Chapter Text
My kind have roamed the Earth for centuries. We walk alongside humans, taking their skins, their eyes. We speak and laugh like them, but sometimes, if you stare long enough you’ll notice some differences. Like how are skin doesn’t shine, not even under direct sun. It’s as if you took a paper drawing and gave it life. Opaque, always looking like dead. Or how our eyes don’t really have any color in them. Yesterday they were blue, today they are brown. And if you try to remember their color, you won’t know.
“I guess I never payed attention to that”; you’ll say. But you have. You have become entranced by our eyes, how the color seems to change under the light. Or was it under the shadow? You could stay hours staring right at our eyes, but the moment we are gone you won’t remember them at all.
And maybe you have noticed how our voice doesn’t sound like our own. Sometimes high, sometimes down. But it isn’t ours, and you’ll know that from the small mistakes we may make. Like talking with two or three voices at the same time, or a voice that sounded exactly like your partner’s. But you’ll brush your doubts aside, because, who even pays attention to someone’s voice? Not you, not humans.
We do.
It’s all we do, all day. We love noticing those smaller details, how the light reflects the golden tones of your hair, how your nose scrunches up just milimeters whenever you smile. We study them and analyze them, making sure not to confuse your micro gestures with others form someone else. For us, humans are all special and different. Each of them has a small carpet with all their characteristics. You could say that we know you enough to impersonate you.
And you would be correct.
You see, my kind does not have bodies of our own. Or well, we do, but not the kind of bodies you are used to seeing. They are not physical, you cannot touch us or see us. Sometimes you hear us in the middle of the woods, sometimes you can feel us when the wind brushes your skin.
As I’ve said, we love humans. Sometimes, our love is too much that it becomes obsessive. The sickening kind of love that doesn’t let you sleep or eat or live. Fortunately, we really don’t do any of those things. We live for humans, but sometimes, it gets a little too boring for us. Sometimes not being seen is not alright. We want to be seen, especially by you.
So, we make deals. Deals with the dead, deals with the living. Soon enough, we have enough deals to make a body of our own.
Do you believe in reincarnation? If you do, then you are smarter than you think. Your soul isn’t made of the life of only one being, but of multiples. There may be over 50 or a 100 lives inside of you. There may be onlty two or three. Right now, there are no new souls. Everyone is sharing the space with another one.
Your souls are what binds your body together. But for us, who have no soul, we need to collect them manually. We need to have a minimum of 300 souls to have a physical body, to be able to pass as one of you, even if we never get to be you. And to get those souls, we make deals with you. It’s not as if it affects you, you already have way too many lives inside of you. Losing one won’t kill you.
That is, until you are truly dead. Then we take all of your past lives and make it our own. The first soul you give us, the only one while you live, is like an engagement. A promise ring. It confirms that the rest of you will also belong to us once you die.
It isn’t that hard to get 300 souls. All we have to do is search for the oldest, the ones who have more souls inside their bodies. You might even get 200 souls from one single life. Which is why the ones with more souls are also the ones most followed by my kind.
You may not notice it, but maybe there are two or three of us after you right now. Hoping to be the first one to convince you to give them your souls.
If you ask me, competing with another one of us for souls is horrible. It’s a never ending battle, until it ends. And then the loser has nothing left to do except look for another human to lust after.
You see? Being us and making deals is not that easy.
It certainly isn’t easy when you are hunting down one of the oldest group of souls. And they come packaged in the form of a teenager. Teenagers are the worst to make deals with. They are sarcastic and have a strange will to die, although sometimes it’s only a joke. It’s difficult to tell when they are joking. This one jokes way too much.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
First I need to explain how we are able to make deals if you can’t see us.
Well, the closer we are to the 300 souls, the easier it is to take a human like form. It can’t be for long, just for some hours at a time, but it is usually enough to allow the humans to trust us and make the deal. If we are still young and barely starting, then you’ll go after the dead, the ones who no one wanted. They are usually also young clusters of souls.
