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It started with a mote.
Oh, it was so nice to have that word back again. After centuries of the cold, of the dark, of the void, it was nice to, once again, have the luxury of a vocabulary.
He counted his favoured words: pensée, selcouth, pishogue. Flokati. “Sinistrorse,” his voice rasped and he grinned.
Mayhaps his recovery would go faster than anticipated. Would it be too soon...well, he wouldn’t know unless he tried. He focused. Taking himself and slowly fastened it all together, into a body of voidlight and stars. How many limbs? How many eyes? Oh, he always loved Tikki’s gift being so flexible, so wonderous, so miraculous.
It’s why he played the guardsman, afterall.
It started with a mote. A singular mote of dust.
Luka sighed, looking at his torn apart house and his messy, messy roommate.
“Marinette-”
“Luka, I can’t find it,” she squeaked from her position underneath her bed. “Oh my spots, Luka. Luka, she told me that dust would be the first sign. We just-”
“Hey. Breathe.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “We’ll figure it out. We always do.”
“Thanks Luka. This is why you’re my best friend.”
He did what he could to not think of one Alya Cesaire in that moment, keeping his smile.
His limbs and spine like oil, he slipped through a crack behind a painting into what some may call The Real World. He settled, crouching on his legs with his theoretical weight on his toes and settling his rapidly-normalising arms (controlling his armspan from galaxies to infinitely smaller ) on his knees. Slowly, meticulously, he rose to a standing position and looked at the painting that had been his key.
“Portrait of Félix Fénéon” by Paul Signac, 1890. The swirl of colours, the implied effort (not made of strokes, but tiny motes of paint strung together in a kind of pointilation that would have taken an eternity to a human), the strangeness, the chaotic order of it...
“Félix,” his voice purred under his breath. “Yes. That will do. That will do nicely.” He brushed himself off, a brown trenchcoat sweeping out from his motions with a black suit underneath (would humans have the sight to be able to see the stars woven within it? Surely not).
Félix snapped quietly, pulling a top hat out of the space between folds and put it on. “To work then.”
Neither of them had been ready for the guardsman. With the kwami hibernating for the next five years, what options did they have? For the Miraculous jewelry was the only magic they had ever thought to have known.
“Thousands of years alongside the kwami,” the guardsman gloated, “and you still are the worst partners they could ever ask for, with needless limits and all the control, the infantilization- and for what? Just so you could lose this pathetically?” He leaned down, taking Luka by the chin, his sword slashing away his lyre. “Why should I ever let the lot of you live?”
Luka rasped, “I…I can-”
“Luka, no!” Marinette, always trying to save him, always trying to take it all on her own, but-
“Oh?” the guardsman tapped his fingertips on the soft flesh of Luka’s throat, his grip still on Luka’s chin. “You want to gamble with me, Luka Couffaine?”
“I can…I can show you why humanity is worth it.” Luka weakly tilted his head. “Just…give me time to patch myself.” He made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a cough. “Pick me up at eight?”
The guardsman tilted his head in parallel to Luka, his starry skin glittering. This close, Luka got the impression that for every star on the guardsman’s skin was another angle he could see from. His smirk shifted sides, like swapping hands for a switchblade. “…I can do that, little snake. But the broken bug- she remains elsewhere.”
“Alright,” Luka replied. “She needs rest anyway.”
“Don’t lie to me,” the guardsman snipped. “You need it too. I know what it’s like to be on the other side of me in a fight. I’m too old not to.”
“You’re still picking me up at eight, old man.”
The guardsman, against all odds, snorted. “What an irreverent snake.”
“Told I’m incorrigible, actually.” Luka smirked, ignoring the soreness in his jaw as he did so.
Leaning down, the guardsman swiped his other thumb across Luka’s jaw. The soreness was met with a cold feeling, like an ice bath all at once, and then...it felt normal to move again. His voice rumbled quietly, “I shall see you at eight then.” And then, stepping away, the guardsman vanished, leaving Luka to catch himself.
Eight o’ clock rolled by fast. Convincing Marinette to leave this to him (putting her in the situation she had put him and so many others in the past, both recent and what felt like ancient now) took time, as well as patching up some of his worst wounds. Then his hair took time and so did picking clothes.
The clock rang eight times and Luka Couffaine stood...and out from a little sunspot at the corner of his eye, the guardsman flickered into existence, like a forgotten piece of lint pulled into existence by him remembering it existed.
