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The room was poorly lit, and by every metric also poorly kept.
Wallpaper flaked from rotting walls, the only window (though large) was damp and had fungus growing from its muntins and frame. There was a single dirty lightbulb hanging off its own electrical cord, its light barely reaching the far side of the room with its sole exit door, but judging by how it seemed only half attached to its hinges it probably wouldn’t be much to look at either. It looked like an actual bomb had gone off in the middle of the room. Plastic trash littered the musty wooden floor, which was full of holes. And there was a rusted sabre jutting out of one of the walls.
That was the entirety of the sight that met Kagami as she awoke after an unknown time asleep. She definitely hadn’t gone to sleep anywhere like this. She would never have been able to sleep on this… wheeled… metal tray… thing in the first place. She couldn’t even remember going to sleep.
… what could she remember? An arm around her, two arms around her, but not why or when.
Strangely, she didn’t feel uncomfortable on the tray. She almost didn’t feel anything at all.
She pushed off the contraption, gingerly placing her slippered feet on the floor. She had slippers. What was she even wearing? The slippers seemed somewhat fresh, almost homemade, but her stockings were torn and full of holes, her skirt looked slimy and stained, her blazer had a large hole in it.
She moved over to the sabre and pulled it out. It felt – like a memory, kind of. Like she had held it before. But that couldn’t be right; she’d never touched a weapon this old.
Someone had brought her here. Someone had taken her from somewhere, probably drugged her or knocked her out, done something to her. Then they’d done something to her clothes, too, and they’d dropped her in this weird room, and she shuddered to even imagine what else might be going on. But she was going to get away, and she would fight her way out if she had to.
Frankly, this level of carelessness was unacceptable. Whoever took her hadn’t done anything to restrain her. A good abduction should have one of two things: it should be glamorous, or it should be dramatic and thrilling.
As she walked towards the door, though, she heard noises from outside. A thumping sound, then footsteps. A creak from an old floorboard. Then a hum, a whistle. Whoever was out there was clearly not being careful. No sense of panache or drama. She would have to give them some stern notes on etiquette, with the aid of this rusted sword.
She listened for a little longer. There was more floorboard creaking, some banging of metal and ceramics. Something heavy hit the floor, and there was a brief yelp, and then a pitter-patter of feet walking away quickly. The person kept humming as she disappeared: from the voice a young woman, maybe even just a girl, and judging by the lack of other sounds that young woman or girl was alone.
Kagami hesitated for a moment. If her captor was just a girl, then she could get away easily. She was – not to brag – incredibly good with a sword, fiendishly clever, and very dangerous. But then again, if this girl had overpowered her and taken her here, then that girl must also be fiendishly clever and very dangerous, and probably have some weapons ability. Perhaps a blowdart, or a garrotte.
Briefly, Kagami wondered if she should throw caution to the wind and try to sneak out instead.
But that would be cowardice. So instead, she threw her caution out with the bathwater and ripped the door open with an incredible, shuddering creak. There was a yelp from somewhere else in the house, and then distant footsteps. The confrontation was coming.
The hallway beyond looked no better, the main difference being that it was better lit so it was easier to see the decrepitude. The floorboards and carpets were both so full of holes they might as well have been cheese. There were even better-lit rooms to either side, but she couldn’t see through them, only see the impression of light through their half-open doorways.
The footsteps – they were coming from the left, down another stretch of hallway. She ran towards it, ready to meet her soon-to-be hapless captor. But as she turned the corner, she came face to face with –
Kagami had seen several manga with this premise. She had even read a couple, hiding away between the shelves at the bookstore or library to avoid detection. Some creepy old man bought a creepy old house and did creepy old – no, wait – absolutely insane experiments within its walls. He abducted girls or dug them up from a nearby graveyard, and brought them back to life with some kind of magic or absurd technology, and then he… well, what he did depended a lot on the manga. Either way, it was not the type of manga she would ever view as a blueprint for real life.
And she wanted to cry, because whichever type of manga it was had happened to Marinette. What stood in front of Kagami was Marinette’s body, but that body was a zombie’s. It had green and raw skin, the head had been crudely reattached, there were cuts all across what was visible of the chest and arms. One of the eyes was just barely misaligned. The hair looked unkempt and like it had been buried in soil for days. And the clothes looked like they’d been involved in that explosion that had apparently happened in the first room.
