself from swearing, reaching up to grasp his cheek. He found that even Graviton's form couldn't withstand Luka's bitchslap, already feeling the spot flush a deep, painful red.

Chat Noir winked. "That's from Plagg."

"By the way…" Before he could dare recover, Carapace's fist bruised his shoulder, knocking the boy off balance. "Thanks for not running any of this by us before getting yourself purposely akumatized, jack ass."

Adrien shrank in on himself, eyes rooted to his feet and voice painfully soft. "…I did send a text."

Looking up, it was almost scary how uncharacteristically serious Nino looked glowering down at him. "We're a team, Dude. You can't just go rogue on us like this."

He was right. Adrien had been stupid, reckless and a little bit arrogant.

He was right. Adrien endangered everybody with this move.

He was right. Adrien should apologize.

But Adrien did not apologize. He just looked away, leaving them in a tense silence that wasn't resolved as easily as it should have been. He was used to messing up, he was used to apologizing; sorry came to his lips as easy as breathing. So why was it so hard this time when he knew he did wrong?

Alix flashed in his mind, the pure bitter hatred and disgust pouring from her eyes just looking at him. The thugs throwing him to the floor, kicking him down, cracking him open to see if the inside was as rotten as his father's. He imagined Nino and Luka in their place. He imagined Alya scrutinizing him on the news, both as Chat Noir and Adrien. He imagined Chloe and Max looking the other way.

He didn't trust them like he did before. And he knew it wasn't fair, that they hadn't done anything differently. It was all him.

Before it all went wrong, he'd trust them with his life, he'd never think to look over his shoulder when they entered the room. Now, the love of his life lied to him. His father was a monster, and the woman he was so ready to accept as a mother enabled his despicable crusade for years. He couldn't trust the people who were supposed to be loyal to him on a genetic, instinctual level. He couldn't trust the woman he stood beside and followed into hell for years.

If you can't trust the very people who hold your heart, how could you ever trust those who didn't even have that?

That's why he didn't apologize. Because, if he didn't trust them, if he was truly alone, then he had no reason to run the plan by them, to have anyone other than him take on this burden. Deep down, Adrien didn't think he had something to apologize for.

Luka's voice shook him from his internal debate, motioning for the two to follow him in moving ahead. "Rena's still trying to tear Chrysalis apart, we should probably hurry this up before it looks suspicious."

Carapace moved to join Luka, but Adrien remained still, his arms tight by his side. They came to a stop when they noticed him falling behind, looking back to silently plead for an answer.

He took a deep breath and desperately tried to wet his drying throat. "Aren't you going to ask me?"

"Huh?"

"Aren't you…" He looked away, biting down on his lip. "Aren't you going to ask me if I knew?"

Adrien still wasn't sure of the answer himself.

Had he known? Had he suspected? Had there been moments—small, fleeting, dismissed in favor of keeping the peace—where something felt wrong?

Where Marinette looked tired and frustrated in ways that had nothing to do with akumas? Where she bit her tongue so hard she bled? Where she jumped or became guarded around specific subjects? How many times had he let doubt creep in only to smother it with good intentions and misplaced faith?

Luka and Nino shared a looked, and then in unison they shrugged.

"Nope."

"Nah, we don't need to."

Luka gave him a nod, then turned on his heel, stepping forward again. "C'mon, Agreste. You can overthink later—let's move."

Nino clapped a hand on Adrien's shoulder, squeezing briefly before following Luka.

Adrien lingered for a moment, staring at the ground. His stomach twisted, guilt clawing up his throat; but still, the apology didn't come. Instead, he swallowed it down, shoved it somewhere deep, and forced himself forward.

Later.

He'd deal with it later.

Adrien broke into a light job to catch up with them as they delved into the maze of scrap metal, they still had time to brainstorm before they reached the battlefield and Graviton had to disappear into his role once more.

"So, current plan is I rush in to get between them, we make a big show about you guys kicking my ass, I start crying, Lila gets cold feet and whisks me off to her lair." He positions himself in front of them, turning to walk backwards to gauge their reaction. "Sound good?"

Nino scratched his head. "Why don't we just take her by surprise and end this all here?"

Adrien sighed, shaking his head. It sounded so simple, so easy. But it wasn't simple, nothing about this was allowed to be simple for them. "Nino, if all we needed was to kick Chrysalis' ass, I wouldn't have gotten myself akumatized."

He ran his fingers through his hair, finding himself instinctually tensing up his right hand and making himself hover ever so slightly, anything to take the weight off his mind. "We've spent all this time only able to react to her plans, when what we need to win this is go on the attack for once. I need to get inside her lair, and I need her to trust me."

They needed to understand her endgame, why she was so convinced that, whatever they were doing, she was saving the world. They needed to understand the malevolence and the threat it posed beyond Colt's ominous warnings. They needed to see if there was anything important, he could swipe from the heart of her operation.

If any inkling of what Lila believed is the truth, the didn't have the time to risk just capturing and interrogating her. They needed action and they needed it now.

Whether Nino's thoughts ran along the same line, or he simply lost the desire to argue, he nodded without protest. "Fine, I guess this would all be a waste of time if we didn't at least see your plan through."

Before Adrien could reply, he felt a tug on that mental link, strong enough to make him reach up to massage his forehead. "Pegasus just dropped a dumpster on Lila's head. She is not happy."

A low, disgusted growl escaped Nino. "Oh god, I can't imagine being connected to Lila like that." He reared back, hands roaming up his body to wipe away at the chill advancing up his spine. "She must make you feel so uncomfortable."

Adrien stared ahead. "Uh, yeah… She's terrible."

He doesn't mention that it's warm.

He doesn't mention that he enjoyed it.

He doesn't mention that he wanted it.

He doesn't mention a fraction of the shameful, wrong, disgusting thoughts he has regarding their worst enemy. Because he's ashamed, because he doesn't trust them, because he's pathetic.

He just lets Nino continue to talk, all while desperately trying to forget how easily he leaned into her touch as Graviton, and how natural he found it to pull on the link just for the comfort of feeling her pull back, her hand reaching to interlock with his own.

Carapace clasps a hand over his shoulder, pulling it back to make Adrien turn to him as he readied a stern finger raised to chest level. "If she tries any funny business, just knock her out and call Pegasus, okay?" The finger retreated into a fist. "We'll be there with an ass whooping and all the soap you need to wash her stench off of you."

Adrien's smile didn't reach his eyes. "I appreciate the thought."

He suddenly became acutely aware of Viperion's eyes burning hole into him.

"Adrien?"

An involuntary shiver hit Adrien at full blast. Luka's voice wasn't even all that different, but it was weighted with knowledge, with sight. Luka could see something through Adrien's shame, and could hear the rapid, inconsistent beat of Adrien's heart. There was a putrid rhythm falling upon the musician's ears.

Lips wobbled for a moment before Adrien quietly said "Yeah?"

"Just…" Luka's eyes narrowed. "Keep your eye on the ball, okay?"

The words came out as a snapping defence, one that flew over Nino's head, but all too easily fuelled Luka's suspicions. "Why wouldn't I?"

"Because you're in a right state at the moment." Luka said simply, averting his eyes from Adrien's gaze. "And Lila's great at taking advantage of that."

---

Graviton launched himself forward in a blur of movement, his trajectory cutting right between Chrysalis and Rena. The violet glow of his powers crackled at his fingertips, giving off an eerie pulse as he hovered above the ground.

"Mind if I cut in?" He jeered, wiggling his eye brows and throwing a smirk Rena's way.

Rena scoffed, gripping her flute tightly. "Pretty boy, I like you, but I swear you're being so annoying right now."

"Aww, but that's my most attractive trait!" He teased.

Before she could retaliate, Graviton thrust his hand forward, directing a refrigerator along with it. The fridge hit true, lifting Rena clean off her feet and punting her backward, making her skid across the junkyard floor.

As planned, Chat Noir and Carapace wasted no time joining in, leaping at Graviton in synchronized attacks.

"Rena, step aside!" Chat Noir called, twirling his staff and lunging forward with a heavy downward swing.

Graviton met the strike with his own hand, stopping it cold mid-air with raw force. The ground cracked beneath him from the impact, but he barely budged. With an exaggerated grunt, he shoved Chat Noir back, sending him rolling across the dirt.

Carapace wasn't far behind, throwing up his shield and charging straight at him. Graviton grinned, feigning struggle as he caught the edge of the shield with both hands, flipping over it and twisting mid-air to deliver a wide arc kick that sent Carapace stumbling.

Everything was going smoothly.

Until it happened.

A sudden crack split the air, followed by an ominous hum. The ground beneath them vibrated violently, and then—

BOOM!

A bolt of searing purple lightning crashed down from above, slamming into the ground and erupting in a deafening explosion. The force sent everyone flying, bodies rag dolling through the air before crashing into heaps of scrap metal and debris.

Graviton barely managed to stay upright, skidding back several meters before catching himself. Dust and sparks filled the air, his ears ringing from the sheer force of the blast.

"Ohhh, I've been charging that up for a while!" Chrysalis called out, her voice gleeful, the kind of twisted delight that sent a shiver up Adrien's spine. "Almost thought I wouldn't get an opportunity to try that one out!"

Adrien barely had a moment to recover before he felt her voice slither into his mind.

"I've got another one ready."

His breath hitched.

"One direct hit, and Chat Noir's transformation will break. Before anyone can recover, I'll end this."

His stomach twisted. He couldn't let that happen. Adrien moved before he could think. His muscles tensed, and in the next instant, he bolted.

"Chat Noir is mine!" He roared, voice echoing across the battlefield as he rushed forward.

The suddenness of his declaration made Chrysalis hesitate for just a second—not long enough, as she'd already fired.

"Wait—" She started.

But it was too late. Graviton threw himself directly in front of Chat Noir.

The second lightning bolt struck Adrien dead centre. A searing flash of violet filled his vision. His whole body seized, white-hot agony burning through his core, his nerves screaming as the world exploded into unbearable light and sound.

He barely heard Chrysalis' sharp, horrified gasp.

Because by the time she realized what she'd done, Graviton was already falling.

The moment Adrien hit the ground; Chrysalis' breath hitched. A sharp, broken thing that barely made it past her lips. Her hands trembled as she took a staggering step forward, eyes locked onto the motionless figure sprawled in the dirt.

Then Carapace moved.

And she snapped.

"Don't you dare touch him!"

Her voice pierced the air, shrill with panic and rage, without her even making a motion with her hands, a horde of moths closed in from who-knows-where and ambushed Carapace. He barely had time to react before he was ripped off his feet and thrown through the debris.

Chat Noir staggered, his ears still ringing from the explosion, eyes wide as he tried to push himself up. "What the hell—"

"Get away! Get away!" Chrysalis shrieked, her vision blurring as she scrambled toward Adrien.

Her knees hit the ground beside him, dirt scraping against her skin as her fingers frantically grasped at his shoulders, his arms, anywhere she could touch.

"I—I didn't mean to…" Her voice wavered, breath hitching as her fingers dug into his armour, as if her grip alone could hold him together.

"Oh God… Oh God…"

His body was still convulsing, spasms wracking through him as faint, lingering sparks of violet energy fizzled and danced along his limbs. The burn marks. The way his breathing was too shallow, too uneven.

This wasn't supposed to happen.

This wasn't supposed to happen.

"You'll be fine. You'll be fine." She whispered the words like a mantra, rocking slightly as she pulled him against her chest, shielding him from the world.

Her head snapped up, wild eyes darting around as the others began to recover.

"No. No, no, no—"

Without hesitation, she wrapped her arms tight around Adrien's limp form, summoning the moths to her, to wrap around her and Adrien like a cocoon. There was no time to stop her, and no will to risk trying while she had Adrien in her embrace, the two bodies disappeared into the veil of flapping wings.

Soon enough, the moths disappeared, and nothing was left in their place.

---

When he awoke, it was as Adrien, free from Graviton's scars. The pain that crippled him wasn't upon him anymore, but the ghost of its touch still lingered. It was strange, how his body remembered the agony even when it no longer burned through him. His limbs still felt heavy, sluggish, as if something deep in his bones refused to believe he was unscathed.

He blinked, forcing the world to come into focus. Dim orbs of gold, red and green flickered above him, casting long, crawling shadows over gnarled stone walls. A few blinks allowed him to recognise them as old Christmas lights you'd string around a tree. A cold, earthy scent, like sticking your nose in dirt, clung to the air, mixed faintly with the old detergent smell of someone haphazardly spraying air freshener around the room.

Adrien managed to convince his body to move, shifting in the large bed he found himself occupying to get a better look at his surroundings. A large, stone hall sparsely populated by disconnected furniture arrangements. The air was thin, with an invisible pressure pressing down from above, cluing him in that, wherever he was, he was deep underground. He'd imagined Lila's lair to reside in some cushy Tsurugi facility, but he supposed that the malevolence didn't exactly give her a choice in the matter – and that Lila most likely didn't want Tsurugi anywhere near her personal sanctuary.

Which made it all the more odd that Lila had seemingly left Adrien alone. The world around him was silent, only populated by the distant groans of the world above, the occasional drip of damp patches clinging to the walls; nothing that would indicate life in the immediate area. He could find proof of Lila's recent presence in the first aid kit lying open on a nearby table, fresh scratches around the latch from her hurried nails. A hamper of recently discarded clothes had been thrown into a corner.

Even his body betrayed the memory of her, of the loose sensations he connected to his half-conscious state as she carried him through Paris. His eyes could trace the path of her fingers from his cheek, down his arm and to his hands. At the end of the invisible trail was a landmark, her lipstick, smeared and fading on his knuckles. And that scent, her perfume lingered on his nose, an irritating, thick odour that made his nostrils burn; and yet he couldn't help but inhale.

The most prominent feature he could gauge was the number of marks on the floor where a strong layer of dust broke away into clear patched that followed various objects that had recently been moved, or the tell-tale signs of brush strokes that broke the dust apart. Someone had tried to rush a clean up job and given up halfway through. It seemed Lila had not planned on showing Adrien this place initially.

That meant this was an opportunity.

He slipped off the bed heavy, the weight of her eyes set into his bones even when she wasn't here to use them. Walking through the abode of his personal psychotic stalker knowing that she could return at any moment to find him should have felt akin to a horror movie, there should be an unnerving undertone where he dreaded getting caught, where the worst possibilities of what she did to him while he slept filled his minds.

