Chapter Text
Chloe's bare feet pounded on the pavement, just a little louder than the rain.
And just a little louder than her footsteps were the footsteps of the creature chasing her.
It just wasn't fair, Chloe couldn't help thinking to herself as she ran. Why did her stupid car have to break down? Why did one of the monsters plaguing Paris have to pick then to come down the street? Why did her stupid driver have to sprint off without her? Why did the stupid monster have to decide her to chase her instead of him? Was it because she was wearing heels? Was the creature chasing her making all of its decisions based on shoes?
Because while Chloe would normally commend that decision, she could not approve of the fact that it had decided to kill her, or whatever it was exactly these creepy things did to their victims.
She'd ditched the shoes pretty fast. Which sucked, because they were designer shoes, and they were adorable, and Chloe didn't like losing adorable things, but she figured surviving was probably more important. She'd revisit that decision after she lived through this. If she lived through this.
But losing her completely fabulous shoes had not made the creature stop chasing her, though it had helped her run a little faster. Which meant that Chloe was probably still gonna die, and now she would die barefoot, which just made the whole dying thing worse.
The thing was getting closer to her. She could hear it. Where was Ladybug? Wasn't it her sworn duty to protect Paris? Didn't she know Chloe needed her? Heck, at this point, Chloe would even take Chat Noir. Sure, he was the lame and mostly useless one of the two, but she'd probably cry in relief to see him right now.
Then the creature slammed into her, and Chloe screamed, a good, loud, blood curdling scream, because if she was going to die someone was going to hear her. The whole blasted city of Paris was going to hear her. She was going to die the most dramatic death this stupid creature had ever seen.
The creature pinned her to the ground and Chloe got her first close look at one of the monsters plaguing her city.
It looked almost human, almost like a man. But its form was too insubstantial and dark, like it was made of shadows, and its face was twisted into a shape that looked decidedly less than human. It also smelled like rotting meat.
But Chloe barely noticed any of those things. Her attention was very much focused on the claws digging into her arms, mixing her blood with the rainwater, and on the teeth that the creature was about to sink into her neck.
Chloe screamed again as she fought back with everything she had, kicking hard against the creature's stomach in an attempt to keep its mouth away from her throat.
It didn't work. The creature’s fangs ripped into her and Chloe couldn't scream again. She couldn't even breathe. All she could do was choke.
For a long moment, Chloe was aware of nothing but pain, of the horrifying mix of crushing and sucking she felt as the creature fed off her.
Then the creature got off of her, walking away with heavy footsteps, leaving her on the street to die.
She couldn't see it walking away. She couldn't see anything. But she could feel things, so much more than she wanted to. She could feel the rain and blood pouring off her, feel the pain in her throat. She couldn't help but think she should already be dead, but her consciousness wasn't fading. There was no escape from the pain, or from her own thoughts. From the knowledge that she was going to die on the street, in a pool of her own blood, a horrible and violent death. Her father would see her like this, and he'd have to bury her, his only child, in a coffin with a nailed down lid to try and stop her from rising again.
Maybe it would work. Maybe she really would die here, a meaningless end to a life that hadn’t mattered much anyway.
But maybe it wouldn’t work. Maybe she had been infected. Maybe she would still rise as a monster as hideous as the one who had killed her, no trace of her own personality left. She would serve the villain that had attacked her city. She would help the creature who had murdered her. Maybe even to attack her own friends, or her father.
Chloe heard footsteps on the pavement again, and for a terrifying moment, she thought it was the creature coming back for her, coming to take something else from her, though she had no idea what that would even be.
Then she realized the footsteps were too light to be the monster, and there were clearly more than one person running towards her.
Then she heard them yelling, and her heart lifted when she recognized the voices, only to plummet when she heard what they were saying.
"Chat! Look at that girl!" Ladybug's voice, terrified in a way Chloe didn't think she'd ever heard before. It came from far away, but got closer by the second. "Oh, no. The blood. There's so much. The cure won't fix that. Maybe if we get her to a hospital...." She fell silent for a second. "Wait. Is that... Is that Chloe?"
Chat sounded sick when he answered her. "That… that smell…"
Ladybug’s voice was very close when she spoke again. “Oh, not. Chat, I… I think she might already be dead.”
Chloe's soul shattered. She was right. Her heart had already stopped beating. She could feel it, in the awful aching emptiness of her chest.
But then why was she still here? Why could she still hear them talking? If this was the only kind of an afterlife there was, it sucked. Being stuck in a dead body, hearing people mourn- or worse, not mourn- you? What kind of life after death was this?
Unless it was hell. Chloe had always imagined hell with more fire and less rain, and she'd never thought of herself as hell-worthy, but there was no way this was heaven or a nightmare, so maybe that was the only possibility.
