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There is a beautiful miasma of grief longing regret at the edges of Hawkmoth’s senses. A self-contained storm that, if given the right chance, can turn into a majestic hurricane which will engulf Paris in chaos.
Ladybug and Chat Noir won’t stand a chance.
Smiling, Hawkmoth sends an akuma towards the source of the miasma. He feels more than sees the butterfly enter something silky—a ribbon or robe—and the thread between Hawkmoth and the akuma pulls taut.
There is a mind at the other end of the thread now, instead of the simplistic construct sent to do his bidding. With practiced ease, he prods the mental link and pries the mind at the other end open.
It is a small teenage girl; that much he can easily tell. But—
This mind is strange. There is a thick, hazy mist draped over most of the girl’s mind, shielding her thoughts and memories from him—a mist that no matter how much Hawkmoth prods and pushes, he can’t seem to penetrate.
Well, no matter. He has seen minds like this before, though they usually belong to people who meditate habitually. People who meditate more have thicker mist clouding their mind, and this girl has some of the most impenetrable mist he’s ever felt. She doesn’t seem like the type, but he isn’t here to speculate about a random teenager’s spiritual life.
“Hello,” Hawkmoth says, rooting in his victim champion’s mind for a suitable name, “…Deku. I am Hawk—”
“Fuck off.” The girl hisses, with so much anger that her tiny body should’ve imploded from storing all that rage.
Hawkmoth blinks.
This isn’t how it is supposed to go.
Marinette is having one of those days.
It didn’t start as a bad day—if anything, her dreams last night were calm and pleasant.
She dreamt of a memory, something that happened during her second year at UA, when they were still hero students who only feared the next test, and there was no centuries-old war that loomed over the horizon.
No matter what Aizawa-sensei seems to think, it isn’t Izuku’s fault. It was Mina’s idea to have a barbecue. Shoto is practicing his quirk by changing the heat of his flames, when Mina comes over to plop an entire egg into Shoto’s left hand.
“I wanna eat a soft-boiled egg!” She tells him.
Shoto complies, and the resulting egg tastes surprisingly good. Then, Denki comes over, pancake batter poured into a pan, and begins using Shoto as an impromptu stove.
It devolves from there. Someone convinces Momo to produce a sheet of metal, and Shoto sits there, bemused, while their classmates use him to roast meat.
“You wanna eat this?” Izuku asks, uncharacteristically sly, a fork speared with a piece of beef in his hand.
Shoto nods, and Izuku grinning, takes the beef from his fork into his mouth.
He savours his boyfriend’s crestfallen expression for a moment, and then—to the cheers of his classmates—presses his mouth onto Shoto’s and feeds him the beef.
Cheers turn into screams as Shoto flushes, and the flames on his left flare. The sprinklers turn on, drenching the entire class and ruining their food.
Aizawa-sensei arrives soon after that, and sentences the entire class to detention. He looks like he meant to put the entire class on house arrest, but immediately realised leaving the class unsupervised is what lead to this moment.
Still, Marinette remembers Shoto’s face, eyes wide and a blush covering his face. She remembers Mina’s cheerful suggestion, and the begrudging way Momo became accomplice to the class’s misdeeds. She remembers her classmates’ cheers, and how, after ordering the class back to their rooms, Aizawa-sensei lips twitches when he thinks no one is watching.
She remembers, and—
When Marinette wakes up, salt pools onto her tongue and her hair sticks to her wet cheeks. Tikki presses herself onto Marinette’s nose—the kwami equivalent of a hug—but it does nothing to distract her from the lump in her throat.
The miasma of grief longing regret hangs around Marinette as she prepares for the day, heavy and suffocating.
When Maman greets her as she comes down from her room, Marinette sees a green-haired woman in her steed, plump from the years and weathered lines across her face. As she makes her way to school, she sees a pink girl with horns standing where Alya should be. When Adrien smiles at her, another boy with white and red hair stare back.
Some days, despite all the years that have passed, Marinette cannot turn in any direction without seeing ghosts, and she wonders why she must remember a past she can never return to.