But there was none of that. At least, not from the thought of Lila. There was a certain, ominous, unshakable sensation that pulled at him, flashing images of something scratching and struggling within the walls. Something that emerged from the cracks as putrid roots wrapping around the corners of the room. And maybe, if he didn't know what it was, if it wasn't the very same feeling that attacked Chat Noir before, he'd attribute it to Lila.

It was here. The malevolence was here, surrounding him, and only vaguely aware of him. It slept soundly, echoing a dull, muted note of apathy through his head. He turned himself away from it, knowing that his thought may very well cause it to stir, to recognise that he was something it had already tried to claim.

In that moment, for a split-second, he allowed himself to acknowledge that it had claimed his father, that Gabriel had been carrying this creature within the butterfly miraculous before Adrien was even born. As quickly as the thought appeared, Adrien buried it deep, not yet ready to wrestle with whatever implications it could bring with it.

He found himself stumbling towards the nearest door, convincing himself that he could at least try and use this time to map out the place, maybe find some sort of landmark or passage up that could be used to lead the team back here. The Malevolence's roots were thicker, feeding through this very door, plunging Adrien into a cold abyss of apprehension, but still he pushed forward.

The chamber he found himself in was almost quaint, a defiant elegance in this sea of run-down broken home. An art gallery? Several titanic paintings towered over him, depicting vibrant scenes in startling, and eerie, detail. And that apprehension was only emboldened when he came to a stop in front of the one that had his own eyes staring back at him.

His initial assumption has been Lila, in her obsession, had taken to painting him for her personal shrine. He wouldn't put it past her. But the truth scared him even more, because it wasn't just a painting of him, it was a painting of a private moment he remembered. Pulling his focus back to examine the entire painting, he recognised the memory instantly; the pool party, that stolen moment of comfort between Adrien and Marinette as they fell asleep on each other, the moment captured in Aunty Amilie's photo album.

But this wasn't the same picture his aunt had, this was minutes later, where both teenagers awoke to their embrace, their eyes half-lidded but no less filled with overwhelming adoration for one another. And the 'painting' was blinking.

It was a memory, stolen from Marinette and trapped in a frame.

He couldn't stop his hand from trailing over the frame, clinging to it. As far as he was concerned, it was a treasure; it was a piece of Marinette that would forever be preserved after her death in a way no mundane art could ever immortalize. Not even his anger in the face of Marinette's betrayal could drown out his instant desire to steal the magic painting and take it home.

Why… Why did that make him feel more pathetic than his attraction to the woman who ruined his life?

He shook his head, shuffling away from the painting, already drawing his gaze over the rest of the room. Lila's seemed to respond to his presence, the image fading from a scene of Ladybug's first ever confrontation with the girl, to that moment so many years ago when a young Adrien Agreste desperately clung to the hand of the girl he'd accidentally knocked to the floor with a basketball. The moment where Lila's mad obsession began.

Quickly, he moved on, following the polished gleam that announced Colt's painting.

Adrien felt his breath go still, caught by an invisible hook that stretched it into a tense string closing his throat together. He had seen many paintings of his mother, plenty of photographs too after his aunt gifted him the album, but this painting with its ghostly visage that shifted back and forth and faded into different moments it time, it didn't feel like a 2D image captured by ink or paint.

It looked real, like he could reach out and take her hand if he leaned in enough. It wasn't a painting. What was it? A window? A door? A hole connecting reality and the shards of a fractured mind, a memory perfectly preserved, not as an akuma, not as something to guide or empower, simply as an experience to share.

The scene before him was one that he wasn't present for, yet he knew exactly what it was. The dining room, his mother sat at the head of the table with a brightly coloured birthday hat on her head and a crudely made mac-and-cheese necklace around her neck.

She wore a face that seemed almost alien on his mother, a look of unbridled distain focused into a glare at the man that stood closest to the memory's 'camera'. Colt's lumbering frame perfectly framed her scowl between his shoulder and the door frame. This was Emilie Agreste's last day on Earth. A child version of Adrien had been banished from the party room, sent to play with Gorilla and give the two adults time to talk.

He couldn't stop himself for reaching forward, nor the way his eyes welled up just from seeing her again after so long. Fingers brushed against the surface of the painting to find themselves wet and cold, the image rippling under his touch, inviting him further, inviting him to experience the memory for himself. He needed to see her. He needed to know. He needed... He needed...

"I don't think Colt would appreciate you snooping around his memories."

His hand stilled, the ripples fading back into the illusion of a solid. Chrysalis didn't sound angry, or surprised, just quiet. She stood at the doorway, a plastic bag by her side emanating a delicious odour of fresh food that overpowered all other aromas in the room.

He made no comment, so she held the bag up and shook it. "I got Chinese food. Best sweet and sour chicken in Paris."

A few minutes later he'd been coaxed back to the bed, a paper plate in his lap and a generous serving of noodles, rice and chicken overflowing onto his knee. Lila deliberately waited for him to start digging in, instead of just pushing around the food, before she took her first bite.

Adrien couldn't deny that he was hungry as hell, he hadn't eaten since the news broke and the sauce smelled heavenly. It was not his finest moment, stuffing his face like a pig going through gruel with barely enough time to chew or swallow.

"I didn't think you'd be up so soon." She murmured, tearing apart an egg roll. "I should have left a note. Warned you against wondering anywhere… Dangerous."

The meaning was obvious enough, but her gaze moving to linger on the Malevolence's roots sealed it. He chewed on that thought as well as the chicken for a minute before he thought to respond. "How'd the Malevolence end up here anyway?"

Lila leaned back in her seat, taking to playing with the crooked ends of her hair instead of looking at him. "I think my grandfather put it here…" It was odd to hear Lila sound so unsure of herself. "This is… This is where your father killed him. Colt said that they were performing some big ritual, but he didn't really understand what it was for."

Adrien's eyes narrowed. "Your grandfather made the Malevolence?"

"No. I know a previous butterfly user created it. A long, long time ago." She paused again wrap some noodles around her fork, practically inhaling both the food and the utensil just to force something down. "It was some evil created by a previous butterfly user that a Ladybug sealed away. You ever wonder why Ladybug has an ability to specifically counter the butterfly? That's why."

The Malevolence, if it was indeed the entity that Su-Han spoke of, was a result of Nooroo activating his raw power without the filter of the miraculous to restrain it. An unrestrained Tikki makes a moon-sized macaroon crash into Earth, Plagg eradicates the dinosaurs, and Kaalki sends the Eiffel tower to the moon. Nooroo created a memory that was embedded in the world itself.

In that moment, Adrien started to understand what the Malevolence was. The reason why Ladybug needed to purify akumas instead of just breaking the object they were housed in was because, left alone without a vessel, an akuma just multiplies. Without focus, without healing, that bad memory is left to spread its influence over the rest of you.

Nooroo's power created a wound in reality, a moment so vile and painful that the Guardians seemingly erased all mention of it to curb its influence. That was what the Malevolence was, an akuma that was never purified, that was allowed to multiply and spread. And what was an akuma if not a wound left to fester?

"I think the Guardians tried to seal it away by breaking it into pieces, and Salvadore had one of those pieces. Left it here, where it was useless until… Hawkmoth and Ladybug's war woke it up."

"Do you think my father knew?" His voice sounded so childish and weak on his ears.

Lila leaned down, fork stabbing into her chin. "He couldn't have. If he had an inkling of what was growing under Paris, I think he would have done things differently."

"Wouldn't the signs have been there this whole time?" Adrien couldn't control the snap to his voice. "The way you describe it, this thing was screaming like a banshee and taking over the sewer with nothing resembling subtlety."

There was no visible reaction to his tone, just eyes staring down at him, almost pitiful. He hated that look more than he hated her being smug. "That's only now in the last year." She explained simply.

"What changed?"

"Chat Noir mostly."

He froze, head snapping into position to gaze up at her, baffled and horrified. How could he have anything to do with this? Was this a lie, or was Lila just making assumptions?

She met his silent question with a tinge of bitterness. "The power of destruction is more like… Deterioration. It's accelerating the process of living to the point the target ages to dust in the span of seconds. That's why when cataclysm is used, it looks like things become all rusty and old."

There was no reply, just a moment of thoughtful silence. He'd never looked at his power that way before. He found himself looking down at his hand, slightly curling his fingers into a half-hearted fist, imagining Chat Noir's claws bared.

"Gabriel Agreste did a lot of things over the course of his life to break himself down to his very soul." She continued. "But taking on all those miraculous at once as Monarch? That shattered him. The Malevolence had been carving out his insides for years, and he was continuing to deteriorate himself into the perfect vessel."

"Where does Chat Noir come into this?"

"There was a time where our heroes managed to trick and capture Monarch, but those two dunderheads were too busy bragging about their victory to secure it. And thus, predictably, it slipped out of their fingers."

Adrien felt his shoulders tense up, ghostly fingers stabbing into his back at the slow realization that was dawning on him. Because he knew exactly what came next.

"Chat Nor, in a desperate attempt to salvage the mission, ended up using his cataclysm on Monarch." He could hear the groan of her teeth as she gritted them together, stabbing at her food with murderous vigour. "And that cataclysm shocked Gabriel's system so much, and accelerated the deterioration that the Malevolence was counting on, that it woke the sleeping beast into the creature we see today."

Adrien was choking, his plate left forgotten, and rice coughed out as if he'd just found it rotten.

He killed his father. He brought the Malevolence back to life.

Everything that happened this year, the lives lost, the people hurt, Lila's condition, the very power she wielded, the threat to the world itself; it all came back to his mistake.

"Adrien, it's fine. It's okay." Lila leapt from her seat to tend to him, reaching for his hand. "This… This isn't anything you need to worry about. Because I'm going to make it okay."

For once, he did not accept her touch, he slapped her hand away and lunged forward. The food was hurdling across the room as he jumped on Lila, grabbing her by the throat, not breaking pace, and slamming her down on the table.

He leaned down close to her ear, taking in her wide-eyed surprise and fear, glowering down with a mad gaze and his teeth bared. "What do you even hope to accomplish with all this madness? To break everyone else like you?"

Her breath quickened, her throat squealed, but she didn't resist, she just stared back at him. "No." She choked out. "To save them."

His free hand went wild, flying out to swipe the air at his imaginary opponent. "How does any of this help people?" He growled.

"Ask Noah." She shot back with a simple, self-satisfied even if struggling, smirk.

At that, all Adrien could find the will to do was laugh at the sheer confidence she executed in such a pretentious comparison. She really thought she was oh-so smart in saying that, it was disgustingly adorable.

"What? From the Bible?" He barked, the sudden humour on the brain doing enough to loosen his grip. He backed away, clasping his forehead.

"You know the story, Darling." She purred, that uncertainty fading now that she had something she could actually sink her teeth into. "God looks down on humanity and finds them lacking, so he cleans the slate with a flood. Noah and his family get picked out as the sole survivors to build the future after the past is cleaned away."

Rising to her feet, she thrusted her arms out in a wide arc. "The Malevolence is the flood. It will drown the world in its putrid waves." One hand came down to clasp itself over the butterfly miraculous. "We are Noah, and my mementos will be our arc."

"We don't need a boat; we need to fight this thing." Adrien spat. "But that might mean you don't get the spotlight, and you hate that."

Something flashed in her eyes that resembled hurt. Naturally, punches and strangling could bruise her bones, but it was words that cut her deep enough to bleed. She stalked away from him for a moment, throwing herself over the medical station that was set up a bit away. There was a moment of just her heavy breathing, where Adrien bore holes into the back of her head, his stare unflinching.

"You don't know what we need." She trembled. "You don't… You don't know."

Her hand lashed out; paper was sent airborne as the table trembled.

Wrinkled photos settled at his feet, treating his eyes to a wealth of gory, intimate pictures of Lila's body and it's many, many mutilations that hid under the miraculous' transformation. Bruises soured to a rotting purple wound, incisions cutting her open and scooping out the putrid muck within, torn flesh hanging open with an outwards blast pattern showing that the wound came from the inside.

"You haven't had this thing inside of you, worming into every fabric of your being and violating it." She stood over him, fingers pushing through her face, trying to smooth out the haggard wrinkles. "You haven't seen what it could do, you haven't experienced… The future that's waiting for us if this thing is allowed to continue."

He stood there and took it, he let her talk, let her vent. He had the feeling that she'd been bundling all this up inside herself for a long time. And who was he to interrupt the villain's exposition?

"The Guardian Order, the arbiters of the universes' greatest secrets at the height of their power, chose to seal this creature away and hide its existence instead of killing it." Her hand fell down to cover her mouth, the red rim around her eyes betraying the tears that could have been. "Shouldn't that tell you something?"

Chrysalis' thumb hooked under the clasp that she'd attached the butterfly broach to, pulling it tight around her throat to make him focus on the broach pressed against her neckline. From where he was standing, it looked more like a collar.

"I was damned from the moment I picked up this miraculous." Fingers squeezed the miraculous, trying to choke it, trying everything in her power to do damage to the cursed object that ended her life. "Colt was so terrified when he realized that I had picked it up. He screamed for me, but it was too late, his warnings were lost to that sickening song. Before I knew it, I was down here, I was… Dragged into the darkness and ripped apart."

However briefly, Chat Noir had experienced the Malevolence's influence on his mind, felt the fingers clawing at his soul and the whispers beckoning him to his final fall. Even after Su-Han had cleared him, Adrien still felt the memory of that sensation wrapping around him in the dark of the night, striking him in the depths of his dreams.

He knew a fraction of what Lila had experienced, on some level he might even feel sympathetic to her suffering, to lost, broken look flickering in her eye. After all, she had just unintentionally revealed that he was indirectly responsible for her current pain. But that didn't mean he was convinced of her solution.

"The Malevolence bound us to it, forced us to go enact its plan to break itself free and unleash it on the world once more." The voice slipped from desperate to mocking, bouncing back and forth with the thin undertone of mad laughter. It was forced, of course, a woman fighting against her own fear with her best asset, her ego. "But we found a way to stall it, to trap it and use it to fuel a different plan."

Adrien crossed his arms, offering her a pointed look. He wondered how much of her disposition was a genuine argument and how much was her banking on his heart to push aside the logic of questioning her. "If you can do all that to it, you can stop it."

She busted a gut laughing, the high-pitched cackle of a witch looking down on the angry mob that forgot to bring water.

"No stop."

With a sharp sigh, her laughter transitioned to a cry.

"Can't stop."

She fell back against the table, collapsing into a heap on the edge that barely managed to stop itself from plunging. Lila's body folded in on itself, hands desperately reaching for her head, bracing for the impact that would never come.