Then Chat Noir spoke again. “She’s not.” He paused for a second. “At least not for long. That smell… They infected her. She’s going to turn.”
“You’re sure?” Ladybug asked. “But then why’d they rip out her throat, if they were going to turn her?”
“I don’t know,” he started to say. He cut himself off suddenly. “Whoa! Look at her. She’s turning purple.”
“She’s changing.” Ladybug sounded stunned. “Already? But that’s way too fast. She can’t be turning already.”
“What are we going to do? We can’t just let her turn into one of Papillion’s monsters! We have to save her! We have to… bite her.” Chat’s voice took on an odd quality as he finished the sentence.”
"What?" Ladybug sounded shocked. "No way. You're not thinking..."
"We’ve never tried it on someone who’s already started turning. We know it doesn’t work once they’re turned, but while she’s still changing, maybe we can save her. We won’t know until we try.”
He sounded desperate. Chloe wondered why he cared so much. Did he feel this protective of everyone in Paris? That seemed like it would be exhausting.
"Well, yeah, but can’t we figure something else out? Make her one of us? This is Chloe. She's a bully, and a brat. She doesn’t deserve this kind of power." Ladybug’s voice lowered to a mutter. “And I don’t want to have to put up with her forever.”
"Ladybug!" Chat was angry now. Chloe was startled by the ferocity in his voice. "We have time for that. We can't just let her die! We have to do something now."
Ladybug's voice was startlingly calm. "We don’t even know what’s going to happen. Doing this to someone who is already turning…"
“That doesn’t matter,” Chat repeated. His voice was suddenly quiet, and deathly serious. “We have to save her. I’ll do it myself if you won’t.”
"No, I’ll do it," Ladybug said, her voice softer now. “My bite’s better at healing, and she’s in really bad shape."
The next thing Chloe knew, a hand grabbed hers and raised it, teeth sank into her wrist, and her world exploded with light.
Warmth spread over her body, slow and thick and sort of oozing. She felt drowning in something thicker than water, something that left a sweet taste on her tongue, maybe too sweet, but it eased the pain. She felt her consciousness slipping away, into the light. Maybe she was dying for real now. That would honestly be a relief, if she didn’t have to be in this hell anymore.
Then something, from somewhere deep inside Chloe, screamed at her to fight. To make her life, her existence, mean something. Something more than this death in the rain.
Her body flew up without her permission. She gasped desperately, surprised to find that she could breathe.
Her hand flew to her throat. It felt normal. The rest of her did not.
It wasn’t a bad feeling. She felt strong. Powerful. Nothing like the scared little girl whose struggles had been meaningless against the monster who wanted her blood.
But it was definitely a weird feeling. Like the blood in her veins had been replaced with something else, something thicker. And it felt like her bones were vibrating, like something deep inside her was almost… buzzing.
She held out her hands, staring at them to see if they looked different. They didn’t.
“It worked.” Chat sounded like he was going to cry from relief.
Chloe looked sideways at the two heroes. Ladybug was still kneeling beside her. She looked the same as always. There were jagged stripes that wound round her arm and obscured most of her face, wrapping around her eyes almost like a mask, places were her skin was hard like a shell, red with black spots. Her ladybug wings were closed behind her, but still clearly visible. Her hair and the irises of her eyes were both the same red as her skin.
She was more human looking than the monster that had tried to kill- or succeeded in killing, really- Chloe, but still not someone who would blend in a crowd.
Ladybug didn’t seem to notice Chloe staring at her. She turned to look at Chat, her expression tender but her voice teasing. “Are you really surprised? I’m disappointed in you. Of course, my bite worked.”
Chat looked at Ladybug and smiled softly. He looked just as lame as Chloe remembered. He had jagged stripes of his own shell in the exact same pattern as hers, pure black like his hair and not at all shiny the way hers was, but the whites of his eyes were green where Ladybug’s were still white, and he had a tail and claws instead of wings.
They both wore tight, no nonsense outfits. Black pants, sensible shoes, gloves like they didn’t want to get their hands dirty. There were only a few differences in their clothing: Ladybug’s shirt was red instead of black, her pants stopped just after her knees while his went to his ankles, and she wore sneakers instead of the black boot Chat wore.
Chloe hoped those boots weren’t leather, not in this weather. Sure, it did sort of complete his tacky look, but that was hardly a good reason to ruin perfectly good shoes.
But even though they looked the same as ever, Chloe found herself noticing things about them she had never noticed before.
For one thing, Chloe was pretty sure she could smell them now. Not that she could have told anyone what they smelled like. They just smelled like themselves, in an indescribable and sort of overwhelming kind of way.
More than that, Chloe could practically feel power radiating off the two of them. And somehow, even though she had never been able to feel that before, the feeling that came from them was familiar to her. Chat’s was even more familiar than Ladybug’s was, and Chloe couldn’t imagine why that would be. She narrowed her eyes at him like that would somehow help her figure it out.
