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Halloween was upon them, and as promised, Gabriel was working.
The sounds of the party in the foyer filtered through the atelier door, worming their way into his brain. Halloween music, talking and laughter and the clink of the spoon in the punch bowl. It sounded like Adrien and his friends were having fun, but Gabriel was not.
I wish I had a cool dad I wish I had a cool dad.
Well, despite having been tricked fair-and-square into allowing this to happen, the ‘dad’ still did not feel very cool.
Chloe’s high pitched laughter broke his concentration yet again, and his pen skidded off the drawing tablet. He groaned and raked his hands down his face. A tingle of stress sat in his stomach, and his hand unconsciously rose to the brooch at his throat…
...No. He should not. He should not, but the itch of power was addictive, and he had spent so long giving in to it that he wasn’t sure he could resist it under stress.
Old habits died hard. He stepped towards the painting to trigger the secret elevator. Undoubtedly, someone else in Paris would be having an un-happy Halloween.
“That’s ridiculous! I’m not going to sacrifice my dignity for a donut on a string!” Chloe’s hands were on her hips and the voluminous skirt of her princess costume quivered in indignation.
“Come on, Chloe, it’s a halloween game!” Sabrina encouraged.
“Well, I’m not doing it.” She crossed her arms. “Besides, donuts are very high in fat.”
Adrien shrugged. “Okay, suit yourself. I just thought I’d ask. We need one more person to do a race. Marinette, you down?”
“U-uh, um, I mean, yes?” she stammered.
Adrien smiled. “Okay, great.”
“Hey, Adrien!” Nino called. “Are you ready to get annihilated in this contest? I bet my mouth is bigger than yours!”
“Bro, no way. I’ll beat you any day,” Adrien grinned as he followed his friend. “Marinette, you coming?”
“Oh, uh, yeah uh, sure! I love nutdos-- donuts, ” she replied, her face turning bright red.
Nathalie watched the girl facepalm before hurrying off. Most of Adrien’s class was present at the party, sporting various forms of festive dress. Marinette and her friend Alya, the reporter, were twin witches, and Nathalie supposed Marinette had made their costumes and done the makeup. Nino was a blue spaceman from that new murder game Adrien kept raving about. Chloe was a princess, and her little friend...Sabrina? was a knight, although she had likely been forced to wear the costume under Chloe’s orders.
Since she was chaperoning, Adrien had given her a pair of teeny devil horns on a headband.
“Here, It will match your sweater, and then you can be festive, too,” he had said with a smile. He was wearing a pirate costume with a bandanna tied over his head, a painted mustache, and an eyepatch. Nathalie wouldn’t normally dress up, but she hated to disappoint him, so she had put them on and pulled a tube of red lipstick from the back of her drawer and applied it to match. She had squinted at herself in the mirror. It had been a long time since she had worn such a dark lip. Ah, well, it would have to do.
He had also given a pair of horns to his father, (perhaps with the intent of matching the two of them, Nathalie wasn’t sure) but Gabriel was unsurprisingly absent, having shut himself in his atelier for the evening. She knew he was uncomfortable having so many people in his house, but Nathalie had assured him that they were only allowed in Adrien’s room and the dining room. She would keep an eye on things.
And she did. She stood near the front door and kept lookout for mischief. The foyer was draped in flickering lights and leering jack-o-lanterns perched at the bottom of the stairs. Crepe paper was strung from the chandelier in gently waving threads. Kids mingled around the room with cups of green punch and festive treats, though there was certainly a concentration of them in the corner, raucously cheering on the donut-eating contest. Alya was the judge, and it looked like Nino was winning. Nathalie stifled a smile at the powdered sugar all over Adrien’s face.
Then all at once, a crash of splintering glass and rush of cold wind burst into the room. The partygoers gasped aloud, looking around in fearful surprise. One of the front windows was broken, but by what? Who? The party music fizzled and died, replaced by an ominous buzz of static.
A cloud of mist billowed in on the wind and coalesced into the form of a man, but not a man. He circled the chandelier, seemingly weightless, lazily drifting through the crystals, a swash of mist in his wake. He wore a large hat with a scarlet plume, and his fancy coat was embellished with golden threads. And his face….was nonexistent. It was nothing more than a grinning skull with two orange glowing pinpricks for pupils in the depths of his eye sockets. He was like something out of a Poe story Nathalie had read long ago, and it kindled a distinct uneasiness in her stomach.
“I am the Phantom,” he purred, voice as smooth as velvet. “Nobody should be ostracized, especially on a night like tonight. Except me, apparently. I will make sure you know how it feels to be alone.”