"He's too… He's too deep." Her eyes darted as she whispered, and for a moment it sounded like she was talking to someone else instead of him. "The time to stop him passed when Hawkmoth was born."

Adrien blinked and the room shifted before his eyes, the walls trembling, distorting like they were sinking into a funhouse mirror. From the cracks between the brickwork came the voices, a soft, harrowing call that came not from words but groans, the tired whispers of hundreds of akumas stuck in a deep sleep. The Malevolence stirred, even in it's dreams it reached for them for the pitiful creatures it had marked as it's own.

Was it just a coincidence that it did so when Lila suddenly started to refer to it as 'him'? When she treated it as something that had an identity?

Either it was all in his head, or Lila was just used to this crap by now, because she had no reaction to the distortion. She just pushed on, breathless after pushing through her outburst. "What we can do is deny him."

She crept closer to Adrien, slow, cautious, as one would do when approaching a wild animal that could attack them at any moment. Her eyes were constantly roaming him, looking for his reaction to her pleas, hoping for an inkling of understanding that would unite them. "I'll save the world by fracturing it, leaving him with nothing but a wasteland to conquer."

Adrien did his best to channel Nathalie's stone-cold demeanour, regarding her with a steel edge. "You think destroying the world, killing everybody is saving anything?"

"N-Not destroying! Fracturing." She put so much emphasis on the words, spreading her arms out with full teeth on display, like it was such a meaningful difference when it came to the fabric of existence.

Her face became sour, the same way Marinette's would when Adrien was failing to grasp the obvious meaning she'd been painfully hinting at to him; because he could apparently never have a relationship with a girl where they could speak directly. "When the ladybug and the cat come together to make a wish, they break apart the world and rebuild it."

There was a brief sigh, Lila letting her body shake to get the blood flowing as she began to pace back and forth. "But in the middle, there is a precious window where all these broken pieces are in a limbo state. After destruction removes the past, but before creation determines the future, there is the present; where reality can be anything."

"With the future no longer certain, we will be allowed to write our own story." Hands came together, tucked under her nose. "Of course, our physical forms are torn into pieces during the destruction stage and remain in stasis until creation puts them back together; that's where the mementos come in. They will allow all of humanity to remain together and awake during the fracturing process."

"How do you intend to control anything in this 'limbo' state? You're not a kwami."

That recognisable Lila grin came back in full force. He'd just asked the question she'd been giddily waiting to be asked. Should he be uncomfortable with the fact that he was almost more at ease to see her being more of her usual putrid self?

She held up one finger to keep his breath baited before gliding over to the bed, dropping down onto her front and disappearing under the frame. After a moment of wriggling while an almost bemused Adrien watched her legs kick up and down, she resurfaced.

On her return, she brought with her what could politely be referred to as a box of junk in her arms. Said box was placed down on the table, giving Adrien an eyeful of a make-up kit, some failed arts and craft projects, a diary and- Ah. His eyes brightened up upon spotting some recognisable miraculous task force tech; specifically, that damn akuma harness he'd been trying to get his hands on all this time.

It looked like Adrien was going to set his sights on leaving this party with a goodie bag.

However, it wasn't the tech that Chrysalis brought out to show to him. She dug to the bottom of the box to retrieve a mirror, a bronze mirror with handle and in intricate frame. A sense of familiarity washed over him, not from him, but from echo is his mind, a loose tether from somebody else's memory telling him that this mirror was from the feudal era of Japan. On it's dexter side, there was carvings and colours coming together to form a butterfly and a ladybug circling the rising sun; the dawn of a new day.

"With these."

She waited patiently for Adrien's eyes to narrow, to look up at her with that questioning stare, to silently ask her for the context the was missing.

The context was the reveal that the mirror's frame could be rotated. With a deft touch, she twisted it clockwise for several complete cycles before coming to a dead halt, and then she moved it in reverse. After two more cycles, tiny buttons popped out of the frame, her thumb pressing two of them into place, waiting a beat and then clicking the others.

For a minute, Adrien watched with bated breath as she continued to twist the frame, adjust the buttons and spin the mirror in her hands. All until a soft, wet click echo'd throughout the chamber. Before he could ask what she had done, her hand pressed against the mirror's surface and sank through it.

The mirror rippled, like disturbed water, as Lila's arm disappeared up to her wrist. She didn't react with shock. No wide eyes, no hesitation. She just reached deeper, searching for something, and from its depths she pulled out a box.

It was small, fitting neatly in her palm. Black, with delicate golden detailing curling around its edges. It looked just like the one Master Fu had given him.

It looked like something you would store a miraculous in.

Then, right before his eyes, the box grew. The motion was smooth, seamless, as if it had been compressed and was simply returning to its natural state. Seven extra inches in height, and now it sat comfortably in both of Lila's hands.

It was a miracle box. He felt himself choking on the revelation, unable to get out any word other than a guttural, shocked gasp.

Lila was loving every second of it, drinking in his amazement like it was her own personal supply of alcohol. She leaned into him, shuffling herself to press flush against his front, his chin on top of her head as she popped open the box's lid. He didn't resist, setting his arms down by her side, holding her in place as if he feared that she'd suddenly try to escape.

Inside were five trinkets that were unmistakable in their nature. Lila drew her finger over them, breathing life into their names to pull him deeper and deeper into his curiosity.

The Gorgon and the snakes that coiled from her head glared at him from the face of a coin.

Manipulation

The Grim Reaper stood proudly, scythe in hand, on a tarot card.

Character

The Banshee screamed at him from behind an hour-glass shaped badge.

Consequence

The Werewolf was torn between beast and man, his anguish spread across the length of a collar, their confused existence meeting in the middle.

Structure

The Hydra's multiple heads trailed up to meet the knuckles of the pale green glove.

Continuity

Unlike regular miraculous, these ones weren't designed to be everyday accessories you could wear casually without suspicion. They were loud, they were scuffed, and they were designed to be held in your hand and wielded as a weapon.

"We call them the storyteller's miraculous."

Her fingers stopped over an indent where a sixth miraculous was missing, but Adrien already knew that was the one already accounted for. "The Griffin, the miraculous of choice, is with Colt. Funny story: it was just a medal when we got it, but it changed into a sheriff's badge when Colt started using it."

Adrien let out a shaky breath. "Another set of miraculous?"

He knew others existed, the eagle was from a different set entirely after all, but there was something off. There was something wrong about these ones. He stared at them and all he could conclude was that they shouldn't exist.

The box went down and back up came the mirror. Lila flipped it around, bringing his attention to the now relevant design on the back, the ladybug and the butterfly. "The same holder who caused the Malevolence allied with the Ladybug of his time. Together, they had similar designs to take advantage of this window between destruction and creation."

The rising sun cutting through the night, the deciding point between the end of the night and the beginning of the day; championed by the symbols of the two holders who would define that moment.

"Something was happening back then that made them frightful of the future, of their place in the world."

The sentimonster invasion. That past Ladybug's warning to Shadow Paw. This all happened before; the sentimonsters, the malevolence, the plot to redefine the story of the world. They were repeating all of this, and Lila didn't even realize it. Adrien had suddenly found himself ahead of the enemy in the worst way possible; because he might have just figured out what Lila's success looked like.

Lila leaned her head back to look up at him, moving her hand up to palm at his cheek. "To enact their plan, they needed certain magic to conceivably control the threads of fate and write their own chapters in history." She didn't need to pull him in, he leaned closer of his own volition, hooked on her voice. "So, they created these."

"They created their own miraculous."

That explained why they looked different, so rough and slapped together. They weren't made by guardians under the same intent, they were made for a specific purpose and only for that purpose.

"No, no, no." Lila giggled, standing up on her tip toes just to make sure her lips reached his ear. "They created their own kwamis."

Kwamis weren't made.

They just were.

"H-How… Could that even be possible?"

Adrien tried to wrap his head around the sheer impossibility of it. Kwamis were gods. Manifestations of the very foundations of reality itself. They weren't just spirits, weren't just magical beings with immense power. They were concepts given form; the embodiment of ideas so fundamental that the world could not exist without them.

Creation. Destruction. Luck. Protection. Illusion. Time. For as long as there was a world, there had been kwamis. Yet here Lila stood, casually claiming that some long-forgotten holders had created their own.

How?

How?

His mind reeled through every piece of knowledge he had about kwamis, about Miraculous, about the Guardians' teachings. But nothing—nothing—had ever suggested that mortals could create a kwami.

Tikki and Plagg should have known.

They were the oldest. They had seen the world form around them. If it was possible to create kwamis, then they should have—

A thought slammed into him like a fist to the gut.

Would they even tell him?

He had spent so long believing in the immortal wisdom of kwamis, in their unchanging place in the world, that he had never considered…

What if they hadn't known?

What if they had known, but had deliberately never said a word?

Or worse…

What if even Tikki and Plagg had been lied to? If they could have their memory altered to forget an entire era one of their previous holders were involved in, whose to say that they couldn't be tricked into believing an even bigger lie?

His grip on Lila tightened, a subconscious reaction to the sheer terror creeping up his spine. He was standing on the edge of something vast, something awful, and it was swallowing him whole.

Lila hummed in amusement. "Oh, Darling." She murmured. "That's the fun part, isn't it? No one knows how they did it."

She spun in his arms, resting her hands against his chest, tilting her head up with a mockingly sweet smile. "Their existence is proof that it's possible. But the how? That's the real mystery, isn't it?"

She let the words sink in, watching him like a cat toying with a mouse. Then, she tapped a finger against the side of his head, lightly, playfully, like he was a child struggling with a puzzle. "But since we have them now, we might as well make the most of it, right?"

Then, her grin faded into a pout. "Well, eventually. Right now, most of them have been damaged." She gestured to the dark, murky stains that could just be glimpsed spreading across the miraculous like an infection. "The Malevolence left its mark on them, rendering them disabled until we purify them. Colt's is the only active one at the moment."

"Your entire plan is banking on these things and they're not even functioning yet?" Adrien asked incredulously, letting the words sooth his frazzled brain desperately clinging to any certainty he could find. "How do you even know any of this will work if you can't test them?"

"Just… Trust me, Adrien. I've done my research and experiments, and the previous holders confirmed that it can work in their own notes." She sighed, taking to stroking his hair. "When everything is ready, and I have the black cat and the ladybug miraculous, these tools will be good and ready to give everyone a happy ending."

There had to be some dark irony to the fact that Adrien was frustrated that he couldn't tell Lila, of all people, the truth. Because what truly disturbed him, what truly ripped her plan apart, was a revelation that only Chat Noir could realize.

Though, in her arrogance and madness, he heavily doubted that his theory would sway her from her goal. Her belief may have started from a logical standpoint, but she was too deep into the plan now, there was never going to be any turning back from what she'd already set into motion.

Lila thought that the big revelation was her plan.

In actuality, the revelation was that the plan had already failed. It clicked into place for Adrien as a possibility, a strong possibility, that this perfectly explained the incongruities of this secret history of Shadow Paw and the feudal era holder's secret war.

What if the moth and bug duo did succeed in their plan? What if they did manage to rewrite history with the storyteller miraculous? What if they did so with a very similar intent to trap the malevolence? After all, there was no certainty of when the Malevolence was created during that period.

Guardian magic couldn't make Plagg and Tikki forget, it could tamper with the memories of such ancient beings. But other kwamis designed for the sole purpose of altering the natural order to fit a pre-defined story? That sounded like something that could cause such an impossible cover up, to the point that Shadow Paw's memory imprinted on the very miraculous Adrien wielded was corrupted. Like a glitch in the system.

He couldn't debate Lila on that matter without exposing himself and all his friends. So, he decided to find another hole in her scheme, one that seemed glaringly obvious to him.

"Happy ending by who's standard?"

"By the individuals of course." She answered with a smooth, rehearsed grace. This had been a question she'd anticipated. She slipped her hands into his own, locking their fingers together and tugging him to her side. "Everyone gets to be the leading character of their story, without having to worry about overwriting somebody else's."

A flicker of fear broke through her confidence. "And I have to do it before the Malevolence's curse drains me dry."

Adrien barely stopped himself from flinching. It was easy to forget, when Lila was like this—so smug, so rehearsed, so untouchable—that she was still human. That, somewhere beneath all the arrogance and twisted ambition, there was something fragile enough to be afraid.

And if she was afraid, if she was rushing, that meant she wasn't as in control as she wanted him to believe. Adrien let his gaze fall to their joined hands, feeling the subtle tremor in her grip.

"So…" He breathed, staring her dead in the eye. "It's all fake." Not a question, but a statement.

Lila blinked. The momentary vulnerability in her expression snapped shut like a steel trap, replaced with something cold and calculating.

"What are you talking about?" She asked, her voice dipping into that stiff, stumbling tone where you could practically hear her twitching.

Adrien didn't let up. "There's only two ways to stop people's choices from affecting others." His grip tightened just enough to keep her from slipping away. "Either you control their choices, or you make sure their choices don't actually matter. A world built on either can only ever be a fake one."

Lila's smile flinched at the edges. "That's a very pessimistic way of looking at it."

"It's a realistic way of looking at it," Adrien countered. "You can dress it up however you want, but at the end of the day, what you're describing isn't a world of happy endings—it's a script. And if you're the one writing it, then that means you're deciding what 'happiness' is for everyone, whether they want it or not."

She laughed. It was quiet at first, almost breathy, then louder—more delighted, like he had just given her the greatest compliment she'd ever received.

"You're so clever, Adrien," She purred, finally stepping back, slipping her hands free from his. "But you're still thinking too small."

She gestured behind her, to the mirror—to the impossible, distorted history etched into its surface.

"This isn't about controlling people." She said. "It's about freeing them. From suffering, from regret, from all the little moments that hold them back from the lives they were meant to have."

Adrien felt his jaw clench. "But whose version of 'meant to' are we talking about, Lila? Yours?"

Lila's eyes flashed, but the amusement never left her face. He knew her well enough, a sentence he never thought would pop into his head, to know that there was a war raging inside of her. A battle between her bruised ego bristling at her grand plan being challenged, and her rapidly beating heart salivating over Adrien challenging her so directly and so fiercely.

"I still maintain that it is their decision." She mused. "There are so many things that happen in the world, Adrien, that never effect our choices. What does the town drunk in a bar in Germany care whether or not you choose to continue your fashion career? Is his choice in life invalidated just because somewhere out there someone will lead a life that he doesn't care about?"

Adrien narrowed his eyes. "That's not the same thing."