“Well,” the guardsman replied, holding his hand out to Luka, “let’s see your gambit then. When and where are we going then?”
“Why ask when?”
“I know better than to take a snake to think only in the now.” The guardsman tilted his head. “You wouldn’t have been even chosen had you not the capacity to think in several times at once. So. When and where?”
Luka answered, “Late May then, ten years ago. And...Scottland. The sheep farm owned by my grandfather, specifically.” He slowly put his hand in the guardsman’s, somewhat...marveling at how simultaneously warm and cool he was. The cold of sunlight. The warmth of starlight. And everything in between.
The guardsman hummed, his eyes glowing purple (not a uniform purple all at once; Luka could see the image of luminescent pages flicking in the guardsman’s eyes, visibly sorting through the information available to him). “Alright. I am going to snap so your own mind comprehends something happens and so you won’t go insane. It is not an attack this time. Understood?”
“Alright.”
The guardsman raised his free hand and snapped his fingers. The scenery around them shifted, like peeling wallpaper, from his living room to the pastures of his grandfather’s farm, with the rolling grasslands unfolding around them like carpets in commercials. Stars, untouched by light pollution, hung above them. Luka knew that some 30 meters to the left of here, his grandfather’s flock was resting beneath a shelter, hurdled together for safety in the summer evening.
“We never managed to make it this year,” Luka replied. “Guess I know why now. Paradox.”
“Your gambit, snake.”
“I’m getting to that.” He looked around, breathing the air in. “Just...take in the night a little bit, alright?”
The guardsman looked around, humming. “I am largely surprised you wish to show me humanity’s worth in a place seemingly bereft of them...besides the one I can taste.” He pointed a lazy finger in the direction of Luka’s grandfather’s house. “You are really selling your argument.”
“We’ll need two jars.” Luka held his hands out for the dimensions. “No lids. Just the glass jars.”
“To your left then.”
Luka turned to his left, finding two glass jars sitting on a stump he had climbed many times as a child. He reached over, plucking them up in one hand, using a finger to stop them from clinking together. He took one, offering it to the guardsman. “In about 30 minutes,” Luka replied, “there’ll be glow worms waking. We’re each going to try to gather as many as we can, without using any kind of magic. Just by touch and sight.”
“And what is this meant to achieve?”
Luka just smiled. “We’ll talk about that at 2 am. That will be the end of my gambit.”
The guardsman hummed, taking the jar. “We’ll see.”
“Mr Couffaine?”
He turned, his blond hair glinting like starlight under the orange lightbulb the university kept in its lecture hall. “Yes?”
“I um. I wanted to apologize,” the student replied. “I was impatient-”
“No need.” He smiled neatly, having learned how to smile with the right number of teeth. “I was once an impatient old man once too.”
“...don’t you mean-”
“I don’t.” He hummed, looking at his paper-coloured hand and reflecting over it back and forth in a show to the student. “You’re from the midwestern states in America, are you not?”
“Um. Yeah?”
“Then you know how it is to catch fireflies,” he answered. “How one must be patient and gentle. I’ve never caught them myself; my husband took me to a place in his childhood and he taught me to find glow worms, a distant cousin of the firefly. Such an experience can be rather...grounding, yes?”
The student blinked, then nodded slowly.
“That is how astrophysics is,” Mr Couffaine continued. “You take a small concept, like the applied mathematics, and then...wrap your mind around it, slowly, gently, like fingers around the small, glowing insect. You must be gentle: both with the mathematics but also...yourself.” He tapped his pen to the table. “So...do not beat yourself up overly much over today’s lecture or your test results. After all, you have all the time in the world to understand what matters most.”
Mr Couffaine’s phone began to ring. The student hastily excused themselves with another apology. Mr Couffaine answered it.
“Hello, Luka.”
“Félix,” Luka’s voice poured over the phone, soundwaves audible in a way that always felt like warm water to his mind. “How’s work?”
“Nostalgic.” He leaned back in his chair and hummed. “Tonight, I have a request.”
“Bossy as ever, I see.”
Félix snorted, as he had once. “I think I would like tea and cuddles, once we’ve both returned home. Is this agreeable?”
“That is, as ever,” Luka answered, affectionately mimicking Félix’s voice, “an agreeable gambit.”