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Marinette could hear very insistent whispering outside her door, but she could do nothing about it. For one thing, she was completely bedridden, and held in place by a cast and a giant stomach wound and multiple tubes inserted into her body.
More pressingly, though, Kagami was attached to her arm just as tightly as the cast, and she was asleep.
Marinette wasn't sure what day it was. She assumed it was two days after the accident, but for all she knew she might have slept for twenty hours or even fifty. The round clock on the wall showed about five minutes past eleven, and that could be either AM or PM, though the daylight outside at least made it look like the former.
And the voices outside were recognisably those of her friends, which probably meant visitation hours. They were saying something about her in hushed sibilants and fricatives, though she didn’t quite catch what.
The agitated hissing didn't seem to lead anywhere, either. No faces appeared in the doorway. No feet stretched around the frame to start moving inside. They were just disembodied voices, muttering about her.
“He-hello?” she said, and was rewarded with immediate silence. “Guys? Hi?”
There was silence a little bit longer. Then, there was a brief shushed argument that sounded like,
“We have to go in now! She heard us!”
“But what if she spells us?”
“K-I-M. It's not hard.”
“No, I mean —”
“She might get angry if we don't go in now!”
“She won’t get angry! She’s always nice!”
“But what if she isn’t nice when she’s hurt?”
“Um, guys?” tried Marinette.
“Jesus — move it, or she’ll get angry for real!”
Then there was the sound of someone being pushed, and then Nino appeared in the doorway, half-stumbling like he’d been pushed, catching himself on the opposite jamb. Just behind his back was an arm, one that might possibly have pushed him.
He didn’t take long to catch his bearings, though. He scrambled to his full height and spun to face Marinette in the bed, and his mouth twisted into a horribly unconvincing grin.
“Heeeeeey, what’s up — oh,” he said, pointing at Kagami. “Is… is she dead?”
“She’s sleeping,” said Marinette, with a reproachful frown. “Don’t make so much noise.”
“And are you… stuck in bed?”
Marinette blinked. She was pretty sure the tubes and cast would be visible from quite a distance further away from where he was standing. “... Yes?”
“Oh, thank god,” said Nino. He heaved a deep breath, then turned towards the direction he’d been — presumably — pushed from. “Hey, everyone, I think it’s safe…”
As he waved like a traffic conductor, a whole heap of people walked inside past him. First Alya, then Alix, then Max, then Rose literally pulling Juleka, then Zoé, then Luka, then Nathaniel, then Ivan, then Marc, then Sabrina, then Chloé of all people, then Mylène, then Adrien, then Kim, then Lila —
All of them stopped in a wonky half circle around the bed, and nobody spoke until everyone had a spot. “Hey, girl,” said Alya, with an awkward twinge to her voice. “Er… how are you doing? Everything okay?”
“... Yes,” said Marinette. She smiled for a moment, though it was very weird to have seventeen people watching her and Kagami. Not least because the room was built for a much smaller amount of people. There definitely wasn’t space for everyone in there: Nino was trying to peek over Adrien’s shoulder, while Rose and Juleka had ended up smushed against a little wooden case, and Ivan and Kim were awkwardly pushed behind Nathaniel and Marc or Lila and Adrien, respectively. Luka had half climbed up on a lamp.
“No unresolved anger or anything?” said Marc.
“... No? What —”
“See, I told you,” said Alix. “It’s fine.”
“We’re all very happy to see you,” said Adrien. He said it like he was trying to address a runaway lion.
“Yeah, we’re really happy to see you,” echoed Alya. “Three cheers for our very good friend Marinette, right, everyone?”
And there were weak cheers from everyone — even Chloé, even Lila. Marinette shook her head, trying to dislodge whatever thing had been knocked loose in there that made her see everyone else acting weird. Everyone except Chloé, who was rolling her eyes. “Guys, what’s going on? Are you worried Kagami will be mad at you?” she asked.
Now everyone else blinked, with expressions that were extremely neutral. Again, except Chloé. “Um,” said Nino. “Maybe? But not really. Do you like her?”
“What?”
“Are you in favour of Kagami, in a general sense?” said Sabrina.
Marinette lifted her right hand slowly. Everyone jumped. But when Marinette hesitated with the hand in mid-air, they relaxed again, with more than a handful of relieved sighs coming from the lot of them. She moved the hand across her chest and put it on top of Kagami’s head, and she drew her thumb across it like the girl was a cat in her lap.
“Yes,” she said. She might have been embarrassed to say that normally. But if everyone else was going to act weird…
“Then no,” said Nino. “We aren’t worried about Kagami at all. She’s a cool dude.”
“Yeah, Kagami’s awesome!” said Kim. “So please don’t hurt us!”