"Isn't it?" she countered smoothly, stepping toward him, slow and deliberate. "You're thinking of this as if I'm locking people in a cage. But what I'm actually doing is giving them a blank page. A chance to tell the story they want to tell, without interference."

His stomach twisted. "But life is interference."

Lila actually sighed, like he was the one being frustratingly dense. "Life is potential. And that's what I'm giving back to them. Pure, unfiltered potential. No regrets. No accidents." She gestured vaguely. "No unwanted ripples from other people's bad decisions."

"I don't think we're going to see eye-to-eye on this."

She giggled. "Invigorating, isn't it?"

He wasn't going to reason with her. She had her reasons dug deep in a fundamentally different look on the agency of those around her, she had the shadow of death looming over any other option and she had too much of her life invested in her scheme. She would not be convinced, the only hope for her was a long imprisonment, if Adrien could even manage to restrain her without the two of them ending up killing each other.

It was freeing to admit that.

For so long, Adrien kept himself stuck on the idea of another way, of desperately swaying the villains to his side and avoid all the grief, blood and heart ache. He was stuck to the morality that he thought his father and Marinette would expected of him, one born of a desperation to please everyone. Some part of him still longed for that, he didn't want to see the worst in people. As much as he disagreed with Lila's conclusion and her method, he couldn't deny how enchanting the idea of giving everybody a happy ending was to him.

But to accept that Lila would only be dealt with by force, it allowed Adrien to breathe, it allowed him to focus. He had a mission, and she wasn't going to stop him; in fact, she was going to help him. He was walking out of here with that box, he just needed to keep Lila occupied.

And keeping her occupied was easier than he thought it'd be.

He knew that one kiss would be enough.

It was clear in her eyes when he closed the distance and claimed her lips, the pure euphoria that lit up her eyes like a shooting star. Her shock, her questions, her protests; none of them could stand against the victory of Adrien willingly pulling her, without any provocation other than the sensations their back-and-forth had spurned inside him, into a passionate embrace.

She'd consider it a conquest, her pleasure nerves were frying every other sense in her body, overwhelming even her scheming mind. The moment he let go, she'd stumble away, drunk and weary, lost in satisfied daze before collapsing on her bed and spending the next hour trying to recover from the sudden affection.

One kiss, that was all that was needed to take her down. Adrien knew this.

And yet, he did not stop at one kiss.

He took hold of her hips and ripped her off the ground, trapping her in his arms and pinning her to his chest. He grasped her hair and buried her face in his. He opened his lips and called for her warmth, dragging her in by the skin of her teeth and refusing to let up.

Lila gasped against his lips, her fingers tangling in his hair as he carried her effortlessly toward the bed. The box was already forgotten, discarded on the table like a meaningless trinket, and Adrien didn't even try to justify this as necessary.

Because it wasn't.

He wasn't going to pretend this was strategy. He wasn't going to delude himself into believing this was some carefully calculated distraction.

This was indulgence.

Indulgence of what? He wasn't as sure.

He sank onto the mattress with her still locked in his arms, pressing her into the sheets as his mouth claimed hers again. The heat between them was too much, too consuming, too easy. She was soft against him, molten in his grasp, and every second that passed, he felt her surrender to him in a way that had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with raw, human need.

Adrien tilted her head back, kissing her throat, her pulse thrumming wildly against his lips. Lila was mewling now, breathless and giddy, her nails digging into his skin. His lips stopped at the broach, teeth over the straps keeping it there. He could rip it off with his teeth if he wanted to, leave her powerless before him and bring a comedic end to her reign.

Instead, he growled. "Detransform."

"W-What?" She heaved out, hands impatiently pawing at his shoulders. "My normal form is… I… I haven't put any make-up on to hide the damage."

"I don't want to kiss a mask." He almost sounded tender when he said it, letting go of her to pull his hands over her front, thumb pressing down against the miraculous costume. Even the slightest pressure of his fingertips coaxed little moans from her lips. "You want something real? Then I'll need the real you."

She didn't cave in immediately. Her reservation lasted long enough for Adrien to feel his own body groan at the delay, but his blood continued to pump, loud enough to hammer in his ears, fierce enough for her to feel the inferno beating at her touch. But eventually, her nerves gave way and those magic words left her. "Dark wings fall."

As the transformation unravelled, dark energy peeled away like smoke, revealing the truth beneath. Lila's wild hair tumbled in uneven waves, tousled and twisted like a storm had run its fingers through it. Her skin was a sickly pale beneath the dim lighting of the room, only the barest fraction of life beyond that of a corpse. The deep purple marks littering her arms, neck, and collarbone looked almost black, the mark of the Malevolence faded but never forgotten.

She shivered, her breath uneven, her fingers twitching against Adrien's chest as she waited.

Waited for him to recoil. Waited for his interest to wane. Waited for the disgust, the revulsion, the coldness.

But Adrien didn't move away.

His hands traced her sides with the same reverence as before, his emerald eyes taking her in—not with horror, not with pity, but with something else. Something unreadable, something that made her stomach twist into knots.

He leaned in, and for a fleeting, dizzying second, she thought he was going to press his lips to hers again. Instead, he tilted her forward just slightly, enough for his lips to brush against her forehead, slow and deliberate.

And then he whispered, in a voice so soft it made her tremble:

"I only see you."

There were many reasons he could look to in order to explain his actions that day.

He wanted to know how Hawkmoth felt, having the akuma wrapped around his finger, enslaved by their obsessions for whatever vision he desired.

He enjoyed seeing such a prideful woman of ego and strength come undone as he undid the buttons holding her shirt together.

His inner Chat Noir couldn't stop laughing at the idea of giving a whole new meaning to 'Taking the villain down'.

Her face, brought to life entirely by his touch, was finally so distinctly not Marinette that it pushed her from his mind for the first time in months.

The way she writhed under him, her eyes utterly devoted to him and him alone, desperately pulling away his clothes. A loyalty, a twisted love, only she could provide his heart.

He adored the control he leveraged over her, that his fingers would squeeze her throat until she was choking, that his nails would rip blood from her flesh until tears dotted her eyes, that he could speak with bile as well as passion and she would respond with nothing but a desire for more of him.

He wanted revenge, to humiliate her, to imagine Marinette angry and jealous that her perfect little doll could be so depraved.

He wanted something real, something that no one else would approve of just to prove for a fact that it was his decision, untainted by the influence of everyone he looked to for guidance. Everyone who betrayed his desire to understand.

Maybe it was one of those reasons, or all of them in some shape or form. Maybe it was as simple as a boy with a lot on his shoulders, and drunk on physical touch, just wanting the carnal relief of a beautiful woman.

Maybe, after all the secrets and the lies and their consequences; Adrien just wanted a dirty little secret of his own.

An hour later, he was wrapped up in her sheets, arms around her body, nose taking in her irritating scent; waiting. Waiting for the guilt to set in, for all those thoughts of fresh panic and burning bile that told him how much of a mistake this was. This was supposed to be the part where he was disgusted with himself, wondering who he was and how could betray everything he stood for, betray Marinette, just to sleep with the enemy.

He was supposed to muse about how empty he felt. That this was all a crime of passion that did nothing to fill the hole Marinette left in his heart, that any petty, vindictive drive was fleeting the moment he allowed himself to think straight.

This was supposed to be his lowest point. It wasn't supposed to feel satisfying.

There was no bile rising in his throat, no fresh wave of panic clawing at the edges of his mind, no all-consuming regret that should have left him reeling in horror. Instead, there was only warmth. Lila's warmth. The press of her body against his, the steady rise and fall of her breath as she dozed in the aftermath, the way her fingers twitched in sleep, even unconscious she was still reaching for him.

He should have felt disgusted.

He didn't.

His mind was quiet for the first time in months.

Lila shifted slightly, her arm draping lazily across his stomach. Even now, in the depths of exhaustion, there was a smirk playing on her lips, as if she knew she had won something. That she had claimed him, or at least a part of him, in a way no one else ever had. He was sure she'd be pleased with herself if she ever realized that she took a first that Marinette would never be able to claim.

Perhaps it would all hit him later, in the safety of his own bed in the dark of the night. Or, perhaps, Adrien Agreste just had to admit that there was something wrong with him. Something depraved, something dark, something broken.

Something he would leave between him and Lila. For now, he had a mission to complete.

Adrien moved slowly, carefully. His breath barely stirred the air between them as he traced the curve of Lila's shoulder, his touch featherlight. She didn't stir. Her smirk remained, a satisfied little thing even in sleep, and he forced himself to ignore the sharp stab of something he didn't want to name.

His goal was clear.

The Butterfly Miraculous gleamed against her skin, its metal cool and unassuming, an innocent façade for something so twisted. Nooroo was in there, buried beneath the weight of her corruption, watching, waiting. Could Nooroo even feel what she was doing with his power? Did he care?

He didn't want to think about that.

His fingers ghosted up her collarbone, brushing aside strands of wild, tangled hair, and he pressed a soft kiss to her throat. Lila let out a breathy sigh, shifting closer, her body instinctively curling into his.

Good. Stay asleep.

Another kiss, this time just beneath her jaw. Her pulse fluttered against his lips. His fingers hovered an inch away from the brooch, so close that he swore he could feel the malevolent energy crawling against his skin.

"If you take it now, it will consume you." A voice hummed, edged with concern, but mostly just acceptance. "Please don't do this to yourself, Adrien."

Adrien froze, the miraculous taunting him, begging him to take advantage of the opportunity and snatch it, deal with the consequences later. But eventually, logic won over the end. He clenched his jaw and withdrew his hand, resting it back on her waist as if it had never left. Just as Nooroo had asked.

His lips brushed against her temple, a bitter mimicry of something intimate before he slipped away from her. The kwami sat in the table, peering up at him from the corner of the box. Adren always thought of the kwami's as invisible, but Nooroo looked as sickly as his master, the vibrant purple of his skin (according to the other kwami's description of him anyway) was pale, saturated; one shade away of being completely devoid of colour. His wings were wrinkled, like crumpled paper, and moved in jutting, brief flutters that convinced Adrien that flight was no longer an option for him.

Adrien swung his legs over the side of the bed, stretching his arm out to the table and silently wiggling his fingers to usher Nooroo forward. As someone who'd only ever seen kwami move via flight, it was heartbreaking to watch Nooroo shuffle forward on his tiny legs, wobbling with every step until he tumbled into Adrien's palm.

"You must be Nooroo." He held Nooroo up to his nose, sighing. "I've been waiting a long time to meet you. I'm sorry that it's not to save you."

Nooroo shuffled closer, reaching up to wrap his paws around the tip of Adrien's nose. "Don't be." He said softly. "Your dedication to fighting for us is something to be celebrated, even if fate did not allow the victory we all wanted."

"Yeah well-" The implication hit Adrien a little too late. His eyes stared incredulously down at Nooroo. "Wait, you know?"

"Your timely absence during the final battle was not missed by everybody." Nooroo nodded. Before Adrien could even spare Lila's sleeping form a glance, the kwami smoothly added. "And no, Lila doesn't know; I couldn't even tell her if she commanded me."

There was something eerie about how gentle the kwami's touch was, how unshaken he seemed despite his withered state. Nooroo had been suffering for so long—longer than Adrien had been fighting, longer than Gabriel had even worn the brooch. And yet, he comforted him.

Adrien ran a thumb carefully over Nooroo's fragile body, mindful of how frail he looked. It was the least Adrien could do to try and comfort the kwami that had been living over his father's shoulders for years. The kwami who would have been spared so much pain and misery if Adrien ever took a second look at his father's new broach.

Nooroo had been there his entire life, a constant he was never aware of, lingering on every moment Adrien ever shared with his father. He wondered what Nooroo thought of the boy he'd silently watched grow into a man, how much attention Nooroo paid to all the stolen moments he witnessed, always watch-

Wait…

Red suddenly tinged Adrien's cheeks, the nineteen-year-old man reduced to a schoolboy as he nervously glanced over to Lila. "Um, were you…" He gulped. "You know, 'awake' when me and her were… You know?"

Nooroo stared at him flatly, delaying his answer just long enough for the awkward imagination to take over. There was a brief image of Nooroo, eyes wide with full-blown trauma, desperately searching for something to plug his non-existent ears. Was it like walking in on your parents? Or was it more like witnessing a pet hump a lamp post?

Oh God, suddenly Adrien saw every close moment he had with Marinette/Ladybug while transformed. How much of that was Tikki and Plagg forced to be a part of? They never said anything. Would they have said anything? Somebody better say something because his mind was spiralling with a topic he never expected to broach ever.

"I was hiding in the memory chamber." Nooroo explained.

Adrien awkwardly pushed his hands together, a nervous laugh taking over as he moved to retrieve his clothes. He needed to put some distance between him and Lila, because he was going to end up making some loud, strangled screams in a moment that were going to wake her up. "Right. G-Good. Good."

It did not help that, while he was getting dressed, Nooroo saw fit to climb onto his shoulder and, rather bluntly, continue to talk. "I am a being older than the formation of your entire planet; trust me, your mating rituals don't even register for me."

Adrien groaned, dragging a hand down his face as he yanked his shirt over his head. "Okay, great. That's… really good to know."

Nooroo hummed in agreement, his wings giving a tired little flutter. "Though, if I may offer an observation?"

Adrien stiffened. "You really, really don't have to."

Nooroo ignored him. "For a species so preoccupied with physical intimacy, humans often fail to recognize when they are engaging in self-destructive mating behaviours."

Adrien nearly tripped over himself pulling on his pants. "Nope. Nope, we're not talking about this."

Nooroo tilted his head. "Would you prefer I rephrase? You have, in essence, made a contract with her."

Adrien flinched, yanking his belt a little too tight. "It's not a contract."

A moment of awkward silence pervaded over the last few articles of clothing fumbling through his fingers. Nooroo didn't show any outward reaction, but there was a smidgen of amusement that seemed to escape his dead eyes. Adrien wanted to comment on it, but he simply drew his lips into a pout. He'd let Nooroo chuckle for now, after all it had to have been a long time since Nooroo last felt like he could.

When his outfit was secure, Adrien got to work shuffling over to the box. The advantage of ambushing Lila with a sudden answer to all her desires was that she hadn't been allowed a moment to consider stuffing the miracle box back in its magic mirror safe. Though, before dealing with the miraculous he made sure to grab that damn harness out of the junk box, grabbing a handy-dandy plastic bag on the floor to store it in.

There was only a moment of hesitation, briefly pondering if Lila left any other defences on the miracle box that would react to anyone other than her opening it, but this was a time of risks and Adrien tore it open with no more reservations.