A stunned beat of silence.
“An Akuma!” Somebody yelled, and the room fractured into chaos, with figures desperately trying to all leave the room or hide.
“QUIET!” he roared, and everybody froze. He descended from the chandelier, rage evident on his face, but then something caught his eye. Sabrina, the knight, with her arms and legs spread out, frantically trying to conceal Chloe and her miles of skirt behind one of the foyer chairs.
“Aww, how touching,” he mused, drifting closer to the two of them. Sabrina’s eyes were saucers and her chest was heaving, and Chloe didn’t look much better. “I see the two of you have a strong bond...what’s your name?” A skeletal pointer finger caressed the tip of Sabrina’s chin and she tried to move her head away.
Apparently that ticked Chloe off. “Ugh, get off her. It’s Sabrina. But don’t pay attention to her. You should already know MY name.” Her voice trembled, but the saltiness of the usual Chloe still bled through.
It was enough to make him abruptly stop. “I’m not certain I do,” he replied, his hand still on Sabrina’s chin.
Chloe rolled her eyes. “The mayor’s daughter? Chloe Bourgeois? Honestly, some people….” She missed the way his eyes lit up.
“Chloe and Sabrina,” he said, pointing his hands like shotgun barrels at their foreheads. “Feel what it's like to be ALONE.” Something whooshed from his fingertips and two red glowing masks formed over their faces. They blinked, and looked at each other, and said at the same time, “Who are you?”
Once again, the room erupted. Shouts and screams sounded as everyone tried to leave as quickly as they could. The Phantom whipped around and soared towards the ceiling again, firing red light from his fingertips, and one by one, students went down.
Nathalie saw Marinette creeping along the wall towards the door with a determined look on her face just before he did. He growled and pointed his fingers and before she had time to react, she had been hit, and a red mask formed over her face. She gasped and blinked.
“...H-hello? Alya? Adrien? Where is everybody?!” she cried. It appeared the ability to see or hear the other occupants of the room had been taken from her, and to her, it seemed like she was the only one in the house.
That was all Nathalie needed to see. She pushed open the door to the mansion and ran.
Nathalie was intimately familiar with all of the Agreste Mansion’s routes and passageways, perhaps even more than Gabriel himself. Like the exterior service entrance on the west face. She ran around the corner of the house and pulled open the door and stepped inside, breathing hard, and leaned against it.
She was in a little room, a space Gabriel had claimed for storing fabrics and costume materials and whatever else his designer brain desired. It was dark, the only light entering from the small window of the door into the hallway. But at least she was alone, and safe. If she had her miraculous, she could transform, but Gabriel had hidden it from her.
A rustle came from the fabric shelves across from her and she jerked to standing.
“What’s that? Who’s there??” She cried, hands up and ready to trade blows, though what she would do against a figure that was half mist, she did not know.
A blonde head of hair wrestled into a bandanna peeked out from between the bolts, and one green eye. She relaxed. He was still wearing his eyepatch.
“Adrien.”
“Nathalie? I thought you were the akuma,” he said sheepishly as he crawled out of his hiding place.
“Me, too. About that. Have you seen Ladybug and Chat Noir yet?”
She thought she saw a hint of nervousness in his eye. “No.”
“What about your father?”
“Also no.” He still had powdered sugar on his nose. Nathalie fought the urge to wipe it off with her thumb.
She pursed her lips, thinking hard, and walked a few steps over to a shelf. “Well. I guess it’s up to us to save Halloween, then. Assuming you’ll join me?” She looked at him before stepping on the lowest shelf to boost herself up so she could rummage through one of the topmost bins.
Adrien stood. “Okay, but how?” He looked up at her as she pulled two somethings out of the bin in her clenched fist, but in the darkness he couldn’t see what they were.
“You know what they say,” she said as she climbed down. “Hide your face so the world will never find you.” She smiled and handed him a mask of translucent red cellophane. Why Gabriel had these in his stash, she had no clue. Perhaps an abandoned project, but she was glad she had remembered they were there, because they were about to come in useful.
Adrien’s mouth rounded in an ‘o’. “I see. We’re going to buy us time until we figure out what to do?”
“Yes,” she replied. They put them on.
As luck would have it, the first corner they turned found the Phantom occupying the hallway, looking for stragglers. He was humming something as he turned lazy barrel rolls near the ceiling.
“ Masquerade; paper faces on parade...masquerade…”
He spotted them. “Greetings there, ye fine fellows. Whom do I have the pleasure of ostracizing?” He tipped his hat in mock respect and floated down towards them.