“Kagami!” the fake body yelled. “You woke up after all! Are y-”
“I’m sorry, Marinette!” Kagami screamed, and drove the rapier to the hilt straight through the body’s throat. She was sorry for what had happened to her; she was sorry for killing her again; she was sorry for abandoning her. She was sorry that she and Marinette could never again –
The body hugged Kagami. “Kagami! Thank goodness! It’s been so long!”
“Wait – Marinette? You’re still in there?”
“Of course I am!” said Marinette, hugging even harder. “I’ve been – oh, I have so much I have to explain to you. But we can do that later, because I just want to keep hugging you, oh fudgenuts, I’ve missed you so much –”
“No – no!” Kagami pushed Marinette back, breaking her grip. “This is no time for hugging! We have to get out of he- oh…”
She noticed Marinette’s arm on the floor. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to do that…”
“What, that?” said Marinette, rolling her eyes. “That’s normal. Don’t worry about it. I swear I can never keep it on, I should just get a comically large nail and hammer it on for good.”
“But…” Kagami looked at the sword again. The rusty, painful, jagged sword she had just driven all the way through Marinette’s throat. “Aren’t you… in pain? From, you know, everything?”
“I actually don’t feel pain anymore, and thank the stars for that, or I’d have gone super-mega-ultra-crazy years ago. Actually, that’s something else I’ve got to explain to you.” Marinette bowed down and picked the arm up off the grimy floor. And then, without care for literally anything between heaven and earth, fatally stabbing hygiene and propriety and decapitating Kagami’s frayed feelings, she jammed the arm back in place. “Hup. There we go!”
“… Years?” Kagami said weakly.
Marinette shook her head. “Yeah, no, like, I am going to need a lot of time to explain this right. So why don’t you join me in the living room?”
“No! We need to get away from here!”
“Why? I live here! Well, I guess I don’t really live here, but you get what I mean.”
Kagami blinked.
“Also, I guess it’s not really a living room, either. But –”
“Marinette! You are a zombie! Someone used foul magic and raised you for… nefarious purposes, and if he comes back, he’s going to control you! You’re in incredible danger!”
Marinette smiled. “Can I just get a chance to explain? There’s no danger, honest. He’s been dead for twenty years, anyway.”
It was just too much for Kagami to handle. She hadn’t planned to be abducted today. She hadn’t planned to see her best friend murdered and raised from the dead, she hadn’t wanted to see Marinette mangled and beaten and defiled. She hadn’t expected all that only to have Marinette turn around and be flippant about it. And what was all this about ‘years’? They needed to get away before anything else terrible happened.
She set her jaw and reached out her hand, grabbed onto Marinette’s shoulder. “We’re leaving. Stop protesting. I’ll get us out of here, and then we can figure out what to do about your – your… we will find something to do about your whole being-dead situation.”
However, when she started to walk and pulled on Marinette to bring her along, something happened. There was a wet ripping sound. And she turned back, terrified that she might somehow have torn off Marinette’s shoulder…
… only to see Marinette, as whole as she had been before, holding on to a patchy, scratched-up, green arm. With both of her own hands.
“This is one of the things I was hoping to explain to you,” said Marinette, smiling lopsidedly.
Apparently, that something else terrible had happened already. And Kagami finally realised why she hadn’t been fazed by that metal tray she woke up on.
💀🪦🪦💀
Marinette was right: this wasn’t a living room. It was a long-dead room, like a coffin for a decaying tea party. It had been grand once – in fact, so had the whole house, Kagami had noticed as much when she followed Marinette back through the hallway. This was a house that had been incredibly expensive at some point. But that point must have been decades, and several layers of water damage, ago.
The once-living room, for example. It had a fireplace with a chimney that had cracked and shifted, leaving several bricks on the floor. There had been large paintings on the wall, including a huge one at the back, each now marked by rectangular imprints where their frames had shielded the wallpaper. The wallpaper itself looked costly, but had bubbled or ripped or flaked off so much it barely had a pattern anymore. The furniture was relatively whole, but ‘relatively’ meant very little here. The tea table had a leg missing and the surface was full of nasty stains. The two couches around it looked like dogs had lived in them; in a way, they looked like dogs. There was a lamp in the corner but it seemed to have rusted away its ability to fulfil any function whatsoever.