A second passed. Adrien was still alive. Nothing to worry about.

"Was she right about these?" Adrien asked in a low whisper, hardly able to believe that such powerful artifacts were literally just sitting around in Lila's box of junk. Then again, maybe that's why it was the best hiding spot; he certainly wouldn't have found it in there if she hadn't shown it to him. "About their history, about… What they can do?"

"I wish I could give you any certainties." Nooroo's head hung low. "What I remember of that era is agreeing with the Guardians in sealing away my memory."

Adrien paused, stopping his movements to reach over and stroke Nooroo's forehead once more. "Why would they do that?"

Nooroo smiled weakly. "The Malevolence is made of memories; it stands to reason that my own memory of it could empower it." He leaned into Adrien's touch. "As for the miraculous… I can confirm that Hiroshi Hoshino did figure out how to make kwamis. I've even met Colt's; Maggni. The power of 'choice' seems to allow the user to manipulate the story they touch."

"You mean…" Adrien squinted, trying to sift through the metaphor and the actual function, something that too often intertwined with kwami powers. "He can guide his bullets because he's controlling their 'choice' of destination."

"I believe so."

Adrien tried not to think too deeply how such a power could be expanded upon if Colt ever wanted to get more creative with it. Instead, he moved onto his next question, brushing his fingers over the edge of the box.

"Is there anything stopping me from just taking all of them with me?" He asked. "They're stained with the Malevolence, just like your miraculous, right?"

"The Malevolence has merely damaged them. It's not rooted in them like it is in me." Nooroo explained, Adrien silently nodding along. "Though I think that it has enough presence that taking all of them with you would risk infection."

"What would you suggest then?"

Nooroo made a poor attempt to flutter over to them, his flight a clear struggle, but Adrien couldn't help but feel that the kwami didn't want him to help. "You only need one of them to stop Lila from completing her plan."

From the box, Nooroo fished out the banshee emblem, which was bigger than his entire head, and held it up to Adrien. "This one is the least tainted."

After a moment of hesitation, Adrien took the badge in hand, immediately feeling that familiar presence of the Malevolence poke at his mind. It's only a memory; he told himself before slipping it into his pocket. "This was the miraculous of consequence, right?"

"I've never seen it in action." Nooroo admitted. "I believe its power has something to do with storing consequences. I have no idea how that would manifest."

Adrien stroked his chin. "Maybe it's like… A Schrodinger's cat thing where you decide the outcome?"

Nooroo stared at him blankly. "You're only saying that because the word 'cat' is in it, aren't you?"

Adrien moved on to more important things and did not avoid the question at all, hoisting his bag up to his chest and moving towards the door to the painting room. "How long do you think she'll be out?"

"Long enough for you to explore the memory chamber, I'm sure."

Adrien frowned. "What? I was thinking more about interrogating you."

Nooroo's antennae twitched with amusement. "You can do both." Adrien narrowed his eyes, but Nooroo only tilted his head. "There's no reason to be secretive about it, Adrien. I know your thoughts linger on your uncle and your mother's final meeting."

Adrien swallowed hard. "Right. You're an empath."

"There's nothing shameful about your desire for truth," Nooroo said gently. "In fact, I think it's important that you see it."

Adrien's fingers curled around the badge, pulse thrumming against the cold metal. This wasn't just like reading information from a file, it was a memory. This was his mother. His uncle. The last moments before everything changed. He would be violating the most sacred sanctity a person could have; their own mind. He knew he wouldn't be comfortable with anyone poking around even his best memories, something about the whole idea was immensely violating.

But… He needed to know. He deserved to know. He wouldn't sleep until he knew the answer, and even asking Colt would come with the question of how reliable a narrator he'd be.

He inhaled sharply.

"Alright," He said. "Let's do this."

It took a moment to return to the room, to the painting. Now, it was displaying a different scene. One that felt so alien, so wrong in light of all that has occurred. A young, bloodied Colt was being held up by a young Gabriel. The years had been stripped away, leaving a man of Adrien's height with an uneven, wild clump of dark hair that had yet to be touched by the silver pen of age. His father looked warmer, softer, though a darkness still clung to him. His eyes, it was all in the eyes, that Agreste stare, full of venom and hatred that would burn whoever he was directing it at.

The two were standing under a spotlight, flickers of wooden walls transitioning into a cave around them. At their feet, bodies. Not people, no, on close enough look Adrien could make out a plastic texture, exaggerated features, and the fact that one of the heads were popped off with no blood or bone attached. They were life sized toy soldiers.

However, there was one detail that baffled Adrien the most.

"…Is Colt missing an arm?" He squeaked out the question, still caught up in the absurdity of it all as he pointed out the bloodied stump that Colt held out in front of him like a shield.

"Oh yes, this was when they were retrieving an old tome from a witch living under a toy factory." Nooroo said casually. Way too casually. "Colt had his arm ripped off during the fight."

Adrien's face paled, his jaw went slack, but he couldn't find the words. Taking in his expression, Nooroo was quick to add "Don't worry, Gabriel forced the witch to sow his arm back on afterwards."

"Did they… Do this a lot?"

Nooroo nodded. "Salvadore's vision of the world had him seeking out many avenues of power, and Gabriel and Colt made for quite the team before they lost faith in one another."

"Nothing I've heard about this Salvadore guy has been good." Adrien grumbled.

Nooroo's expression darkened into a haunting visage. "He was not a good man. And he brought out the worst in everyone bound to him."

Adrien took a cautious step toward the painting, staring at the grotesque scene. He'd braced himself for something horrifying, but this was just… Surreal. A witch living under a toy factory? Life-sized plastic soldiers? His uncle, missing an arm as if it were just another casualty of a bad night out?

His father looked human in a way Adrien had never seen before—young, unpolished, but already carrying that sharp, unforgiving stare. A stare that Adrien knew he himself had levelled at Defect when Nathalie's life was slipping through his fingers.

"Monarch." Nooroo hissed, openly disgusted as he said the name, like he was spitting it out. "That was… It was as if Salvadore had been reborn in Gabriel's body. Except he enslaved kwami instead of his own people."

Adrien felt his shoulder slump, shaking his head at the memory. Monarch had always been different from his father's other mantles, the pure unrefined monster within Gabriel Agreste brought to the forefront. It made sense that it was partially influenced from the worst monster his father had ever known.

At the very least, Adrien could consider himself lucky that he'd never have to meet Salvadore and find out how much worse he was for himself.

"I can't imagine how hard it must have been for you." He closed his eyes, the darkness saving him from Nooroo's tortured eyes. "Having your home destroyed, losing all the people you know, only to be picked up by and bound to some random stranger who turns out to be a mad man."

"I assure you, Adrien, there was nothing random about it."

Adrien's brow furrowed. "What?"

Nooroo's wings gave a weak flutter, the kwami's voice speaking with something ancient and knowing. "Your father was no stranger. From the moment he was born, I knew of his existence." A flicker of emotion, of something fond, hung at the edge of his words, but his tone remained disciplined. A teacher recounting a lesson. "He was a potential holder after all, I could sense him, I was aware of him."

It was a strange truth to process for Adrien. Plagg had told him that his placement as Chat Noir was entirely in Fu's hand, Fu's decision, but he never made any mention that his potential as a holder could be something he was born. Was it like a genetic thing? Could he make himself more of a candidate? Or was it all just him winning the destiny lottery?

Don't even get him started on the idea that his father was an actual, legitimate candidate for the butterfly miraculous; and that there were potentially even more who Nooroo missed out on.

He scratched his head. "You can sense future candidates?"

"All kwami can, potential candidates always have a certain gravity to them." Nooroo nodded to Adrien's shock. Plagg had some god damn explaining to do if this was true. "Though I'm more sensitive to it. My power allows me to pick up the emotions of people across the entire planet, after all."

Nooroo sighed, his tiny antennae drooping. "It would be years before we met, and even more years before our meetings would be face-to-face, but I knew him long before he picked me up." There came a moment when Nooroo stopped looking at him. He was facing Adrien, but his eyes were gazing passed him into the past. "I knew what he was capable of, what he could become, what was in his heart."

Even stranger, the world reacted with it. In the back of his mind, Adrien could feel the Malevolence retreating in on itself, groaning in pain. The paintings all shook and, for a brief time, the scene within all distorted to pull from Nooroo's own thoughts. There was nothing to see, however, as the reflection of Nooroo's centuries of memories were shown at incomprehensible speeds, each only staying in frame for a micro-second before skipping to the next one.

There was nothing to glimmer until everything came to a sudden halt. Each painting now displayed the scene of a graveyard, the sun blocked out by Notre Dame, leaving darkness and a thick fog to fall over it. At the centre of it all was a gravestone, and an even younger Gabriel Agreste, with purple streaks in his hair and a studded leather jacket hanging off his arm, stood there, dead. He was pale, he was bloated, he was drenched, he was gaunt, he looked like a zombie that had escape it's grave.

"That's why I chose him."

The idea was so absurd that it made Adrien jump, pushing his head down until he was nose-to-nose with the kwami. Nooroo saw all that Gabriel would accomplish, all the terrible things in his future, and still decided to just chill with Hawkmoth. "Y-You chose my father!?"

"I travelled all the way to France to seek him out, which is harder than you think when you've been locked away in the Guardian's vault for a few centuries." Nooroo gave a small, tired sigh. "I was too weak to materialize a physical form, so there was a lot of hitchhiking, lobbing my Miraculous across the world, and influencing people around me to want to mail my Miraculous involved."

Adrien blinked. "You mailed yourself across the world?"

"I spent two years going in the wrong direction. Somehow, I ended up on the moon."

Adrien's brain short-circuited. "You- You ended up on the moon!?"

Nooroo huffed, crossing his arms. "Don't ask."

Adrien ran a hand down his face. "I have to ask! How do you even… No, wait. That's not-" He shook his head rapidly, forcing his thoughts back on track. "You chose him? My father? You actually went out of your way to make sure he was the one to get your Miraculous?"

Nooroo bore what could be construed as a weak grin. "What matters is that, eventually, I found him."

In an instant, the grin was wiped away by a sullen frown. Those eyes stared into the past again, shrinking under the shadow of a tragedy unfolding before them, heavy and all-encompassing. Wings slumped over, his head bowed, and light refused to touch him.

Cautiously, Adrien moved to the neared wall, sliding down until his knees were bunched up against his chest. He propped Nooroo up on his knee, letting the kwami rest in the gap between them.

"What's wrong?" He asked softly.

"It was a… Sad day." A heavy atmosphere squeezed Adrien's lungs. It took him a moment, where the world seemed to darken and his vision seemed to blur, for him to realize that Nooroo was letting his influence seep into the space around them. "Despite all the despair I've come across in my travels, my connection to him made his own shine the brightest to me. It was overwhelming, blinding, to feel what was escaping his heart, what he was about to do…"

Nooroo's eyes squeezed shut, letting one rogue tear escape down his cheek. "He'd just finished with his mother's funeral, he was going to-" The words got stuck in his throat, he came to a dead halt, peering up at Adrien shamefully. He didn't want to finish that sentence, and Adrien was pretty sure that he didn't want to hear that sentence be finished anyway.

This was Adrien first time learning anything about his father's side of the family. The man never talked about them, never acknowledged them, as far as he was concerned, he was perfectly happy letting Adrien think he simply materialized into existence one day as the grumpy, stern old man he was known as.

Nooroo averted his gaze. "He was going to make a huge mistake, and there was nothing I could do about it. I was… Powerless to do anything other than plead for someone to save him."

Part of Adrien, the one with Chat Noir's voice, wanted to scoff. Yeah, I think everybody can see that nothing was going to stop Gabriel Agreste from confidently fucking up every damn time.

Nooroo pawed at his tear, wiping it away to make wave for a bittersweet smile. "Miss Emilie answered the call." He brightened up, breathing Emilie's name like one would invoke a subject of prayer. "She even picked me up and gave me to him, thinking I was something he'd lost."

Adrien's mother had never been too detailed about the day her and his father fell in love. However, one detail she would spare, the one she would gush about, was that she almost missed him that day. She was about to head home, not a single thought spared for anyone else, her feet were about to carry her away; until something called to her. Something begged her to look it's way, to where she would find Gabriel.

She would say that Gabriel's heart called for her that day.

And, when you think about it, Nooroo was the closest thing Gabriel had to a heart.

Just like that, Nooroo became a vital part of Adrien's story. If Nooroo hadn't been there that day, if he had chosen anyone else, what would have become of his father? Would he even come to exist? Would his mother be with another man, somehow alive and happy with another child? Would his father be different, better? Would Adrien's existence be nothing but a reminder that they were in the bad timeline?

"My mother and father fell in love over my grandmother's grave?" Adrien massaged his temple, the words leaving a bad taste in his mouth. "Jesus."

"Their relationship was an odd one to be sure." Nooroo was caught between a wince and a grin. "But I was happy for them. Even though I couldn't talk to Gabriel, it was nice to have company again, after being alone for so long."

Adrien clenched his jaw. He didn't want to snap at Nooroo, the poor kwami had been through enough, but it was hard not to let himself hiss. Hearing his father's greatest victim with so much fondness, as if the future that brought them here hadn't happened, as if his father wasn't a monster; it just didn't make sense.

"Shame how it ended." He managed to keep his voice even, pushing his trembling down to his fingers idly tapping his thigh. "Why did you choose him? What did you see in him?"

"A hero."

Adrien didn't know what face he pulled, whether it was bared teeth and rage or depression dripping into the open wound of his frown; but it was enough to make Nooroo look ashamed of his words, of his feelings.

"The world may have embittered his soul, but I saw hope in him." Nooroo tried to explain, gentle, fragile, soft; everything that made it hard for Adrien to be angry at him. Considering that Nooroo could most certainly peer into his heart right now, maybe the kwami knew just how to keep Adrien from having a full-on meltdown. "I saw a desire to do good suffocated by disappointment and mistreatment. I saw that, in our darkest hour, he'd become the hero he was meant to be and save us all."

This time, Adrien couldn't stop himself from scoffing. What a load of nonsense. Guess what? The darkest hour came, and his father created it, fueled it, turned out all the lights and only stopped because he couldn't stand up to the sun. And then what did this 'great hero' do? He asked Marinette to cover up his crimes because he was such a coward that even death couldn't stop him from running away from his responsibilities.

"…And then he became Monarch." Adrien snarled. Like Nooroo, he spat the name out like a slur. A despicable, hateful little word. "The mother of all disappointments."