“For god’s sake,” said Chloé, putting her fingers on her forehead in an exasperated gesture. “I bullied her for three years, and she never hurt me back. You really think she’s going to hurt you now when you didn’t even do anything to her? Ridiculous, utterly ridiculous.”
“Well, maybe she’s upset that she’s the only one who got injured?” said Mylène.
“Don’t say that out loud!” hissed Alya.
“Will somebody tell me what’s going on!” snapped Marinette. She accidentally tensed her stomach in the process, and a burst of flaming ants ran through the wound; she swallowed half of the final ‘n’. “Owwwww…”
Nobody spoke, not for a while. Not while she was still wincing with agony. But the glimpses she caught of their faces seemed almost… surprised. Not pure surprise, but all of their expressions seemed to have been dipped in surprise like a glaze on top of whatever else they were feeling.
Eventually, after drifting from Lila’s terrified surprise through Chloé’s surprise-topped exasperation and Ivan’s befuddledly surprised from Zoé’s surprise á la mode, Marinette’s eyes came to Rose’s tossed surprise with compassion dressing sprinkled over it. And something visibly clicked inside Rose’s eyes.
“... Are you really that hurt?” said Rose, with an aftertone to her voice that was almost haunting. “For real?”
Marinette didn’t even bother to parse out what the scale was and where ’that hurt’ would place on it. She sighed. “I’m as hurt as I look.”
Juleka glanced at the cast. “For real?” Rose said again.
“Y-yes?”
“I thought that couldn’t really happen to you guys,” said Kim. He had eyes about as wide as his gaping mouth.
“To us guys?” said Marinette, blinking. “You mean… girls?”
“No?”
“He means… universal recipients,” said Alix. She flipped her arms behind her head and clicked her tongue. “You know.”
There was something about the way she said the word. Like she was awestruck by it. A certain amount of reverence fell over everyone else too, to the point where they felt even quieter than before. Like they’d suddenly been transported into a church or something.
“You think… universal recipients,” here everyone gasped, “can’t get hurt?”
“No, of course you can get hurt,” said Alix..
“Yeah, we just thought it had to happen in a very specific way,” said Nino. “Something more than a building, y’know? Not that we think you’re weak for being hurt, or less cool, or anything!”
Marinette groaned. All this keeping up was starting to make her hypothalamus throb. “Guys… I’m getting a headache, on top of everything else. Can’t you just stop being weird for a moment?”
At that point, though, there was a wail from right beside Nino. Lila, who had spent her whole time looking more frightened than anybody else, suddenly charged forward and threw herself on her knees right next to the bed. “Oh, Marinette, I am so sorry for everything I did to you,” she quavered.
“… What?” said Marinette, all thoughts of pain momentarily forgotten.
“I’m so sorry I tried to turn everyone against you and tried to get you expelled and almost got you akumatised! I promise I’ll make it good to you, and I’ll bring you your homework every day if you want, but please don’t bite me!”
Marinette glanced around the room. Quite a few of the others seemed to be just as flabbergasted as her right now; other than Adrien, who seemed more or less unchanged from his anxious grin, and Chloé who seemed as unimpressed as before. “… Bite you?” she mumbled into the air, because in spite of everything else being Weird, that was the most Weird out of all of them.
“I will be your best friend, I promise, and I’ll never lie about you again, but please don’t bite me!”
“I don’t bite —”
“All universal recipients bite,” said Max while pinching his glasses. “That’s an important part of their mythos.”
“Mythos? It’s just a blood type!”
“Uh,” said Juleka, “Dracula?”
“Twilight?” said Sabrina.
“What We Do in the Shadows? True Blood? Nosferatu? Adventure Time? Buffy the Vampire Slayer?” said Alya — and slowly, everything fell into place. Marinette felt her mouth fall open and her eyes expanding to cover the entire universe.
“… You think I’m a vampire?” she said, in the weakest voice she had ever heard herself make, including yesterday.
Nobody replied. Everyone stared. Some stared with surprise, others with anticipation, but they most certainly stared and they did it something fierce.
Eventually, Alya took pity on what felt like the whole room. “Yyyyyyeeessss?” she said, pulling the word as long as it could go.
“Yes,” said Nino, with a little more confidence.
“Duh,” agreed Chloé. “Why else would you be hiding every time there’s an akuma? You couldn’t show your powers because you’d reveal your true nature. Also you sparkle in the sun.”
“Um, no, she doesn’t,” said Marc.
“I’ve never seen anyone else look so gorgeous in the sun.”
Marinette groaned again, and put her hand to the bridge of her nose and gripped it hard. The headache was announcing itself again. “Guys… I’m not a vampire. And Chloé, I’m not even going to try to make sense of… like, anything you’re saying right now.” Chloé folded her arms and scoffed. “Why would you think I’m a vampire?”
“Well, uh, you survived that,” said Alix with raised eyebrows. “It looked pretty bad.”