“Hm,” he mused as he settled in front of Nathalie’s face. His skeletal grin made her shiver. “It seems I have already met you, though I don’t remember your name…” She tried to quiet the trembling in her breathing.
But she hadn’t counted on Adrien. “Don’t touch her,” he growled, wielding a tissue box he had pilfered from the hall table. Nathalie inwardly groaned.
The Phantom stopped. “You can see her. That means, that means….”
A corner of the mask slipped on Adrien’s face, the ties too big to hold it up properly. A low whine started in the Phantom’s throat. “Imposters,” he growled. “Imposters!” He pointed his fingers and fired.
“Adrien, RUN!” Nathalie shouted as she turned and did the same, cursing at her heels sliding on the tile. A bolt of red energy hit a picture frame near her head and she yelped and ducked, trying to run in an irregular pattern. The back door to the atelier was just down the hall. If she could make it just a little bit farther…
Yes! She kicked open the door and burst through it, throwing herself against it just in time to feel the thock of the Phantom hitting the other side and hear his bellowing curses. Apparently, she thought with some relief, he wasn’t intangible enough to pass through walls. It must be that massive skull.
“Nathalie?” Gabriel stood still, staring at her, his pen poised above his tablet and a look of innocent surprise on his face.
It took a fraction of a second for her fear to morph to anger.
“Recall it,” she ordered, striding over to him.
He pursed his lips. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t play dumb with me, Gabriel!” She got up in his face. “There’s only one person who can make akumas in this city, and he’s standing right in front of me! Recall it; it’s ruining your son’s evening, I can’t even begin to tell you the havoc it has caused….”
“Wait, stop. The akuma is here? In the house? I never intended...I wanted it to stay far away.”
Nathalie fought the urge to roll her eyes, hard. “Yes,” she answered through gritted teeth. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a Halloween party before? But usually there’s more laughter than horrified screaming. So get rid of it, or else, or else...I’ll tell Adrien you’re Hawk Moth! ”
He looked like he had been slapped. “You wouldn’t.”
“I would.”
“Fine.” His hand shook as it went to the brooch, fearful of her rage.
The door was thrown off its hinges, and both of them shielded their faces from the splintering wood.
“There you are. I have something special in store for you,” the Phantom’s face was triumphant as he aimed his two fingers at Nathalie and fired. She closed her eyes.
But the hit never came. She opened them a crack and gasped when she realized Gabriel stood in front of her, stiff, and she let out a strangled sound from behind him as she saw the red glow of the mask form over his face.
“Hm,” the phantom’s hand was at his chin. “This could be interesting. But still-” he aimed his fingers at her, and she knew she was about to forget everyone she ever knew.
A black blur streaked into the room and tackled the phantom across his torso--the only real place he could be tackled--and he yowled as he was bowled across the floor. Chat Noir stood up and winked in her direction.
“See you around, Mademoiselle,” he said, and sprinted off, calling “can’t catch me!” over his shoulder with the Phantom in pursuit.
Nathalie turned her attention back to Gabriel, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him. His eyes were unfocused. “Stop it. Snap out of it. Gabriel,” she commanded in desperation.
He let out a little moan, and she saw his gaze sharpen. For a moment, she thought she was in the clear, but then his expression morphed into one of absolute terror.
“NO! Get away from me,” he cried, and shoved her. She stumbled back.
“Gabriel, what-”
“No, please, don’t hurt me, please! Please go away!” He was backing away with his hands up, the most fearful stature she had ever seen from him, and it both concerned her and made her horribly sad. She stepped towards him and he cowered.
“It’s me; it’s Nathalie! Gabriel! ”
“Nathalie? Nathalie!” He looked around. So he could hear her, or something, but she appeared as his worst nightmare, whatever that was. This stupid akuma. She attempted to close the distance between them, but he kept moving back. If she could just touch him, maybe she could get through…
“No, no no no get away from me, get away! Nathalie! Please! Please come,” he cried, distraught, as his back hit the wall. She grabbed his hand and he shrieked and jerked it from her grasp, sinking down against the wall with his arms over his face.
Nathalie’s mind raced. This akuma was definitely from a story. Perhaps multiple stories. What sorts of things broke curses in stories? She could think of one. It was stupid as all hell, and a long shot, but if it didn’t work, he wouldn’t remember it anyway.
Nathalie knelt down in front of him, leaning towards him, fighting him as he fought and pleaded with her, and somehow she managed to pin his hands with her forearm and grab his chin and scrunch up her face and kiss him.