She buries her head in her pillow, and tries not to think of another room rife with merchandise of heroes that do not exist in this world.
(This is when the butterfly flies in.)
Marinette is having a bad day, and her day gets progressively worse when a butterfly flies into her hair ribbon.
“Hello,” a voice speaks in her head, and Marinette is overcome with the sudden urge to punch its owner, “Deku, I am Hawk—”
“Fuck off.” Marinette Izuku hisses.
Deku, the worthless, quirkless boy.
Deku, All Might’s successor.
Deku, the number one pro hero, the Symbol of Hope.
Deku, Winter Hearth’s boyfriend.
Deku, the dead hero.
Marinette blinks, momentarily put off by her own viciousness. She isn’t one to curse. “I know who you are, Hawkmoth. And please, leave me alone. I’m not in the mood to deal with this.”
“Yes,” Hawkmoth says impatiently, “as I was saying, I will grant you the power to bring back what you lost—”
Several thoughts fly through Marinette’s mind at once. One, her turning into an akuma will be disastrous for Paris. Two, Hawkmoth is really annoying. Three, Hawkmoth is using a mental link to talk to her, and vice versa. This mental bond goes both ways.
If she can overwhelm him…
Marinette begins reciting the periodic table.
“—iron, cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc, gallium, germanium, arsenic, selenium, bromine—"
“Deku.” Hawkmoth grits his teeth, the inane words bouncing around his head like the world’s worst Mexican jumping beans. “You are to—”
“I told you to shut up. You’re making me lose count. Where was I…krypton, rubidium, strontium—”
Hawkmoth does not growl. He is more eloquent than that. Once again, he tries to push through that thrice-damned mist clogging the girl’s mind. He fails.
His head pounds.
This is fine. The girl will give up eventually, and then he will have his prize. It’s just a matter of endurance.
He can almost feel the power this akuma will have once she completes her metamorphosis. The lines of green that will streak her body, the ability to transform people into those she loves and control an army of them, the sheer chaos that this storm personified will rain on Paris.
He just needs to wait.
The girl finally finishes reciting all 118 elements. She pauses, taking a deep breath.
Hawkmoth smiles.
But.
But then—
The menace proceeds to reciting…is that law? She proceeds to recite something in Japanese, and then a list of code names that ought to belong to an overbudgeted spy movie.
“And then in number 33 there are the Wild, Wild Pussycats, which consists of Mandalay, Tiger, PixieBob and Ragdoll, since retired. In number 34 is Shatterblade. Dove is in 35, and 36 belongs to—”
What does that even mean? Is it from a cartoon? Some sort of ranking from a video game?
Hawkmoth pointedly does not groan. He is a grown man and refuses to let a teenage girl best him like this.
“Bring me Ladybug and Chat Noir’s miraculous, and you will—”
“—number 41 belongs to Snowglobe, and number 42 his twin Dew—”
He is too old to deal with this.
Marinette is beginning to run out of things to recite; she fully expected Hawkmoth to give up sometime before she finished quoting the Japanese quirk laws.
Pressure builds up at the back of her head as Hawkmoth pushes once more, barely held back by the barrage of hero names overwhelming their mental link.
She doesn’t panic, but it’s a near thing. Panic will give Hawkmoth more to work with.
Gritting her teeth, Marinette begins once more, “Hydrogen, helium—”
A voice, boisterous and loud and drowning out the foreign presence in her mind, cuts in. “Yo! What’s this ugly villain doing in our mind? Get out of here, you creepy eyesore!”
Marinette has never felt more grateful to hear Fifth’s voice.
The teenage menace swallows as she finishes her inane list of character names. Hawkmoth can feel her anxiety leaking across the bond, and a fleeting thought, “Why isn’t he gone yet?”
He smiles.
The girl returns to reciting the periodic table, but Hawkmoth doesn’t mind as much as he did. He is wearing her down.
But then—
Another presence, foreign and loud and grating, cuts in. “Yo! What’s this ugly villain doing in our mind? Get out of here, you creepy eyesore!”
What?
But—but—
Another series of voices join the first. “Out—” “—get out—” “—you won’t hurt—” “—shut up—” “—kami, so annoying—”
This—this should be impossible. How are there other beings invading the bond?