Kagami wished she could say that the only thing that looked alive and well in here was Marinette, but that would have been a lie. Marinette looked like Death himself had visited her five times, quite rudely every time. It was like someone had chewed her hair every time then gobbed it back onto her head. She set out a chipped teaset and poured a cup for each of them.
And the whole time…
“Marinette. Please take that sabre out of your neck.”
“Right. Thanks. I forgot it was there.” She grabbed hold of the guard and pulled; the blade slid out like it had only been run through butter. After dropping it on the floor, she picked up one of the teacups and picked up a biscuit from a tin she’d brought in; she placed the biscuit on the saucer plate and handed the whole thing to Kagami, who could only really resign herself to accepting it.
“So do you want this chronologically, or in order from most to least believable?” said Marinette, sitting down next to Kagami with her own cup. She didn’t take a biscuit for herself. “Or maybe some other order? I’m adaptable.”
Clearly. Adaptable enough to be unfazed by rusted holes in her body. “How about you start with the basic facts?” Kagami said, shuddering at the thought that literally anything in this situation could be considered ‘factual’.
“All right,” smiled Marinette. “Oh, tell me how you like the tea, by the way. I’m pretty sure I’ve perfected tea brewing now. Anyway… we’re both dead. And we’ve been dead for… oh, I think it’s actually twenty-one years exactly today! What are the chances?” She took a sip from her cup. “That’s a bit of an anniversary.”
Kagami sipped some for herself. The tea was actually very good. She should have known that Marinette wouldn’t brag unduly. It was just sweet enough, while the water had been suffused completely with – chamomile? And there was a taste of honey to it, and she could really feel the love that had gone into every part of the brewing.
“So the reason we’re dead is because – okay, what’s the last thing you remember? Because when I got raised, my memory was shot. Took me days, and a couple of newspaper clippings, to remember stuff. And you’ve been gone for longer, so…”
“Well…”
It was still sinking in for Kagami that she was dead. Here, in the warmer light of the not-quite-living room – because despite everything, there was at least a functional and decently-kept chandelier – she could clearly see that her skin looked no better than Marinette’s. She had a hole in her chest that she hadn’t noticed before, because apparently her mind could still lie to her and ignore that the hole was there even though she’d looked directly at it when she inspected her clothes.
The next thing to sink – like a grindstone into a deep ocean ravine – would probably need to be that she’d been dead for over two decades. And then she might need to let it sink in that she wasn’t panicking any more. Maybe her mind was too busy with everything else and would get back to panicking after tea. Maybe it was the sublime tea. She just had to take another sip, good grief.
“This tea is very good,” she said.
“Thank you,” said Marinette. “I’m glad you like it!”
“Can you teach me how to make it? I would like all my tea to be like this forever.”
Marinette giggled. “Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is it took me twelve years to get it right.”
“And the good news?”
“Well, ‘forever’ is a strong possibility.”
Kagami took yet another sip, nodding. That made sense. And then it didn’t. “Is that… good news?”
“Well, it is to me. There’s a lot of – actually, no, hang on.” Marinette went from thoughtful to playfully stern in the flash of an eye. “You’re supposed to tell me what you remember. Tell me! I’ll explain later.”
Kagami took another sip. She wanted to pour the whole pot into her mouth like some absolute uncouth monster. How could tea taste this good? As for her memories…
… well, she remembered waking up. Twice, now. She’d been pretty – excited? Annoyed? Upset? Whatever it was, she had been completely awake. Then arms. And then…
“Nothing,” she concluded.
“Well, okay. Let me be more specific. Do you remember me getting publicly exposed as Ladybug on television?” Marinette slurped a bit more tea. Her stab wound was leaking a small brown stain onto the neck of her shirt. “That was the day before we died.”
“… You were Ladybug?”
“I’ll take that as a no,” laughed Marinette. “On the day, we were fighting this invisible akuma who could teleport. You were there, and Cat Noir, and Zoé and Nino and – oh, doesn’t matter. The akuma grabbed your necklace and my earrings and sent them back to Shadow Moth who, it turns out, was Gabriel Agreste.” Kagami choked on her tea. “Yeah, he wasn’t the brightest man. He gloated about the earrings so much he accidentally said his own name, and why he was doing it, live on national television. Anyway, he had to bolt the whole place down and make a sentimonster that was just a magic wall to stop cops.
