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Juleka crouches in what’s left of the rooftop shade, pink light just barely casting light on her pale skin. She goes through her loot one more time, checking to make sure that she has her plan in check.
It’s been a long time since she’s fenced. She hopes that the years she’d worked with Kagami would be enough – this is her last ditch effort before she shellters off Paris and Penalty for good.
The kwamis are worn down from use. Two of them have been stuck transformed for years, thanks to Penalty attacking their adult holders while they were unprepared, and she’d had to use Roaar’s power to get this close to Penalty without being seen in the first place.
Still, she pins the two extra miraculous to her jacket, running the new transformation phrase over and over in her head to make sure that she doesn’t mess it up in the heat of the moment.
With all that set, she allows herself one more deep breath.
It’s just her and Penalty. Bunnyx hasn’t been around to stop her since the start, leaving the remaining heroes to drop one by one. Once Viperion dropped, the snake miraculous completely knotted in glowing pink thread, some of them had retreated out of Paris in order to come up with a new strategy, and whether it’s because they failed to come up with useful or got caught on the way out, the point stands that none of that part of the team is around, now. They’ve got one chance left, and in all honesty they all blew it the day they left Pigella alone after an argument between teammates.
“Roarr, stripes on.”
Purple Tigress curses herself for not considering the flash of purple light, but she knows by the sudden presence of noise in the silently crying world that Penalty has spotted her, and half of her element of surprise has already been ruined. At least the other two miraculous are still subtle enough on her in costume.
“Julie!” The deceptive, yet sadistic thing that is Penalty, piloting her girlfriend’s body, greets eagerly as she touches down. She waves in that same eager way Rose used to, as though both her hands aren’t weighed down by thousands of marionette strings, so crammed together the morbid part of her wonders how much more tension it’d take for her fingers to start falling off. “It’s so great to see you! Do you have another game for me? Or even better—”
“No,” she yells, or says, or– something. It’s hard to tell what volume is normal at this point, let alone what used to be her normal. Not even the pigeons give her a reference anymore, because they were smart enough to flee. “I don’t have the ring, and I don’t have the earrings. I’m just here to talk.”
Penalty hums, tilting her head. Behind the pure-white mask, her eyes flash that now-threatening hot pink. “You’re more hopeful than normal. Did you finally find Luka? I’m not sure where he is in all this, but I could–” she breaks off into a gasp, starting to bounce childishly. “–What if I use the wish to bring him back guaranteed!? That’d be fair to you and I, wouldn’t it? And who’s to say I can’t just make a second wish for myself? Ladybug and Chat Noir won’t be there to stop me!”
Tigress growls at her girlfriend. Despite their (temporarily frozen) relationship status, she’s long since given up on trying to hold her temper in front of the akuma. “I. Don’t. Have them. But I do have a gift that I’ll think you’ll like, if you want, Penalty.”
The akuma beams, bouncing forward without a care. The thread around her fingers rescind, wrapping around her wrists like two massive bracelets that stretch across the skyline and down into the city streets. “Show me, show me, show me!”
It’s a little ironic, to be honest. The form Rose matured in would be the most childish of hers yet.
But if Tigress has anything to say about it, she’s starting a new round of memories, tonight. Just one more hour and she and her happy girlfriend will leave the city as a duo, make it down to London and reconvene with Argos and then the rest of their friends, and eventually they’ll find the Ladybug earrings and set everything back to the way it should be.
Tigress takes one more deep breath, for the road.
“Nooroo, Duusu, Roarr, unify!”
The power nearly strangles her for a brief moment but she forces herself through it, grabbing the butterfly’s sabre from its hilt before her suit is even finished re-materialising. Penalty doesn’t have time to react as the heroine slashes, the sharp blade cutting off the thread intertwined in her pigtails, and then with a dive she gets in a lucky shot at Penalty’s ankle, barely making a scrape in the pig miraculous, but getting a strong cut in on her ankle itself that’s barely a scrape thanks to the akuma powers and the pig miraculous’ power underneath.
Penalty stares at her, her light pink eyes eerily void of life.
And then a purple cocoon wraps around her form, the marionette strings falling to the rooftop as an akuma pushes its way out of the small slice in her anklet and flies towards Violet Redemption.
She lets the akuma settle on the hand that once held the sabre, only then recognising that she’s apparently dropped it. But that’s fine, she doesn’t feel like fighting for a long, long time after this.
“No more evil-doing for you, little akuma,” she murmurs with the small bit of breath left in her lungs, and as her tears land against its darkened wings, creating small spots of purification that reminds her of the starry sky she’s found herself resenting as time has kept on moving forward.
With her tears, the rest of the crying starts anew. The suspended corpses she’d learned to ignore all begin a new cacophonous weeping, echoed by the dark sky beginning to drop the first drizzle of rain.
Rose stumbles as the cocoon frees her, landing in Violet’s arms. She still seems eerily distant, but as she looks around and begins to catch her bearings, Violet can only hold her girlfriend close as she comes to terms with what she’s made of the world.
“I’m sorry,” an unnaturally sorrowful Rose sobs, clinging to Violet tighter, not even bothering to verify her identity.
Violet holds her back, tucking her face into her chest if only to preserve her from the full extent of the horror she’s caused for even a minute longer.
“None of it was your fault,” she replies, already swearing she will fight the world to prove it.