So, as I am sure you have started to understand, an old demon like me is able to take human form enough time to make the target trust me, even talk to me. I have over 250 souls, and all I need is 50 more to become human-like 24/7.
It just happens to be that my target has 70 souls inside of her. There’s even some to spare, in case there’s a problem in the deal. She’s perfect.
Or at least she would be, if she payed more attention to me instead of making oogly eyes at freaking Adrien Agreste.
“Marinette?”
The girl stopped her increasingly alarming staring at the blonde boy and finally separated her eyes and looked at me instead. She went full on tomato red, probably because of the way she had been caught.
“I! I wasn’t- I wasn’t staring, you know? Who would even do that? That’s crazy!”, she blabbered with no end. For God’s sake, couldn’t she calm down? All I wanted was one thing and one thing only: to make her trust me enough to give me her souls. Is that too hard?
I feigned a small laugh, just enough to make her calm down. Her shoulders relaxed and slowly, her face lost all that extra blood on her cheeks. Good.
“All I wanted to ask is for you to explain me this problem”, I said with as much of a smile as I could muster. It had been a long time since I had actually had to do any ground work like this. On the past, all I needed to do was go near philosophers, offer them the answer to their problems and they would sign before I said the price.
Oh, how I miss the old days of Ancient Greece and the Illustration.
“Sure!”, she answered cheerfully. “What do you need help with?”
“I just can’t understand how to write the function’s equation. I mean, what do I do about the descending intervals?”
“Uhm, well, you first need to-“
Marinette was a good student. Not a good teacher, not at all. I knew how to solve that problem, but she wasn’t explaining how to do it the easy way. And she was doing it correctly, with some small mistakes here and there which honestly, wouldn’t affect the result at all. Whoever said that maths were always exact, was a liar.
I think I knew who did it. I may have his soul somewhere inside of me.
“And then you multiply the signs and write the result”
“Thank you Mari! I really appreciate what you have been doing for me”
“Not a problem at all, Felix”
“I know we are almost strangers, but do you think we could meet this afternoon? I think I really need a good tutor to catch up to the rest of the class”
“Forget strangers, I would gladly help you. What if you come to my house after school ends?”
I almost wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her multiple times. The girl was really, really over explotating herself. If I remembered correctly, she still had a project from Madame Mendeleiev to finish (a team project, but the team was too busy to help). Adding to that, she also needed to finish a commission from one of her friends. At least they were paying her, because if she had been doing it for free I would throw hands. And finally, she also needed to help her parents with the bakery. Why couldn’t they just hire a employee? Well, economy was rough.
But I wasn’t there to be nice and say no, say that she was probably too busy already. I was there to gladly accept and make her my friend, maybe even make her have a tiny crush on me. And then, when she least expected it, I would offer her the deal. And she would accept, we would part ways and we would live happily ever after. At least I would.
“Sure! Thanks Mari”
Almost inmediately, Mari started talking about freaking Adrien Agreste and why he was so awesome. As boys, we probably would get along right? Oh, Mari hoped so, because the boy really needed more friends. He was a model, didn’t I know? And his father was Gabriel Agreste, one of the most important fashion designers!
And she would go on and on and on with no end. What I do for a real body, you humans should really start valuing your bodies more.
I was counting down the minutes until the end of class, when, out of nowhere, an enormous plant broke in the window and started taking screaming students out of the class. Gee, an akuma, what a surprise.
I hated akumas. Not because of the destruction, but what it meant for me and Marinette.
Because on top of being the perfect daughter, friend, student, and designer, she also needed to be the perfect hero.
Mari ran out of the classroom, probably looking for a place to transform. Meanwhile, I willingfully allowed one of the plants to take me. If I had lost my study session with Mari, then at least I would get a bit of “saving the damsel in distress” with Ladybug.
This is why I hate teenagers. Couldn’t they have more relaxed lives?