“Also your parents told us you’re a vampire,” added Nino, scratching the back of his neck. “Like, we talked to them this morning.”
“They did what?”
“They said you were a universal recipient,” said Kim.
“Yeah, and everybody likes y—” started Adrien, but Marinette wasn’t going to let Kim and Nino get away with what they just said.
“Hold up. Kim… Nino… do you really think ‘universal recipient’ means ‘vampire’?”
Kim looked like someone had just asked him for directions to the Moon. “Um, yeah?”
“Yeah, like,” said Nino, “that’s just what it means, right? Universal recipient, like, vampires just eat a lot of people’s blood. So they receive blood universally through their teeth.”
Despite the pain she knew it would bring, Marinette risked ripping out the intravenous tubes in order to slap her own forehead. “Nino… it means I can receive blood transfusions from anyone, no matter their blood type. I could have received blood from any of you,” there was a palpable though very brief shiver from everyone else, “through medical injections like anybody else. I don’t even have sharp canines! And I eat garlic! Alya, there’s a cross on our living room wall and I know you’ve seen it because my dad’s Catholic! I’m not a vampire!”
“But…”
“Universal recipient is a blood type! AB plus! Like universal donor, O minus!”
As one, everyone else in the room turned towards Nino. Even Lila, who was blushing so hard she looked like she might catch fire soon. But the first one to speak was Alya: “Nino, what the hell?”
Nino took a step back and raised both hands. “He-hey, I was for real, I was just misinformed…”
“Max!” snapped Marinette, turning towards him. “You’re supposed to be smart. Why didn’t you tell Nino he’s got cotton for brains?”
“Hey!” said Nino.
But Max just smirked, rolling on the balls of his feet for a moment. “I just wanted to see how far it’d go. Sorry, it was 87.3% funny and only 12.7% not funny. ”
“So Nino wasn’t misinformed, just stupid,” said Alix. She didn’t seem angry, though, so much as just amused. “Just like all of us. Except Max.” Max preened again.
“That’s the same thing!” Nino protested. “I didn’t mean to be!”
Marinette found herself absently placing her hand atop Kagami’s head again. Kagami was about the only thing that made sense right now, because she at least had explained all her nonsense hours ago, and that nonsense turned out to be a good thing. She tousled the hair gently, stroking the skin underneath. Everyone else was going to have to bring her chocolate croissants to make up.
Before she could inform them about this, though, the weird doctor from last night appeared in the doorway. And his jaw would have hit the floor if not for all the skin and ligaments keeping it up. His glasses did hit the floor, and he didn’t pick them up. “What — out! All of you! This patient needs rest, and she won’t get that with fifteen people crowding her room!”
“There’s seventeen of us, sir,” said Adrien. Marinette didn’t protest that there was actually eighteen of them, Kagami included.
“Even worse! Get out!”
“But it’s visitation hours!” protested Rose.
“Yes! For five people at a time, at most! Just come back another day, five at a time! Now get out of here!”
Several of the others took a deep breath and opened their mouths, but they all appeared to think better of it after looking the doctor in the eyes. They closed their mouths again, one by one, and looked down at the floor. A couple ‘yes, sir’s floated into the air like embarrassed farts, and then people started to slowly file out the door, Nino first. Not a single one of them held their head up, except Max, who grinned at Marinette in a ‘you-owed-me’ kind of way before traipsing to keep up with Kim.
And except Chloé, who seemed more neutral. But she sidled up to the bed as the others walked outside, and frowned at Marinette.
“For your information,” she said through gritted teeth, “I know you’re a vampire, and you’ve always been. You threw a charm spell on me and that’s why I’ve never been able to stop thinking about you.”
Marinette stared into those beseeching blue eyes and knew there was something lost at sea within them. “... Chloé… can we take this another time? I have a headache.”
“That’s what you always say in my dreams! Whenever I ask if I can kiss you! It’s ridiculous, utterly ridiculous.”
“Chloé, please…”
“Just drop the charm spell and things will be fine between us. I won’t even have to bully you if you stop.”
The thing lost at sea was increasingly Marinette, and she decided to step off the boat before she hit a maelstrom. “Okay… fine,” she mumbled. “I release you from the spell.”
“Thank you! By the way, Aurore’s in your coven, right?”
“Young lady!” snapped the doctor’s voice from the doorway. “I told you to leave!”
“Fine! Fine! I’ll figure out what Aurore’s doing myself,” said Chloé, rolling her eyes as she turned around. “Bye, baker girl. See you later.”
“... Bye,” sighed Marinette, letting herself fall back fully on the bed as Chloé’s ponytail appeared around the corner.
It took a while to realise that she was still rubbing Kagami’s head.
And that Kagami somehow hadn’t been told to leave.
And that she was still sleep—
“That was very silly,” murmured Kagami. Something about her voice instantly rewired Marinette’s brain and erased most of the tiredness from it.