He stopped struggling. She wasn’t sure why, until she felt him begin to kiss her back. She lost herself in it for a moment; the feeling of his lips on hers was surprisingly nice. She opened her eyes a crack to see if the mask was gone and when she realized his were open too, and staring straight back at her. She yanked her face away and fell back on her rear, gasping.
“I- Sir! I’m sorry, you were hit by the akuma and that was the only thing I could think of to do, and I didn’t really believe it would work, and-”
“Nathalie. It’s all right.” Her red lipstick was smeared across his lips, and she winced at the sight.
“...It is?”
“Yes.” He was still leaning against the wall, but infinitely more relaxed.
“Okay. Well…”
A crash from the other room caught their attention and Nathalie turned towards the blown-open doorway, grateful for the excuse to break their awkward eye contact, and remembered that Chat Noir was fighting the akuma all by himself. She wondered where Ladybug was. She scrambled up and dashed into the foyer, Gabriel hot on her heels.
Chat Noir was running circles around the room while the Phantom rested within the chandelier, taking lazy potshots at him. Chloe and Sabrina and a few other masked classmates peppered the perimeter, dazed and fearful.
“Come on, Ladybug, where are you?” Chat muttered in exasperation as he dodged another bolt. He wasn’t going to get anywhere if he was the Phantom’s sole focus.
Nathalie picked up a wood splinter from the remains of the door and threw it.
“Hey! Ghost boy!” she shouted. The splinter didn’t go very far, and neither did the insult, but it got his attention. He fired at her, and she dove out of the way. “Gabriel, help me!”
He looked up uneasily at the thing he had created.
“Your outfit is in bad taste,” he volleyed weakly, and ducked as a red bolt hit the door frame above his head.
“You’ll never vanquish me!” the Phantom laughed. “All it takes is one little hit…” He fired, still circling the ceiling. Nathalie ducked behind a couch and it took a chunk out of the armrest.
“Chat Noir! Do you know where the akuma is?” She called, looking straight at Gabriel. Look at me, you bastard.
“No clue!” He said, somersaulting away.
Yes. Finally. Gabriel was looking at her from across the room. He touched the top of his head. The hat.
“Uh, maybe try the hat?” She replied, and Chat nodded. “Cataclysm,” he muttered.
The action did not go unnoticed by the Phantom, and he rained down fire with a vengeance on the superhero, blows he only just managed to dodge. Nathalie knew it was only a matter of time before he was hit. She darted out from behind the couch and picked up a jack-o-lantern.
“Eat this, skull-face,” she said, and hefted it as hard as she could. It arced and the Phantom dodged it easily, but it was just enough time for Chat Noir to spring into the air, powered fist aiming for the feathered hat.
The Phantom caught his wrist and put it through the airborne pumpkin, which crumbled to ash, and fired at him. Chat ducked as he fell and the shot sparked against the chain supporting the chandelier. The massive fixture trembled, the crystals jingling together in waves.
“You fools.” The Phantom’s voice was low and dangerous. “You’re not powerful enough to defeat me without that wretched bug, and you know it. Give up. At least it will be easier.” Nathalie gulped, because he was right. Their chances were not good. She looked over at Gabriel in the doorway, and Chat Noir on his hands and knees by the surprisingly unscathed refreshment table, trying to catch his breath.
“I won’t stop fighting,” she stated, and looked for something else she could throw.
But before she could, the giant glass punch bowl whizzed over her head like a frisbee, spraying green liquid everywhere, and slammed into the Phantom and the chandelier, stunning him. His hat fell off and drifted to the ground.
“Good throw, Chat!” Nathalie tossed a smile over her shoulder as she dove for the hat in the center of the room, and he grinned back. She stood with it in her grasp, ready to tear it in half, when the screech of deforming metal reached her ears.
The chandelier groaned and shook, and she was standing directly below it.
Chat Noir watched this in horrified fascination. His ring was on its last pad. The akuma was stunned, and would make an easy target. But if he didn’t do anything, Nathalie was going to get crushed.
The weak link in the chain snapped, and the monstrous glass behemoth began to fall.
Nathalie dropped the hat and scrambled, her heels sliding on the polished marble floor. She wasn’t going to get out of the way in time. She wasn’t going to make it, and she would die here, she would die--
A powerful force hit her abdomen and knocked the wind out of her, and her head knocked against the floor. The earsplitting clamor of shattering glass and twisting metal rang around the room and hurt her ears, filling her head, and she closed her eyes and thought it might go on forever.