“So we had to figure out a way to get the Miraculous back, and we decided to send a team of heroes into the mansion. I didn’t want to risk anything when he had four Miraculous in his possession, so I called everyone in. And because I’m an idiot, I said I’d be on the team too as a civilian, because I thought we needed someone to be the leader.”
“You didn’t?”
“Oh, I was needed all right. There’s so much infighting when there are fourteen heroes and half of them are annoying to the other half as civilians, let alone when they can throw chaos toys and time holes at each other to be even more annoying. And Nathaniel would have just used his power to make a bouquet for Marc or something if I didn’t stop him. But I could have just been there on an earpiece or something. Turns out explosions are really bad for you when you’re not in superhero costume. Who could have guessed?”
Kagami meekly raised her hand. “I could.”
“Yeah, well, you were also there. Not in costume either, obviously, you just had that sword of yours. So the two of us kind of ended up painting the scenery.”
A sudden memory startled its way into Kagami’s brain: a magical grenade landing at Marinette’s feet; an immediate protective instinct, running forward to get Marinette out of the way because Marinette couldn’t die, Marinette mustn’t die, because life without Marinette didn’t seem worth living –
– well, she got her wish, didn’t she?
Marinette didn’t seem bothered at all. She just enlarged the stain on her front by taking in some more tea.
“Anyway, like I said, Gabriel wasn’t particularly bright. He got a dictionary for a lucky charm, and that was obviously meant to be used for paper planes to distract Kim and get him to uproar Nino so he’d put a reverse shield around Ivan, which would pull all the Mylènes in and also Adrien’s hand so he’d cataclysm Luka’s wristband, and then he could have thrown the book at Sabrina so her fetch ball would go wide and hit Alix’s pocket watch, and then he could have grabbed the – Kagami?”
Kagami blinked. “What?”
“Your eyes were glazing over.”
“Ahem,” said Kagami, clearing her throat. “I’m sorry. I don’t really see how this is relevant.” That was a lie – her eyes had glazed over because she was too distracted by Marinette’s amazing mind to actually hang on to its turns and swerves.
Marinette sighed, like she’d been really excited to finally tell someone about the plan she made way back then; Kagami almost told her to continue, but she didn’t want to interrupt. “Okay, then. Well, anyway, what he did was try to read it for clues, and then Cat Noir kicked him through a wall and impaled him on a burst metal pipe, and Luka grabbed all the Miraculous off him. And that was that. He was dead, we were dead, and that was that.”
“Okay.” Kagami remembered the explosion now. Not – directly, but she remembered the feeling of Marinette throwing her arms around her and trying to jump away, and then being lifted off the ground, holding on as tightly as possible. “That was the part where we died. But why are we still al… I mean, why are we zombies?”
“Su-Han. Grand master of the order of the Miraculous, and an absolute shipwright. He dug us up and then he raised me, and said our bodies and soul would be fed into the Great Wazoo or whatever he called it.”
“I sincerely doubt that was what he called it.”
“Well, whatever it was, it didn’t sound fun. He was going to burn us as a sacrifice, and we needed to be – zombies. Awake, I guess, for that. So I protested.”
“What happened then?”
Marinette pointed with her thumb towards the corner. “He’s been there since. I wasn’t going to let him burn you.”
Kagami turned to look. There were bones there, and scraps of cloth, and a slightly higher concentration of mushrooms than the rest of the room. There was also a rusted meat cleaver embedded in the floor.
“Was it messy,” Kagami said.
“Oh, the house has been messy the whole time,” said Marinette.
“No, I mean the – never mind,” said Kagami. “What happened then?”
“Then I spent twenty years trying to figure out the spell he used to raise me so I could use it on you.”
Kagami froze, her hands clenching harder around the cup. Strangely, she couldn’t actually feel the pressure from the cup, only a vague sensation of heat. “You mean… you spent twenty years trying to bring me back?”
“Of course,” Marinette said, smiling again. “You matter to me.”
If Kagami could still blush with this body, she definitely would have. But she could feel so little. Not from the cup, not from the sofa. No pressure from the floor. She hadn’t felt the tray she’d been lying on, either. All she’d felt so far was… Marinette. And the tea.
“I shouldn’t matter to you for twenty years.”
“Kagami… you’d matter to me for twenty thousand years. Okay? Don’t talk yourself down.” A non-physical sensation started to spread throughout Kagami’s chest. A feeling she’d felt before, on the last day she could remember before this one, when she had told Marinette that either they both went in, or neither of them. And then Marinette had… kissed her, on the cheek? Another memory returned to her, but one that was unequivocally good.