The beings—oh, he can see them now, rising from the swirling mist—yellow and purple and red and white and—
They pull.
In his lair, Hawkmoth gasps and stumbles forward.
They had grabbed onto the thread that represented their mental bond, and pulled.
And it worked.
Another pull, and Hawkmoth feels something tearing, his mental presence lurching forward, for all that his physical body remained bent over.
His head pounds.
Reaching up for the mental bond, he pulls back, but—
One mind is no match for nine.
His mind lurches forward, trying to fly towards the other side of the city, where the girl remains. He feels threads fraying, his mind stretching, his brain tearing like cheap tissue paper, and—
Hawkmoth swallows.
He does something he should’ve done a long time ago.
He destroys the bond.
“Holy—” Marinette gaps. She opens her eyes to a white butterfly sitting innocently on her knee, no trace of Hawkmoth’s power remaining in it.
“I can’t believe that worked.” A familiar voice comments. Seventh.
Marinette smiles. Her mind is still crowded, but with nine familiar and comforting presences instead of Hawkmoth’s foreign and invasive one.
“Thanks, guys,” Marinette thinks.
“No problem!” Izuku chirps.
“I’m sorry it took so long, my girl.” Toshinori says. “That villain weakened the mental barrier between you and One For All a lot, but we still had to break through the barrier.”
“I’m glad you could come through at all.” Marinette tells him, his presence soothing the grief longing regret that has only been put to the side, not quite gone. “But—is this…permanent?”
Can she talk to them while awake again?
“Isn’t that the million-dollar question.” Third grumbles. “We don’t know yet. Your mind might rebuild that barrier, or it might not.”
Marinette nods, even though the vestiges don’t need to see that to know what she’s thinking, but then—
“Marinette!” Tikki exclaims. “You’re okay!”
The kwami’s head peaks out from beneath Marinette’s blankets. She must’ve been hiding there; probably a smart thing, considering that Marinette might’ve grabbed Tikki if Hawkmoth succeeded.
The thought of it sends a shiver down her spine. She was akumatized. She nearly betrayed Tikki, Chaton, and Master Fu. It was a close call—too close for comfort.
“Yeah,” Marinette breathes. “I…Hawkmoth’s gone now.”
Tikki flies out and hugs her cheek. The vestiges stay silent, giving her the illusion of privacy. “I’m so proud of you, Marinette. I was so worried, but…I shouldn’t be.”
Marinette reaches up to pat Tikki’s head. The kwami is soft and warm and present under her hand. Tikki is fine. Marinette didn’t give her to that villain. “I…I wouldn’t have succeeded without the vestiges.”
Tikki looks up. There is a small frown on her face, like every time Marinette mentions One For All. “You distracted Hawkmoth so he couldn’t complete your transformation, Marinette. Don’t give yourself so little credit.”
Marinette smiles. They stay there for a long time, kwami and human comforting each other, until Maman knocks on the trapdoor and tells Marinette dinner is ready.
The vestiges’ voices become more distant as the night drags on, and by the time Marinette wakes up the next morning, she can’t hear them anymore.
Marinette doesn’t mind it as much as she should’ve; things turned out better than she could’ve asked for; what more can she want?
A few days later, Gabriel catches a too-familiar voice drifting out of Adrien’s bedroom door.
He frowns. The only one of Adrien’s classmates—aside from that Chloe girl—who is allowed to visit the Agreste mansion is Marinette Dupain-Cheng, aspiring artist and hardworking student. She is the only one of Adrien’s friends who is remotely a good influence on his son, thus the only one Gabriel tolerates the presence of.
That polite but firm girl who won his hat design competition is nothing like that uncouth menace of a teenager with the terrifying brain monsters.
A shudder runs down Gabriel’s spine at the memory. His mind fraying and tearing—what would’ve happened if those monsters succeeded in pulling his mind from his body?
But…that voice—
No.
He must’ve heard wrong.
That girl can’t have been the teenager who nearly did what Ladybug and Chat Noir could not—who nearly defeated Hawkmoth.