When it stopped, she realized she wasn’t in pain. Which either meant she was dead, or she hadn’t been hit. The weight of someone else’s body was on top of hers; a teenage sized someone. She opened her eyes. Chat Noir’s arms were planted on either side of her body. His head hung, and he was breathing heavily. She gaped and pushed herself up to her elbows. Something warm ran down her face. She touched a hand to her cheek, and it came away red.
“Why?” she asked, because for some reason, it was the most pressing question on her mind. “You had the akuma right there. You don’t even know me. Why did you...oh my god ,” she started. There were glass shards embedded in his back.
He lifted his head, and smiled, tears in the corners of his eyes. Something about them, even as altered by the miraculous as they were, seemed familiar. She had never been this close to him before.
Behind them, the Phantom rose from the wreckage, hatless, but still very much able to shoot.
“You know what they say, Nathalie…” Chat panted. “Hide your face, so the world will never find you….” His miraculous beeped a final time, and his transformation dropped.
“A-Adrien?!”
His face scrunched in pain. “I’m sorry we couldn’t win. This is all my fault, for wanting this party in the first place…”
“No; no it’s not, it never was…” She sat up and held him, careful of the glass. The Phantom stood and stretched out his hands, one for each of them. She looked straight into his eyes and imagined hers were as furious as the coals that burned in his skull as he fired. And then she knew nothing more.
Gabriel made a choking sound from where he stood frozen in the doorway.
Hawk Moth dropped his transformation. With the akuma gone, the occupants of the house would be back to normal, but without the ladybug cure, the physical damages would remain...and secrets would stay unveiled.
In frustration, he ripped off the brooch and threw it across the lair, then sank down to the floor and put his head in his arms.
Adrien was Chat Noir. Of course he was. The signs had been there, and Gabriel had been too oblivious to put them together, too stupid to follow his gut. And as a result, his son’s party was ruined and the two people he cared about had gotten hurt.
He sat there for what felt like hours before the soft sound of the arriving elevator platform filtered to his mind, but he didn’t lift his head. Her soft heels clicked on the floor to come sit beside him, and as much as he didn’t want to face her, part of him was glad she was here.
They sat in silence, the light from the harvest moon coming through the oculus window making a dim yellow circle around them. The butterflies rested on the ground, opening and closing their wings.
He was the first to speak. “How is Adrien?”
“He’s fine. It wasn’t as bad as it looked. The doctor is gone now.” Gabriel nodded from his hiding place in his knees.
“I can’t do this anymore. Adrien is him.”
“You knew he doesn’t like Hawk Moth. Most Parisians don’t.”
Gabriel winced. “That’s a little different than actively fighting me. This has made it abundantly clear that Hawk Moth is causing him direct harm. I can’t make him happy; I can’t. I can’t reach my goals this way.”
Nathalie shifted, staring out the window at the city skyline. “Then make new ones.”
Gabriel lifted his head, startled, and found he had nothing to say. So he shifted the topic. “You wouldn’t really tell Adrien I was Hawk Moth, would you?”
She sighed. “No. That’s for you to do. It was a bluff, but I must admit I have thought about it.”
“But you wouldn’t.”
“Ultimately, no.”
He looked into her face, then at her cheek. “You’re bleeding,” he said, softly, his fingertips brushing her face.
She grimaced. “It’s not a big deal. Just a stray piece of chandelier. It could have been a lot worse.”
"You're braver than me."
"You're just now noticing this?"
He decided to ignore that. “We’re going to have to replace that with something less dangerous. But...I’m glad you didn’t die.”
“Are you sure?” She smirked. “You seem to spend an awful lot of time annoyed with me.”
“Don’t make this about the corn maze.”
“It’s not about the corn maze.”
“You’re laughing at me.”
“I am not!” But she was smiling, and their eyes met for the first time during the entire exchange, and Gabriel smiled back.
“I could not bear to lose you, Nathalie,” he said, voice low, and his hand on her cheek moved to the back of her head and gently pulled her in so their lips met. It was nice to both be conscious this time, because it meant he could experience every softness of Nathalie’s lips and the taste of her mouth, and remember it.
They pulled away, and she looked at him stunned before her eyes fell to his lips and she snorted. “You have lipstick all over your mouth.”
“It was worth it,” he replied, and she blushed.
“I need to go check on Adrien,” she said, and moved to leave. He caught her hand.
“Let me come with you. Please. Let me make this my new goal.” She hesitantly threaded her fingers through his.
“Okay.”