He didn’t notice Chloe staring at him any more than his partner had, talking to Ladybug instead. “Oh, I knew you could do it, My Lady. I was just afraid that she might give up, let her life slip away without fighting back.”
Ladybug snorted. “Please. Chloe, going into the light without a fuss? Ridiculous.”
Chloe rubbed her face with her hands. Her head felt so weird, and their voices were grating on her nerves. Which was a surprise, at least as far as Ladybug was concerned. Ladybug was the hero of Paris. Chloe shouldn’t have been able to find her annoying.
Except she had talked like she wasn’t sure she wanted to save Chloe, which was pretty sucky of her.
Chloe glared at Ladybug, and she kept glaring until the heroine noticed her.
Ladybug looked surprised. “Are you okay?” she asked, sounding concerned.
“You bit me,” Chloe said flatly.
Ladybug scowled at her. “Only because it was the only way to save you. To stop you from turning into one of those monsters.”
Chloe huffed. “What took you so long? That was really painful, you know.”
Ladybug’s expression morphed into one of pure horror. “You could still feel things? You were conscious?”
“And in pain. I could feel everything,” Chloe snapped. The guilt on Ladybug’s face made her feel better for a second, but then she started to worry that Ladybug was going to cry. So maybe she’d hesitated to save Chloe because she thought Chloe was a bully, but she’d apparently also thought Chloe was unconscious and delaying wouldn’t matter, and she was kind of right about the bully thing. Chloe did tend to point out people’s weaknesses to them, and yeah, sometimes they were wimps and cried about it, which wasn’t really her fault, but she did see how someone could have misunderstood her.
Even someone as amazing Ladybug, hero of Paris.
“Oh, geez. Calm down. I’m not in pain anymore,” Chloe said generously, letting Ladybug off the hook like the magnanimous person she was. After all, Ladybug had literally just rescued her from life as a creepy shadow thing.
But Ladybug didn’t look relieved by Chloe’s words. She ignored her and addressed Chat, her voice nothing more than a traumatized whisper. “If they can still feel things after they die, after they start turning, do you think they can still feel things after they’ve turned? Do you think there are still people in there somewhere, inside those monsters? Do you think they’re still aware of what’s going on? Still… still in pain?”
Chat sucked in a shaky breath. “I hope not. But if they are, we’ll find a way to save them.”
“How? How are we going to do that, Chat? It’s all we can do just to keep them from destroying Paris, turning everyone into Papillion’s puppets!” Ladybug’s voice rose to a yell, her tone harsh. Chat flinched and she relaxed a little. “Sorry. I just… I never thought…” She stopped talking to bury her face in her hands. Her shoulders started to shake.
“Don’t be such a crybaby.” Chloe was even more surprised at her own words than Chat and Ladybug were. They stared at her startled, but something inside Chloe drove her to keep talking. “You can’t afford to dwell on that. You can’t afford to let it break you. You have to keep protecting Paris. You have to keep on saving the people you can save. And if you want to look for a cure for the ones you couldn’t, then do that, but freaking out about it, asking yourself what they’re feeling, won’t help them. All it will do is make you feel guilty about something that’s not your fault and throw you off your game.”
Ladybug blinked at her for a few times. “You’re right. Wow. That’s weird.”
Chat leaned down, his face getting uncomfortably close to Chloe, his lips stretching into a wide smile. “I knew it. I totally knew it.”
Chloe glared at him. Have you never heard of personal space? Get out of my face, you mangy fleabag.”
He sighed. “And then there’s that.”
Ladybug got to her feet, her expression determined, fearless, the way she normally was, all traces of despair and fear gone. “We need to get her to Master Fu so he can explain things to her.”
Chat nodded in agreement and held out his hand to help Chloe up. She ignored him and stood up on her own.
Or tried to, anyway. The second she got to her feet, her knees gave out from under her and she collapsed, falling back toward the pavement.
Ladybug and Chat both grabbed her before she could hit the ground. They each slung one of her arms over their shoulders, supporting her weight between them.
The three of them started to walk, steering her the opposite way from the direction Chloe had come in.
Chloe paused, glancing over her shoulder.
“Is something, wrong, Chloe?” Chat asked.
Chloe looked at him speculatively. “Before you guys take me to this Master Fu person, do you think we could go and get my shoes? Assuming they haven’t been ruined by this awful rain like my hair has, of course.”
Ladybug groaned, exasperated. Chat just gave Chloe a mildly irritated look.
“What? I’m not dying anymore, and I want my shoes back. They’re just like, three minutes that direction.” Chloe pointed the way she had come.
“We’re not going back for shoes!” Ladybug was practically growling now, which really wasn’t all that ladybug of her.