“Y-yes!” she stammered, slowly lifting her hand away. “How long have you… been awake?”
“A while.” Kagami inched higher up against Marinette, without looking up, and put her hand around to Marinette’s other shoulder. “I heard everything that happened.”
Marinette felt like a sigh factory today and released her third batch into the now-mercifully-empty air. She loved her friends, but she might have loved them more if they didn’t make her feel like her brain had been sandblasted.
“I don’t know what got into them,” she said, wishing she could lean over to kiss Kagami on the top of the head, but she didn’t dare to upset the stomach wound again. “I didn’t realise people still believe vampires are real.”
“I feel the same way,” said Kagami. “I thought we’d been sufficiently fictionalised.”
“Yeah…”
A peculiar silence followed. Then: “Are you tired, Marinette?”
“... A bit, but I’m better now it’s just you.”
“You are being a little bit slow.” Kagami turned her head up, so her glinting magenta eyes met Marinette’s. They were beseeching like Chloé’s, but… less vast and incomprehensible and repressed.
“Slow?”
“Do you really think vampires are fictional?”
“Yes? Why are you asking?”
Kagami didn’t reply. Instead, she slowly parted her lips to display her teeth. The upper row had two very distinct, very sharp canines.
“... What?” said Marinette. The teeth were very pretty, but — oh. Oh. “Y-you’re a vampire?”
“Yes.”
“A-am I a vampire too?”
“No.” Kagami smiled, and the smile didn’t look creepy, and the teeth no longer showed except when she said, “If you were a vampire, you would know about it.”
“But didn’t you give me your blood?”
“Yes. But blood cells die quickly. You would need vampire stem cells to become a vampire.”
Marinette stared at Kagami — had her eyes always been this grimy crimson colour? So dark and alluring? — and wondered if she was dreaming. If this was some kind of weird nightmare that somehow featured all her friends being gonzo bananas. But if it was… then it must have stopped being a nightmare and just become a regular dream, because Kagami wasn’t bad. She was maybe a little bit cuckoo grapes or perhaps zooted apple, but she was pretty and she was close and she was…
… not warm after all, now that Marinette thought about it. There was no body heat. But she was close and that closeness was still noticeable, like a kind of metaphysical warmth beaming out from her soul.
“So…” said Marinette. “You would probably have been fine if I didn’t rescue you.”
“Correct.”
“I got hit by a falling building for no reason.”
“You did.”
Annoyingly, there was no specific twinge anywhere in Marinette’s body that she could point to and make an ironic comment in her internal narration. “At least I got your blood from it,” she said, before realising —
— “wait, do you want it back?”
“Hm?”
“Are you going to suck blood from me?”
“No. You are going to recover and get out of here and replenish your own natural blood with plenty of water and iron intake. I don’t want you to get hurt again.”
Marinette recalculated her question against Kagami’s specific brand of attention. “When I’ve recovered, are you going to suck blood from me?”
“No.” There was a pause. “Only if you let me. I’m a vampire, not a savage brute.”
Marinette smiled weakly. She didn’t know if she was awake, if she was maybe imagining this whole thing. She didn’t know if Kagami was a genuine vampire or if this was all some kind of candid camera thing. She felt vaguely like she’d hit her head, or like she was on a lot of painkillers. Which she probably was, but the feeling was getting stronger. “That’s nice,” she mumbled.
The silence that followed wasn’t exactly one of clarity, either. Her thoughts were starting to race with possibilities, but also with impossibilities. Vampires? What else — werewolves? That was a ridiculous idea.
“Um, Kagami, are you actually a vampire?”
“Yes.”
“How do I know for sure? I didn’t think vampires were… real,” she finished, a little lamely, as she realised she was just echoing what she said a minute ago.
Kagami looked up at her again. “I would never lie to you,” she said.
“Oh.”
Maybe that made sense. Maybe it didn’t.
“Can you… still bite me?”
“Why?”
“I… want to know how it feels,” said Marinette. She didn’t realise she’d be saying the words before she was saying them, and didn’t realise they were true until they were already out. She didn’t yet know if that was to do with vampires, or if it was just because it was Kagami. But she did know that she wasn’t afraid, even if Kagami truly was a vampire. She couldn’t possibly imagine that Kagami could be dangerous.
Kagami didn’t smile. She didn’t frown, either. But her bloody red eyes twinkled. “Maybe later. Once you have enough blood of your own.”
Marinette did smile. She hoped her arm would be warm enough for Kagami to notice, and that that was why she didn’t seem to want to let go of it.
“I’ll have blood soon. I promise. Then you can drink all you want,” she said. Then she wondered if she’d really said it. She must be getting delirious from the painkillers.
“Don’t tempt me,” said Kagami.
“Aren’t you already tempted?”
Silence. Then: “Shut up.”
And Marinette did.