He pulled the kwami close, pressing him to the heart beating with disgust and horror, searching for an understanding of his own. He needed Nooroo to explain, need Nooroo to give that closure for a boy in denial. Either confirm that his father was an irredeemable monster or reveal that there was some secret context that absolved him. Why did there have to be so many 'maybes' and 'could haves'?

"I don't get it; how can you talk about him like that? After all he did to you? To everyone?"

Nooroo tilted his head, his tiny wings giving a slow flutter. "It is simply not my nature, I suppose."

Adrien's teeth ground together. That wasn't an answer. That wasn't enough of an answer.

"I never hated your father," Nooroo continued, voice calm, as if discussing the weather. "I am an ancient being who has seen the birth and death of universes, existing as a conscious entity split across multiple realities."

Adrien's hands twitched.

"In that respect, I find it difficult to hold grudges when my suffering is so minuscule in relation to my lifetime." Nooroo's gaze softened. "And… well… it is difficult to explain, but the way in which we kwamis connect to our holders, especially those who wield us for so long, we end up understanding them on a deeper level than mere human interaction."

Adrien's stomach twisted.

"In a way, we bleed into each other. Your experiences soon enough become our experiences." Nooroo looked at him, steady and unblinking. "So, when I think of your father, I understand him as if he were me, seeing his lifetime in my mind as if they were my memories. I don't merely know why he is what he is, I've been what he is, been through the ways he justified his monstrous acts to himself."

Nooroo hesitated. Then, with the same softness, the same eerie calm, he added: "I see you as he does."

Adrien recoiled, breath hitching. A sharp chill raced down his spine, and for a moment, he wasn't sure if the Malevolence had twisted the air around him or if it was just him, just his own body locking up in horror.

His voice was barely above a whisper. "…And… What does he see?"

Nooroo's wings fluttered slightly, his voice impossibly gentle. "He sees Emilie's fingerprints massaged into every contour of your skin. He sees a warmth he can't comprehend. He sees a priceless artifact that will crumble the moment he gets too close. He sees wondering eyes constantly looking for someone else in his place."

Adrien's fingers twitched.

"He sees a light he doesn't deserve, silently waiting for the moment when the blood on his hands drowns it all out."

Adrien swallowed hard, bile rising in his throat. It was almost poetic—sickeningly poetic, in the way only his father's brand of self-inflicted misery could be.

"It sounds all heartfelt and all," he bit out, forcing his voice to stay steady, "but none of that stopped him from being a terrorist, a bastard, and a shit excuse for a father."

Nooroo didn't argue. He just nodded. "No. No, it did not."

Adrien blinked, caught off guard by the sheer finality in his voice.

"Understanding is not the same as justifying or excusing," Nooroo said. "I did not condone his actions. I merely understood them."

Adrien shook his head, exhaling sharply. "And that's supposed to make it better?"

"No," Nooroo admitted. "But it is the truth."

Adrien's hands curled into fists. He hated it. He hated that Nooroo could speak so calmly about all of this, that he could say such damning things and then follow them up with such unshakable acceptance.

Nooroo looked down, his tiny hands pressing together. "If Lila manages to hold onto me long enough, I shall maybe understand her in the same way." His antennae drooped, a weariness settling over him like dust on a forgotten relic. "The difficulty of being the Miraculous that so easily falls into the temptation of evil is that I know exactly what pain is driving my holders… But I also know that it's a pain that I can do nothing to sooth. I can only plead that they let it heal."

Adrien let out a slow breath, his throat tightening. "And do they?"

Nooroo gave him a look that was both knowing and unbearably sad.

Adrien looked away first.

Minutes passed before Adrien reminded himself that he was on a time limit, that Lila could wake up at any moment. So, he pushed himself to his feet with a heavy sway to his movements and set his sights on the last thing keeping him down here.

"I'm ready." He breathed.

It took only a thought under Nooroo's coaching for the painting to fade from that bittersweet scene to the memory he desperately desired. And it only took a push for him to fall through the canvas and vanish under the currents oof time.

---

He opened his eyes to a home, a real home. Not that empty, sterile visage of empty halls echoing with moments lost and forever buried under the weight of a life wasted. The mansion Adrien stood in the entrance way of was bright, lively and cluttered. Wire wrapped around the staircase railings, proudly displaying a bombastic banner drawn in crayon speaking of someone's Forty Second birthday; with the number crossed out and replaced with thirty five.

The distant echo of some early 2000's pop song he couldn't place wrapped him in a nostalgic blanket, anchoring him to this distant past his mind could only hope to retain. It wasn't a dream, it wasn't a thought, he was here, in his home before it became a prison.

A knock, a quiet set of thumps from a pitiful force turned Adrien's attention to the front door. He followed a trail of discarded confetti to the window, peering out to find what remained of his uncle at the door. Colt's height had been stolen by a hunch as the man leaned over his only lifeline, a cane. His muscles had thinned out enough to form sharp edges, breaking up the paling of his skin with dark patches. His prized hat now hung loosely from his neck, strung together by a thin thread.

Even just standing still seemed to be a task for the man that Adrien had only ever known as unbreakable, unable to stop his hands from shaking even as they gripped onto the cane's head for dear life.

"Uncle! Uncle!"

Adrien jumped, swinging around to find himself, smaller, pudgier and happier, balancing on a pile of books to look through the window on the other side. It was surreal looking at a younger version of yourself as if they were a whole new person. Even more so to look into that child version's eye, see the innocent light that brightened up every feature, and find yourself jealous that they had yet to lose it like you had.

Adrien shuffled closer to get a better look at, well, him. Mini-Adrien was quick and, for a moment, Adrien briefly deluded himself into wondering if the child would notice him. Of course, he was just a spectator viewing a memory, so the child simply passed through Adrien on his way to the door, Adrien's form parting like smoke.

Without the aid of a growth spurt, Child Adrien had a hard time getting the door open, forced to desperately scramble up the doorframe, using the scratched surface as handles, just to reach the door knob. The door opened with Adrien hanging off the handle, kicking his legs back and forth as he tried to find his way back down.

Fortunately, Colt came round the corner and caught Adrien by the waist, slowly lowering the boy to the ground. However, the moment Mini-Adrien was free, the child gleefully launched himself at his uncle, wrapping his arms around the man's leg. If Adrien was remembering correctly, at this point it had been more than a year since he'd seen his uncle in person.

What present Adrien saw that the miniature version didn't was how Colt ditched his cane the moment he saw that it was Adrien answering the door, sliding it up his back as if that would hide anything from the curious child. The sleeves of his coat were pulled tighter to hide the damaged skin, and the hat was resecured over his head. He couldn't rid himself of the pale skin, but Colt did his damndest to hide how frail he'd become from the boy.

"Slow down, Partner, I ain't going anywhere." He chuckled, prying Adrien off his leg and ruffling his hair. "Looks like y'all throwing one hell of a shindig. Hope I ain't interrupting."

The sharp, echoing click-clack of heels announced Nathalie's arrival. Without even looking at her, Adrien could just feel her expression turn sour upon noting Colt's presence.

"Mr. Agreste is not in at the moment." She said stiffly.

Now, looking at Nathalie; Adrien had to stifle a laugh.

On top of wielding an utterly cold as a corpse dead pan stare, Nathalie had been ambushed by little Adrien and Emilie to join in the birthday festivities. As such, a SpongeBob bandana adorned her neck, a tall red party hat cone sat slouched on her head and, under her blazer, was a shirt simply titling her a 'Party Animal'.

Colt had to take a moment to process her appearance, her narrowed scowl daring him to make a comment, before he cleared his throat. "I'm here for the birthday girl, Nat."

"Then you're wasting your time." Nathalie ushered his away with a wave of her clipboard. "She's not taking any visitors. This is a private affair."

For a moment, there was silence, the two adults holding each other's stares, something unknown passing between them. Adrien took this time to look at Nathalie who, quite honestly, somehow looked older here than she did in the present. Maybe the early years were just that stressful. Even in her party colours, she stuck out as prim, proper and ready to serve; the main years of her life as the assistant, before she became more in best and worst way possible.

Adrien found himself meeting her stare with a glare. He pondered how close they were to the birth of Hawkmoth. Did she have an inkling of what was going to happen? What she'd blindly enable? Nooroo had been with his father his entire life, had Gabriel already created the concept of Hawkmoth? Did he already wonder if Nooroo could be his solution? When did Nathalie get brought into the plan?

Adrien didn't know which answer would hurt the most or hurt the less.

"Uncle, uncle" Little Adrien tugged on Colt's coat, completely ignorant of the tension filling the air, dragging everyone's attention to him. "I-I-I was on the piano today, and I played Momma a really fancy song."

He was practically hanging off of Colt's coat tails by this point, clambering up until his foot was hooked on the coat pocket. Excitedly, he waved over Nathalie. "Tell him, Nathalie! I sounded really good, didn't I?"

Nathalie crouched down to his level, a ghost of a smile breaking through her mask. "You were wonderful, Adrien."

"That so, Little Maestro?" Colt whistled, hoisting Adrien up to his shoulder. "I could never get Nathalie to compliment my music."

"I could never hear your music after you blew out my ear drums the first time."

Nathalie's clap back went unheard by Colt, who gazes up into Adrien's eyes with an unquestionable sorrow. He made no move to explain himself, he just stares, eyes softening, shaking and fearful.

Little Adrien gazed back, innocently tilting his head. "What's wrong, Uncle?"

"Oh, me?" Colt's voice swept aside the rough gloom his eyes desperately wanted to escape, pulling Adrien into his arm, sat atop his elbow while Colt looked over the boy intensely. "I was just wondering if the old peepers are working," He brought his other hand up, measuring something between his thumb and forefinger, before making an exaggerated shrinking noise. "'cus you look like you've gotten shorter."

For Little Adrien, Colt might as well have just stabbed him. "No, I haven't!" Adrien whined, kicking at Colt's arm and pumping his tiny little fists into the air. "I'm bigger! Momma says I've grown an extra inch and a half."

Little Adrien ended up on the floor, standing up on his tip toes to stack up to Colt. He held his hand over his head and made a straight line to Colt's stomach. "See? I'm bigger than your belt buckle."

Colt shook his head, pushing the boy down until Adrien was slouching. "Nope, I'm sure of it. You've become a full-on gremlin now."

Adrien wildly kicked out his arms in protest, but his tiny fists meant nothing against even a sickly Colt's grip. "Nu-uh, I'm a big boy!"

"I'm sure you will be one day." Colt crouched down in front of him, smoothing out Adrien's hair with a flushed look. "Right now, you're my little buddy."

Present Adrien swallowed past the lump in his throat. It wasn't like he forgot about moments like this—it was more that they felt like stories from someone else's life, some distant bedtime tale he'd once been tucked into.

Colt's hand remained steady against little Adrien's back, his smile still worn, still present, but weaker somehow. His eyes—those deep, unreadable eyes—kept drifting back over Adrien's face, searching, memorizing.

He already knew, didn't he?

He knew this would be one of the last times he'd see him.

Present Adrien clenched his fists, his chest tightening with something raw, something unbearable. He wanted to scream, to reach out, to do something, but he was just a shadow in the past, helpless against the tides of time.

Little Adrien bounded past Colt towards the open door, peering out into the driveway. Adrien remembered, he was looking to see if Felix was going to be joining them, leaving the two adults alone for the moment.

The act was dropped immediately, Colt's breath coming out as a wheeze and Nathalie letting the roof of her brow fold into a disgusted glare. It was almost funny how much Adrien was so casually sheltered from even before the big secrets started taking root.

"Sir-" She started with a warning tone, as if she were catching someone in the middle of something illegal, but she was cut off by Colt throwing up his hand.

"Don't start with that crap, Nat." He growled. "I'm allowed to play with my god damn nephew."

She bristled at the interruption, but didn't bite. There was merely a sigh relieving herself of the tension before settling back into her usual cold, analytical demeanour. "Are you sure that's wise?"

Colt scoffed. "What do you think I'm gonna do, punt him like a football? Christ."

Nathalie pinched the bridge of her nose, exhaling sharply. "You know Gabriel and Emilie don't want you anywhere near him."

Colt's jaw tensed, his teeth grinding behind closed lips. "Yeah." He muttered, shaking his head with a bitter chuckle. "Yeah, I know."

Present Adrien stood motionless; his breath shallow. He had known, of course, that his parents had kept their distance from Colt. He had known that Felix's father was treated like an outsider in the Agreste family. But hearing it said outright, seeing Colt's weary, defeated reaction, made something ache deep in his chest.

Little Adrien came hopping back, a disappointed frown digging into his cheeks. And just like that they painted over their pain, pretended that their light shined as truthfully as Adrien's did.

"Did Felix not come with you?" He moaned.

Colt swallowed hard, plastering on a smile before turning back around. "Sorry, Bud. Felix is spending some quality time with his mother. But he wishes you guys well."

Both present and past Adrien united in giving Colt that unimpressed, pouting look. "Liar."

Colt clicked his tongue and ruffled Adrien's hair, chuckling. "Okay, he hopes someone smashes the cake."

Little Adrien furrowed his brows, chewing over Colt's words with the kind of exaggerated concentration only a child could manage. His lips pursed, his arms crossed, and for a brief moment, Present Adrien could almost see the gears clunking together in his little head.

Then, with all the solemnity of a tiny, determined knight, Mini-Adrien asked, "Is he okay?"

Colt stilled.

It was subtle, the kind of pause only an adult would notice, but Adrien caught it immediately. The slight hitch in his breath, the way his shoulders stiffened just a fraction before he smoothed it all over again.

"Wh-… Why wouldn't he be?" Colt asked, voice light, casual. Too casual.

Somewhere distant, somewhere dark, somewhere unthinkable, there was the wail of a child. For some reason, Adrien's eyes sought out Colt's fingers, expecting to find a familiar ring adorning them, only to see all his fingers bare. Still, Colt seemed to instinctually rub at the spot where the ring used to be, a nervous tick.

Little Adrien shrugged, kicking the floor with the tip of his shoe. "I just worry about him sometimes."

Colt exhaled through his nose, shaking his head. "There's nothing to worry about, Bud." He reached out, ruffling Adrien's hair again, but this time, it felt more like a distraction than affection. Like he needed to fill the space between them with something other than words. "It'll all be okay soon enough."

"He's right, you know."

Adrien's breath caught in his throat.

That voice.

He recognized that voice.

Church bells tolled in Adrien's head, drowning out everything else and shaking him up. At least, that's what her voice sounded like to him. Her voice was the sun rising to banish the night. Her voice was flutter in his chest in the face of a new curiosity. Her voice was silk, honey, warmth; it was everything.