“But to spend twenty years just to get me back…”
“You literally died for me, Kagami. You died trying to save me. I couldn’t not try to save you after that.”
“So it’s just us?” Kagami asked. “You and me, for a possible eternity?”
Marinette nodded, twice. Then she became thoughtful. “Actually, I’m not sure. Do you wanna be alive? Not alive alive, but – this thing? I mean, I love hanging out with you. That’s why I brought you back, but… if you don’t want that…”
Somehow, despite being dead and having chunks rotted off her face, Marinette was still eminently expressive. And right now, she was troubled and nervous.
“What’s the alternative?”
“Well, if you want to stay dead, there is an option for that.”
Kagami didn’t really want to. She just wanted to hear Marinette talk a little more. “Tell me,” she said.
“Well, I have to bash your head in with a bat and then set fire to your remains so you don’t regenerate.”
Kagami somehow didn’t want to less. She just stayed at the same level of not wanting to, but with extra reasons. She took another sip of tea. Still amazing. “I don’t think that will be necessary,” she said. “I’m fine with being undead if you’re here with me.”
“Oh, wonderful! I feel the same way. Like, when I woke up, I was super excited when Su-Han said he’d zombify you too, but to burn you? And your beautiful eyes and perfect smile?” Marinette paused for a second. “Well, objectively speaking, you look like a papier-mâché statue that’s been left out in the rain for a month. But you’re still beautiful.”
“… Thank you?” said Kagami. Had Marinette been practising pickup lines for twenty years, too? Since when could she just flirt like that? Kagami tapped her heel on the floor, uselessly, because there was no physical feedback. It was just a motoric exercise with no use except further destroying the already thoroughly ruined construction.
Marinette stroked against Kagami’s arm, and Kagami could definitely feel that. “You’re welcome.”
“Marinette… why can’t I feel anything except when you touch me?”
“Is the tea not working?” said Marinette. “Oh, frigate, I was sure I’d got the recipe right –”
“No, the tea is perfect. But I can’t feel any pressure on my body except when you touch me. Not from the floor, not from the couch…”
“Or from that nail you’re sitting on,” said Marinette, pointing.
Kagami sighed. She wasn’t going to bother with it whether there was a nail there or not, because clearly it didn’t matter. “So why can’t I feel anything else?”
“Side effect of the spell. I think it’s kind of nice, actually. We’re basically only steered by magic, and the bodies are just like containers. We don’t need to eat or sleep or anything, so we don’t really need any signals from our body, and because physical sensations are bodily signals, well…”
“That only answers half my question.”
Marinette put down her teacup on the table. The table creaked, then collapsed with a damp crackling sound as the weight of decades of water damage finally caught up with it. Marinette didn’t pay it any mind. “Well, the magic does that. We can’t feel things normally, so instead we respond to emotions. If I touch you with love, then you’ll feel that. See?”
The hand that touched just below Kagami’s chin, then moved up to stroke her cheek, sent electric shocks all through her body. Corpse. Soul. Existence. Whatever it was the feeling touched, it was all-consuming, a burst of golden heat, and she realised she’d been missing this type of touch for twenty years – whether or not she’d been conscious to be aware of her lack. It was like waking up and realising she was hungry, and had been for ages.
“Does that mean…” Kagami lifted her own hand and placed it on Marinette’s sternum, and Marinette trembled, eyes closed.
“Yes. I felt that,” said Marinette, opening her eyes slowly. “Now… do you feel this?” She pulled her hand across Kagami’s wrecked ruined skin, around to the back of her head, and sat closer. And she leaned in for a kiss on the lips.
“Yes,” Kagami replied when they parted. “I felt that.”
Marinette’s smile was brilliant. And horrifying, because her teeth had not been treated kindly in death, but also brilliant. “Do you remember that we started dating before we died?”
Kagami swallowed. “… Is that true?”
“Do you want it to be?”
An eternity with Marinette. Drinking this amazing tea, exploring the night hand in hand, only being able to feel each other and nothing else. Without needing to fear aging or illness or death because frankly, it probably couldn’t make them look worse at this point.
“I’m not sure it matters,” she said.
“I agree,” said Marinette. “So let’s just say it’s true.”
So they did.