Chloe stared her down. “You sure about that? The thing that attacked me went that way after he killed me. I think. Anyway, shouldn’t you like, go after him? Make sure he doesn’t hurt anyone else?”
Chat and Ladybug exchanged glances.
“You see?” Chloe said triumphantly. “You guys need to go after him, and we can just grab my shoes on the way.”
“Did he really go that way?” Ladybug asked Chat.
He shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s too hard to smell anything in this rain.” He paused uncertainly. “They usually disappear for a while after they feed off someone.”
Ladybug frowned. “Still, we should double check.”
Chloe grinned cheerfully. They walked back to where Chloe had ditched her shoes, but they didn’t see any sign of the monster who had attacked her.
Ladybug and Chat Noir eased Chloe onto the curb. “Stay here for a moment. We’re going to look for him a little.”
Chloe nodded happily as her idol and her idol’s sidekick took off. She put her shoes back on her feet. Luckily for her, she hadn’t elected to wear anything leather today, knowing it might rain, so her shoes were fine.
The same could not be said about her hair, but given fifteen minutes in her own bathroom, and Chloe would be able to fix that. Unlike her outfit, which had been pretty thoroughly drenched in blood. It was probably ruined, and even if it wasn’t, Chloe was probably going to burn it. She didn’t need any reminders of the day the world had almost been deprived of her beautiful face.
Thinking about her sort-of-death experience made Chloe feel sick, so she pushed it out of her mind as she fussed over her rain-soaked hair, as if getting soaking wet was the worst thing that had happened to her today.
Eventually, Ladybug and Chat Noir came back. “Didn’t see any sign of him,” Chat Noir said cheerfully, as if this was good news.
Chloe scowled at him. “Great. So the freaky beast is still out there somewhere.”
Ladybug shot her an annoyed look. “Let’s just get you to Master Fu already.”
“I could carry her,” Chat suggested. “I know you can’t fly when it’s raining this hard, but you could run ahead, tell Master Fu what happened.”
Ladybug nodded thoughtfully. “That’s not a bad idea. Alright. I’ll see you there, then.”
“What? Don’t leave me with the alley cat!” Chloe protested, feeling panic rise in her chest at the thought of her savior leaving. She was too weak to stand. If any more of those creatures came she’d be a sitting duck, and she wasn’t at all sure Chat would be any help.
But Ladybug ran off without giving her a second glance.
Chat knelt in front of her and held out his arms for her to climb on his back.
“Seriously?” Chloe asked. “You’re going to carry me piggyback?”
“Unless you think you can walk,” Chat retorted.
Chloe sighed. “Fine.” She put her hands on his shoulders and he grabbed her legs and pulled her onto his back.
He started walking. “Whoa. You’re heavier than I thought you’d be. I mean, Ladybug’s not this heavy.” He frowned. “Did you use to weigh this much?”
“Ugh. You can’t just say things like that to a girl. Especially not to me.”
Chat was silent for a moment. “Sorry. I didn’t mean…” He sighed. “Are you sure you’re okay, Chloe?”
She pouted at him. “No, I’m not okay. My hair is ruined, my outfit is ruined, and my dad is probably worried sick, but I feel really weird, and I don’t think I should go home until I figure out why, or I’ll just end up making him worry more. Does that sound okay to you?”
He stared at her for a few seconds. “And you died today, Chloe. You can’t just pretend that doesn’t bother you.”
Chloe scoffed. “Who’s pretending?” she asked in her rudest voice, hoping he’d get the hint and shut up.
He did. He didn’t say anything else to her as he carried her through Paris.
It wasn’t too long though before Chat headed off the street, like he was going to go in this unremarkable building Chloe would never have visited under her own power.
“Is this a massage place? Why are we going to go to a massage place? My dad’s hotel has its own masseuse, you know. I don’t need a massage,” Chloe said.
Chat gave her an unimpressed look. “This is where Master Fu lives, Chloe.”
Chloe gave him an unimpressed look of her own. “Here? Why are we coming to see someone who lives in a place like this?”
Chat sighed. “Because he knows more about this than Ladybug and I do.”
Chloe snorted. “I seriously doubt he knows more than Ladybug. Ladybug knows everything.”
A smile Chloe didn’t understand tugged at the corner of Chat’s mouth. “Ladybug is amazing, it’s true. But she definitely doesn’t know everything.”
Chloe was half tempted to ask him what he meant, or maybe yell at him for doubting Ladybug, but then he carried her inside a room where Ladybug and some old Chinese guy were talking, and Chloe was rendered speechless.
Not by the room. It wasn’t particularly impressive. And certainly not by the old Chinese guy. He was even less impressive than the room.
No, what shut Chloe up was the fact that for just a second when Chat stepped into the room, the whole world changed colors.
The old man smiled at her warmly. “Welcome, Chloe,” he said. “Ladybug has told me what happened to you. We’ve got quite a lot to talk about.”