A voice so warm, so full of love, that it had carved itself into his bones even after years of silence. A voice that had once sung lullabies in the dark, soothed scraped knees, and whispered secrets only a mother could share with her son.

A voice he had missed for so long.

Slowly—cautiously—fearfully, he turned.

And there she was.

Standing in the doorway to the dining room, bathed in the golden light of the chandelier, was her.

Emilie Agreste. In the present, she was dead, she was gone; and she took all her warmth with her.

Adrien staggered, his body locking up with the weight of too much feeling all at once. A breath ripped from his throat—half a sob, half a prayer—as his vision blurred. Here she was, standing just a few feet away, smiling at him with that same soft expression she had always reserved just for him.

It's just a memory, he told himself. Just a memory. But that didn't stop his knees from buckling.

Tears streamed down his face before he even realized he was crying. He covered his mouth with his hand, but it did nothing to stifle the gasping, broken sobs that clawed their way out of him. He wanted to say so many things.

I missed you so much.

I don't know how to do this without you.

I wish I could hear your voice for real.

I wish you were here. I wish you were here. I wish you were here.

His feet moved before he could think. His body lurched forward, dragging himself toward her, barely able to keep himself upright. He couldn't stop himself. It didn't matter that she was just a shadow of the past, just a fragment of a life he had long since lost.

He needed to be near her.

"Mom…"

The world of the memory seemed to pause as his focus waved, freezing all the actors and props in place just to allow him this one moment.

His voice cracked. His chest ached, wracked with too many emotions to name. He wanted to tell her everything. How much he missed her. How lost he had felt without her. How he had tried—really tried—to be good, to be strong, to be everything she would have wanted him to be.

But he hadn't done anything right. His mother had been the best person he had ever known, and she would be so disappointed in him.

"I'm sorry." He whispered, his voice barely more than a breath. "I haven't—I haven't done anything right."

The memory of Emilie tilted her head, as if listening.

Adrien let out a weak, bitter laugh. "You'd be so disappointed in me."

She didn't answer. She couldn't.

Because she wasn't really here.

Adrien clenched his fists, his body shaking. His throat burned, his heart felt like it was crumbling—but even so, even knowing it was a memory, he still reached out. Just one hug. Just one second of feeling like he wasn't alone.

Just one—

His arms passed through her.

A sharp gasp ripped out of him as his body stumbled forward, nearly falling straight through where she stood. The warmth of her presence vanished, replaced by the cold, cruel reminder that she was nothing but a shadow.

He wept in that scuffed corner of the hall, for the reality of his position had never been so painfully real. He had no mother. He had no father. He had no family, and his friends were soon to follow. Adrien Agreste was alone.

Eventually, he dried his tears and returned to his feet. The world continued on.

Nathalie had her head bowed as Emilie made her way over to the group. "M-Mrs Agreste, I'm sorry. I've told him that you-"

"It's quite alright, Nathalie." Emilie's grin were like staring into the sun, so bright it could hurt you. Adrien watched as his miniature clone rushed forward and threw himself into her arms, burying his face in her dress. Emilie looked like she wanted to laugh but couldn't make it out before a 'daaaaw' escaped. She crouched down to pull Adrien into a bone crushing hug, as if she hadn't just seen him minutes prior. "I think we can make an exception for Adrien's favourite uncle."

Nathalie looked down at her like she'd grown a second head, but didn't comment. Her place was to follow, not question.

Something crinkled in Emilie's grin, trading a silent plea with Nathalie before patting Adrien on the back. And then her eyes met Colt's and her smile dimmed. Instinctively, she pulled Adrien tighter so he couldn't look up and see the strain. "I get the feeling that this will be an important talk, and who knows when we'll see him again?"

Adrien's heart twisted as he watched himself, so small and unaware, grasp at the fabric of his mother's dress.

"See, Nathalie? Momma's cool with it," Little Adrien insisted, flashing a triumphant grin.

Emilie laughed softly, smoothing his hair back.

Little Adrien turned his eager eyes toward Colt, bouncing on his toes. "Come on, Uncle! I wanna show you the present I got for Momma! I haven't shown her yet, but I made it extra cool."

Colt hesitated, his jaw working as his gaze flickered to Emilie. Then, with an exhale, he shook his head. "Maybe later, Bud."

"But… But…"

Emilie cupped Adrien's cheeks, pressing a quick, playful kiss to his forehead. "Honey, it'll be fine. I'm just going to have a little chat with your uncle." She tapped his nose. "Then I'm gonna come back, and you're gonna knock my socks off with your present."

Little Adrien scrunched his nose. "But you're not wearing socks."

Emilie gasped, feigning shock. "Well, that's just how amazing it is."

He giggled but still clung to her.

Emilie's smile softened. "Now, you be a good boy and go keep Nathalie company." Her hand pointed to the other side of the room, to the door that led into the living room. "Nathalie, why don't you go and put on some music? Adrien's quite the little dancer."

Nathalie wordless pointed to herself, as if there was another servant named Nathalie that Emilie would be talking to, before curtly nodding and slinking into the next room.

"I don't wanna go." Little Adrien whined, pressing his face into her shoulder.

Adrien found himself beside the child, making the same motions, his form flickering through the past as a glitch. "Don't let him go." He murmured.

"Adrien…"

Little Adrien sniffled. "Father said that I'm supposed to take care of you when he's not here."

"Please…" Adrien begged. "Don't leave me again."

Emilie stroked his hair, her expression unreadable for a brief moment. "Sweetie, I've been fine all day. A few minutes isn't going to have me keeling over."

Little Adrien pouted. Present Adren bawled. "You're wrong. You're wrong."

Emilie lifted her pinky finger. "I'll be fine, pinky promise."

"You won't be fine."

Hesitantly, Little Adrien looped his pinky with hers.

"Don't let her go. Don't let her leave. You don't know what's gonna happen."

Both versions of Adrien leaned into her touch, but only one of them knew enough to cry. Yet, in unison, they whimpered. "I wanna stay with you."

"Adrien."

He stopped.

He didn't speak, didn't breathe, didn't move. He just stopped. Her voice, the one he associated with such sweet harmony and comfort, it suddenly washed over him as an all-powerful pressure. That pressure ended around his throat, ripping the words from his lips and the thoughts from his mind.

In that moment, both Adriens could only remain there listlessly, stuck in a trance only her voice could break. Nothing else in the world mattered, just that voice, just her. For reasons Adrien's couldn't explain, his gaze was guided away from his mother's face, and instead to the ring on her finger. The one whose dull metal suddenly seemed to overpower all other colours with it's vibrance. It carried her voice, it wormed it's way into Adrien's head, and present Adrien could barely muster the awareness to acknowledge it.

Emilie took hold of his cheeks, soft as she usually did, but now it was like she was choking him. "You don't want to stay with me, you want to escort Nathalie into the other room and dance with her until I come back. And you're going to have so much fun."

His own voice came out breathy, almost detached. "Y-Yeah, you're right." He swallowed. "I wanna dance with Nathalie."

Like a switch had been flipped, Little Adrien's tension was wiped away, replaced by a sunny disposition. He took off running to follow Nathalie's exit, calling out to her. "Nathalie! Come on, I wanna show you my moves!"

Present Adrien fell back, coughing out air like he just broke through a deep-sea plunge. As he braced himself against the staircase, he found Colt wearing a horrified expression, eyes staring at the place where Adrien used to be.

"Did you just…" He began to mutter, but was unable to fully spell out the accusation, leaving Adrien in the dark even when they didn't know he was there.

Emilie was lazy in trying to look innocent, almost exaggerated with how she clasped her hands together and pressed them to her cheek. "Tell my son to have fun and not disturb me for a few minutes?" She shook her head, eyes half-lidded, but her voice didn't lose that sweetness. "Oh no, the horror."

Colt choked on whatever words he had prepared, turning on his heel to glare at her. "That's not all you did, and you know it."

She stalked past him; all sense of that warmth Adrien was familiar with drained from her eyes. To make it clear; Emilie Agreste had people who'd literally spat on her, and she did not regard them with the same venom that she freely levelled at Colt. She could laugh off mistakes that even crossed into criminal territory, but Colt Fathom's mere presence tested her once bottomless patience.

Was Colt a special case, or was his mother just that good of an actress even when she doesn't need to be?

Her fingers tip-toed up Colt's shoulder, nails cutting across his throat before pinching a stray hair of his uncombed stache and plucking it. "I also know that you've done far worse than that, Fathom." She said dryly, flicking the stolen hair away. "So, spare me the lecture."

Colt didn't have words, he just had frustration, watching her strut her way back to the dining room.

She paused by the doorway, casting a curt glance over her shoulder to where he remained rooted to the spot. That purposely, obviously, fake grin broke free and she beckoned him over. "Did you want to meet with me or not?"

Colt's lip curled, as if tasting something bitter. His fists clenched at his sides. But still, he followed. Adrien hurried after them, though not as eagerly as he did before.

The dining room hadn't changed much from the present, it was simply more festive this time around. Glitter, glue and lollipop sticks were strewn across the table alongside the horrifyingly ugly end results of Adrien and Emilie's arts and craft projects. He'd tried to recreate his mother and father out of sticks, but his father's bottle cap eyes ended up slumping down to his mouth.

The real kicker was one crayon drawing of his father. It was supposed to be Gabriel flapping his arms and pretending to be a butterfly; based on a joke Emilie made about how Gabriel would one day break from his grumpy cocoon and become a beautiful butterfly.

Oh, how sour that joke became in hindsight.

Emilie sat herself at the head of the table, pouring herself a glass of wine. Colt lingered in the doorway, recreating the initial portrait that represented this memory.

"You look well." Colt commented without a hint of intent. It was just filler conversation, as Colt seemed to be questioning his courage to the real subject he wanted to broach.

"I do try." Emilie raised the glass, her eyes peeking over the rim, half concealed by the red liquid inside. "If my boy is going to put all this effort into a birthday party, the least I can do is put at least half as much effort into looking the part."

Colt lumbered into the room, stiff, slow and painfully unsure. Emilie looked less than impressed as she watched this man struggle to make it to a chair, keeping his arms locked behind his back, desperate to prove that such a simple human action wasn't beyond him.

"Don't hide the cane on my account." She groaned, rolling her eyes as Colt looked scornfully down at the cane in question. "I'm not even being funny, with how much muscle you carry around, you falling over might cause structural damage."

He didn't want to lean on the cane, but neither did he want his continued struggles to be bare for the woman to scrutinize. He settled for dropping himself into the nearest seat, digging his elbow into the tablecloth. "This mansion has weathered worse than a corpse."

"Maybe in its youth." Emilie mused, going for her first sip of her wine. She made an exaggerated lip smack when she pulled away, clearly having been waiting for a good drink all day. "I'm pretty sure it's lost its special spark since its original host was… Evicted."

Colt visibly shivered at that, his eyes looking over the worn walls with careful eyes, waiting for something to jump out at him. "Can never be sure with Salvadore." He grunted. "I don't know what possessed Gabriel take over this place. If it were up to me, we'd have burned it all down."

Emilie chuckled, light and lilting. She swirled the wine in her glass, gaze dipping lazily toward him. "That's because my husband has vision while you only know how to break things."

Colt didn't immediately respond, his lips pressed into a firm line. His fingers drummed once against the tablecloth before curling into a fist. "…That's not inaccurate."

She rested her cheek against her hand, a smile tugging at her lips. "Mhm, you must really be at your lowest if you're conceding to an insult this early."

Colt leaned forward, eyes narrowing. "I'm dying, Emilie. And you know it." Adrien felt his breath hitch. He'd said it so bluntly, so matter-of-factly, despite how clearly it scared him.

Emilie, however, remained unbothered. If anything, she looked annoyed. "This sounds like something that could have been a phone call."

"You can hang up a phone, but you can't silence me in person."

She sighed, tilting her head back against the chair. "What do you want me to say, Fathom?" Colt clenched his jaw. "Did you come all the way down here hoping I'd shed a tear over you? I know you're not here to make buddy-buddy."

"I want you to tell me why." His voice was steady, but there was something strained underneath. "It was the damaged Peacock, wasn't it?"

The… Peacock? Adrien reeled back as if the words were physically lashing out at him. Colt couldn't have meant the miraculous, could he? But, of course, Adrien now knew that Gabriel had the peacock in his possession for an undisclosed amount of time, that's how Mayura was allowed to exist.

And, of course, it all lined up so well. Two people with access to the Peacock miraculous, they both fall to the same unknown illness, left as hollow husks from a condition that doctors simply can't explain because everything says that they're healthy. A condition that corelates perfectly with a broken miraculous.

But none of that told Adrien what the hell the two were using it for. What sentimonster was worth their lives? Unless, as Colt was implying, they didn't know?

For the first time, Emilie hesitated. It was barely noticeable—just the slightest pause in the way she reached for her glass again. But Adrien saw it. Colt saw it too.

"Damaged Miraculous damages the user." He continued, relentless. "I figured that much out when the timing made too much sense, when I recognised the magic tugging at me." He let out a bitter chuckle. "But then… Why do you look so healthy? Why is the worst I'm hearing about your condition some sick days off and a cough the same days I'm getting heart attacks?"

"You've been listening to people gossiping about me?"

"I hear a lot of rumours about the great actress Emilie Graham de Vanily—you're a big hit in England. People just can't stop talking about you." He leaned back in his chair, watching her carefully. "I wonder if your husband's heard any of them."

Emilie huffed a quiet laugh, but there was no amusement in it. She didn't confirm or deny anything. She just swirled the wine in her glass, gaze flicking down to the dark liquid. "Is that a threat?"

He exhaled sharply through his nose, his fingers curling into the tablecloth. "What is there to threaten you with?" There no mirth in his grin, but not even bitterness either, just acceptance. "They're just rumours, after all. Baseless, fictitious gossip, right?"

Emilie glared, slamming her glass down. "I may dabble in some indulgences that Gabriel wouldn't approve of, but that's the end of it." She snapped. "It… It helped with the pain sometimes."

"But now the pain's stopped." Colt growled, pushing himself to his feet and knocking the chair over. "Gabriel found it, didn't he? He found a cure, or some sort of way to repress it, that's why I look like a corpse, and you look immaculate."

Her expression didn't change, but Adrien could see something flicker behind her eyes. That false smile came over her again, but this time it looked a lot more forced. "Have you ever thought that it has something to do with the fact that I'm a healthy woman in her late thirties?" She rolled her head back. "I eat well, exercise often, have no debilitating conditions outside of the Peacock; and I'm not the one who sold their body to the devil."

Colt's fist threatened to split the oak table in two, the force of his punch sending glitter shooting up into the air. "Bullshit, if it was anything else hurting my body, the doctors would have picked up on it."

The only reaction Emilie had was a frown at the shaking causing her to spill her drink, scrunching up her nose and sighing. "Well, you know more about magic than me, Cowboy. I'm too much of a dumb dumb to give you any useful advice."

"If you were still rotting inside, you wouldn't be so damn calm." He roared, throwing his arms out to point at her. "How else do you explain your attitude? Huh? Huh?!"

"A good, soothing cup of coffee and some painkillers can do wonders on a good day." She shrugged, her eyes narrowing into thin slits. "You really want to know the difference between us? I accepted my future when I used the Peacock, while you're still running from it."

"Accepted your-"

Colt and Adrien froze up at the same time, a dark, bitter realization knocking them back. Adrien stumbled, but Colt fell, his knees buckling until he was hanging off the table by one arm. His cane was chucked to the wayside, the hand reaching down to clasp his heart, to try and ground himself, but all Colt could accomplish was flying into a rage.

With pure simmering venom, he hissed. "You knew."

"But that wasn't it, it couldn't have just been one strike to spur him on to murder, right? Not after what she had already done to me." So easily, Chalot's words to Adrien came back in full force.

Adrien rushed over to his mother's side, pressing himself against her chair and desperately staring into her eyes. He needed a reaction, he needed shock, or disgust, or offense; anything to show how horrified she was about Colt's paranoid accusation. "He's wrong." He whispered. "Tell him that he's wrong."

"I love my sister dearly, but she was human like any one of us."

"You… You fucking knew!" He repeated, slower this time, like he needed to hear it again to believe it. His face twisted with something desperate, backed by his jerking movements as he hobbled along the tables. "You handed the Peacock over to me with a smile on your face, and you fucking knew."

The mountain of a man, fury and bile on his lips, continued his staggering approach, and Emilie continued to say nothing. She just stared ahead, past him, past his words, just staring into somewhere else.

"It's not true." Adrien cried. "You didn't… You couldn't… You wouldn't…"

"Under the right circumstances, even she could be… Cruel. Cruel and vindictive."

"Did you get Gabriel and Amilie in on it too?" Colt's bark was worse than his bite, stumbling forward and slipping to his knees before her, hacking and trembling even as he screamed. "Were you giggling to yourself when you signed my death warrant?"

Emilie could have said so many things, could have rejected the accusation in many ways. But all she chose to say, with that dead look in her eyes, not even one of hatred or pleasure, was "It doesn't matter."

Blood dripped down Colt's cheek, bruises seemed to mark his throat for ever loud syllable, but Colt didn't care. He roared through the pain. "Loyalty always matters!"

Colt's breath was ragged, his chest heaving as if he had just gone ten rounds in a fight he was losing. His knuckles turned white where they pressed into the table's edge, his entire body trembling with the weight of his rage, his betrayal.

His voice cracked, raw and stripped bare. "Why?"

Emilie didn't flinch. She sat with the same detached grace as always, swirling the wine in her glass, letting it catch the light with nothing more than a passing thought.

"Why would you do this to me?" Colt's voice rose, strained, and desperate. "I've never done anything to you except be an obnoxious ass, and that sure as hell isn't a justification for murder."

She exhaled slowly, then tipped her head toward him. Her expression was unreadable, calm in a way that made Adrien's stomach churn.

"Would you have changed anything?" She asked softly.

Colt blinked, caught off guard.

"Would you have given up Felix," She continued, voice steady, but trembling with disgust. "just to live a few more years?"

What does the Peacock Miraculous have to do with getting Felix to live? Maybe if Adrien wasn't so caught up in the moment, in the weight of what his mother was admitting, he might have come up with a better explanation than assuming there was some threat to Felix that they used the peacock to defeat.

His mouth hung open for a second before his face twisted in disbelief. "That's not fair."

Emilie's fingers tapped against the rim of her glass, slow and deliberate. "You know what's not fair?" Her tone remained eerily level, but something sharp and simmering lurked beneath it, tinged with a few notes of a bitter, vengeful laugh.

She leaned forward, resting an elbow on the table, eyes locked onto him. Finally, she was looking at him, really looking at him. She took in the dying man before her, saw the ways his once strong body so easily crumbled, and all she could muster was a disgusted sneer at the pathetic creature before her.

"Watching the light fade from my sister's eyes." She said coldly. "Dying inside because she's been sold off and chained to a warmonger's pig-headed lout of a son."

Adrien stiffened.

"Listening to her sobbing into the phone just to cope with how her life has ended up." Emilie went on, her words turning to steel. "She wonders how Felix's future will be affected because her husband is losing all of their money to failed business schemes. That's not fair."

"I didn't arrange the damn marriage." He spat. "I had the same lack of choice in the matter that she did." Colt sucked in a breath, jaw tightening as he drove an accusatory finger into the air. "We wouldn't have had to get married if you and Gabriel didn't run away and leave us to placate your screwed-up family!"

Emilie clicked her tongue, shaking her head. "Gabriel had plenty of reason to get away from you." She folded her hands together in front of her, her gaze steeled by a righteous fury that she'd been burying for who knows how long.

"Do you know how many times he wakes up screaming?" She asked, leaning down the Colt's level and yet still towering over him. "How many times I have to comfort him and convince him that I'm real?"

Her voice was slow, heaving, not by design – her cheeks puffed and deflated, her eyes twitched and crumbled, her rage warring against her sorrow as all these tainted memories bubble to the surface. "All the scars and damage he can't heal from—the pain inflicted upon him by the world you dragged him into."

Colt's lips curled back. "You cannot be seriously pinning Salvadore on me."

Emilie's expression didn't waver. "You ruined his life."

"I gave him his life!" He snarled. "In fact, I gave you, all of you, a life! If we'd never met, he'd be rotting away in some gutter, and you'd be married off to some other ponce!"

Emilie threw her head back to laugh. "You really want to act like you've done anything in our lives other than waste space and ride his coat tails?" The wine glass slipped from her fingers and spattered her hands with that dark red liquid. "Gabriel pulled himself up on his lonesome just fine. You were the one who always needed him to keep you afloat. Even with all your connections and wealth and power, all you knew how to do was piss it away."

"That's not true."

"Look in the mirror sometime." Emilie snapped at him, unrelenting and without mercy. "The only things you've accomplished in life are what you've welched off of others. You're a… You're a parasite! Sucking everything you can out of everybody close to you and then leaving them to rot."

She was admitting to it. She wasn't trying to deny it, and she didn't even feel like she had to justify it; she was explaining it out of curtesy, not because she thought it needed to be explained.

Emilie Agreste gave Colt Fathom the broken Peacock Miraculous under the explicit hope that it would kill him. She attempted to murder him, only for Gabriel Agreste to kill him first.

Colt trembled, his voice lowering under the force of Emilie's attack. "I… I never left Gabriel. Or Amilie. Or Felix. I never walked out on anyone."

She finally rose to her feet, snatching Colt's hat from his head and glaring down at it. It was a beaten up eyesore dedicated to an era that had long since passed, and should have been thrown out years ago; it was as if she were holding him in her hands. "You really wanna know why I did it?"

Stalking over to the fireplace, Adrien was convinced for a moment that she was about to throw the hat on the fires. Instead, she remained there, staring into the flames, stewing. "You wanna know why no one sticks around? Why your brothers dumped you as soon as they realized that you're no longer the heir to the family jewels? Why your own son wants nothing to do with you?"

"Because you give nothing, you do nothing. You take and take and take, and you think that makes you something, but it doesn't." She turns back to Colt, his head bowed low, his shoulders trembling. He tries to get to his feet, but his knees fail him at every turn. "What are you? I'll tell you; you're not a father, not a husband, not a brother, not a man. You're a defect."

She grinned down at him, all teeth, all venom. "You're not even a real Fathom."

It happened so fast Adrien barely registered the movement—only the sound.

A crack like thunder split the air as Colt's hand struck Emilie's face.

She went down.

Her head snapped to the side from the force of it, sending blonde curls whipping through the air, her body lurching as she lost her balance. The hat in her grip slipped through her fingers and crumpled against the floorboards. She hit the ground hard, the impact sending a shockwave through the room, knocking the breath from her lungs.

Adrien flinched, horror clawing up his throat as he watched his mother crumple.

For a moment, everything froze.

Colt stood there, his chest heaving, the weight of what he had done settling onto him like an avalanche. His hand remained suspended in the air, fingers curled as if still wrapped around the heat of that strike, the imprint of it burned into his skin.

Emilie stirred, her hand pressing against the floor, nails scraping against the wood as she pushed herself up.

Slowly, deliberately, she raised her head, revealing the deep, blooming red mark spreading across her cheek. And yet, she looked as elegant and in control as ever.

Emilie wiped at her lip, smearing away a small trickle of blood. Colt didn't answer. He just stood there, fists still shaking, his chest rising and falling with ragged breaths.

She exhaled, shaking her head. "We're dying, Colt." She said, voice gentler than it had any right to be. "There's nothing you can do to stop it."

Adrien swallowed thickly, his stomach twisting. Dying. It wasn't like he didn't already know how this all ended, but hearing her say it so plainly made it feel real in a way he hadn't been prepared for.

Emilie pushed herself fully upright, dusting off her dress like nothing had happened. Then, with an air of finality, she reached for her abandoned wine glass, staring into the dark liquid like it held all the answers in the world.

"Now, if you'll excuse me." She continued, "I'd prefer to spend my dying days enjoying the company of my loved ones, rather than leaving them so I can go and slap around another dying woman."

Colt let out a sharp, breathless laugh—one that held no humour. "You're saying that like I have any loved ones left."

Emilie met his gaze, tilting her head. "And whose fault is that, Colt?"

There was no answer Colt could muster, only minutes of silence as Emilie pulled out her makeup kit and started covering up the damage.

For Colt, the memory would end with him storming away and out the door, where Gabriel would eventually find him at his home, where the police would eventually find his body.

For Adrien, his memory ended a few minutes later. What he remembered most was how beautiful his mother was, and how little he ever considered how much she covered up for that beauty.

She was beautiful in the mornings.

She was beautiful on sad days.

She was beautiful in the night.

And she was still beautiful when Adrien and Nathalie found her in the entrance way, passed out for, as far as Adrien knew, for the last time.

---

Adrien was trembling on his return to the memory chamber, the soft, comforting sensation that Nooroo was soothing his heart with being the only thing stopping him from straight up collapsing.

Nooroo fluttered anxiously beside him, his tiny wings beating softly against the still air of the chamber. His presence was warm, gentle, a stark contrast to the raw, ice-cold horror still sinking its claws into Adrien's chest.

"You're shaking." Nooroo murmured, concern lacing his delicate voice.

Adrien let out a sharp exhale, his breath hitching halfway through. His hands clenched and unclenched at his sides, his fingers twitching as if trying to grasp onto something solid—something real.

"Nooroo…" His voice was barely above a whisper. "Is everyone in my family a monster? Is it just fucking genetic? Do I have to be one too?!"

"Your family is complicated." Nooroo hesitated, his tiny form stiffening. "People are complicated. We rarely see all sides of a person, when they're put in the right situation."

"Did… Did my father know?"

"No." Nooroo hesitated, his tiny form stiffening. "Your mother never told him, nor your aunt, of her intentions."

"How could she do this?" Adrien turned, his eyes burning as they met Nooroo's. "Is everything I know about anyone all just lies?"

Nooroo's wings faltered mid-beat, and for a moment, he seemed to shrink. He floated down, coming to rest lightly in Adrien's shaking hands. "It's easy to justify horrific acts when you believe it will save the ones you love, and make up for any pain you caused them."

Adrien squeezed his eyes shut, swallowing back the bile rising in his throat. His mother's words still echoed in his skull, cruel and sharp and impossible to unhear. The way she had looked at Colt, the way she had spoken—so unshaken, so certain.

"The parents who raised you were not lies, their love for you and others wasn't fake. Your mother's compassion, kindness and relationships weren't fake." Nooroo was silent for a long moment, his antennae drooping. "But neither was her moments where she let her darkness take hold."

Adrien let out a hollow, bitter laugh, his head tilting back. "Do you really believe that?"

"Adrien, I told you before that I believed your father would become a hero, a worthy holder of my miraculous who would save us all." Nooroo met his gaze, sadness ancient and knowing in his eyes. "I still believe that."

"But my father is dead. How can he-"

"And yet, the Malevolence will never let him go." The kwami drew close, reaching as far as he could around Adrien's neck, giving the boy one last hug. "And until this crisis has been solved, neither will I."

---

Next Time - Showtime:

Anarka and Jagged were a loud bunch, living it up in the front seat as they argued over which song to play over the trip. You'd never be able to tell that they had such a messy divorce or reunion, that one of them abandoned their kids to be raised without a father. You'd think they were just old friends getting a rise out of one another.

Marinette had to say; she was jealous. Could she ever hope for a future like that? Even if she saves the day, even if she somehow fixes everything, would there anything that could fix all that she's broken between her friends and family?

She couldn't imagine sitting in the same room as Alya, the person she trusted with everything, and being able to talk like they used to after all that Marinette had done. She couldn't imagine Adrien taking her in his arms ever again, or be able to stand her touch without burning up.

What was going to be left for her when all of this was over? She already knew it was the end of the line for Ladybug, but she didn't know if she was ready to give up Marinette too.

Well, it was only fair, she supposed. She brought about this hell with Gabriel, might as well be damned in it with him as well.

Anarka and Jagged were a loud bunch, living it up in the front seat as they argued over which song to play over the trip. You'd never be able to tell that they had such a messy divorce or reunion, that one of them abandoned their kids to be raised without a father. You'd think they were just old friends getting a rise out of one another.

Marinette had to say; she was jealous. Could she ever hope for a future like that? Even if she saves the day, even if she somehow fixes everything, would there anything that could fix all that she's broken between her friends and family?

She couldn't imagine sitting in the same room as Alya, the person she trusted with everything, and being able to talk like they used to after all that Marinette had done. She couldn't imagine Adrien taking her in his arms ever again, or be able to stand her touch without burning up.

What was going to be left for her when all of this was over? She already knew it was the end of the line for Ladybug, but she didn't know if she was ready to give up Marinette too.

Well, it was only fair, she supposed. She brought about this hell with Gabriel, might as well be damned in it with him as well.