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“I wish for Marinette Dupain-Cheng to take my Cataclysm wound.”
She didn’t know if he had broken her ribs. He had definitely broken her leg. Stupid. Stupid, stupid.
“I wish for Marinette Dupain-Cheng to take the injuries from Nathalie Sancoeur’s use of the broken Peacock Miraculous.”
Above her, above everything, towered Gimmi. A compound god built from Tikki and Plagg, who didn’t even look at her because — judging by the way Gimmi behaved, Gimmi was a completely separate being. Not a single glance cast aside at her battered, bloodied shape as it lay smashed against Émilie Agreste’s coffin. Not a single protest against Gabriel as he flung out his commands. Not an ounce of recognition for what was, and would no longer be.
“I wish for Marinette Dupain-Cheng to also take my wife’s injuries from the Peacock Miraculous.”
It was her own fault. That wasn’t a solace. When she saw him curled up on the floor, writhing in pain from his wound, fully detransformed — of course she couldn’t keep hitting him. He was broken, defeated, she had won, but she was stupid. And when she offered him mercy, reached out her hand to help him up, well…
“I also wish for Marinette Dupain-Cheng to take Tomoe Tsurugi’s blindness.”
At least he’d only hit her five times after stealing her Miraculous. They were big hits, painful hits, but he could have kept going. In fact she’d expected him to, when she saw the rancorous lightning in his eyes. She’d expected him to use Cataclysm, but… in a way, he was doing that now, wasn’t he?
“Furthermore —”
“Hold on there. You’re stacking enough damage on her to kill her three times over and then some. You’re fine with that?”
“You must do as I ask.”
“Fair enough. It’s her funeral, not mine.”
Still no glances in her direction. Gimmi sounded almost bored, like the wish was a service rendered and not an absolute command. Although it would almost have hurt more if Gimmi did look at her, because then it might have confirmed that Gimmi still had a trace of Tikki or Plagg inside.
“I wish for Émilie Agreste’s family fortune to become mine, registered to my family’s name and not that of the Graham de Vanilys.”
The wish needed to be balanced. For every gain, a loss. His wish must have been considered for a while, because he had set up a balance for everything he asked for. The injuries, to her, because he hated her. The money, from Émilie, because it had to come from somewhere. He was smart enough to not wish for anybody else’s money; he just wanted to change the ink on the paperwork that was already his.
“That’s quite the wish you’ve made.”
“I’m not done yet.”
Did she hate him? No. She didn’t think so. In a way, she pitied him. She pitied Paris more than she pitied him, she pitied Adrien and Alya and Kagami and all her friends more than him, she pitied her parents more than him, but she did also pity him. If he didn’t need pity, he wouldn’t be this desperate. If he didn’t need pity, he wouldn’t be this hateful.
“I wish for Émilie Agreste to take Marinette Dupain-Cheng’s fertility, so she can bear children normally.”
“Well, I suppose the girl’s too young to use that anyway, so she won’t mind losing it.”
“You must do as I ask.”
“Did I say I wouldn’t?”
At least he was only targeting her. She bore the brunt of his rage, and that hopefully meant it wouldn’t strike anyone else. Even if she failed to protect Paris, she would have stood in the way of the blast.
“I also wish for Amélie Fathom to take Marinette Dupain-Cheng’s fertility, so that —”
“Stop. You can’t do that.”
“You must do as I ask!”
“Marinette only has one womb to give.”
“She can become dead three times!”
“You didn’t wish for her to die, though. Dying’s just a consequence. This is different.”
“Fine. Then I wish for Sabine Cheng to become infertile in Amélie Fathom’s place.”
“That works.”
She jolted awake. Started forwards. No — no — “No —”
“I wish for Sabine Cheng and Tom Dupain to be erased from existence,” Gabriel continued, like it wasn’t the most horrible thing anyone had ever said, like he wasn’t wishing for literal evil, like —
Gimmi shrugged at him. “Is that a wish or a cost?”
“I wish for their sparks of life to be imbued into Émilie Agreste and Amélie Fathom in the form of embryos.”
“Cost, then. It’ll be done.”
Marinette pushed herself forward with a grunt of pain and effort, landing on her elbows and trying to pull herself along the gritty metal floor. Every movement hurt, every shift of her torso and every tug of her leg was torture, but she didn’t have it in her to care about that. Her eyes were welling with tears. “No! No, you can’t kill them, you can’t do it —”
“Anything else you wanna wish for?” Gimmi asked, like this was a routine, like this wasn’t the worst thing that had ever happened.
And it was Gabriel who turned to look at her. It was a look that he might have given to an ant before stomping on it. “No,” he said. “Do it. Now.”
“No!” —
Then all the pain in the world hit her at once. She collapsed on the floor and withered into nothingness, but a nothingness that hurt so unimaginably. Every part of her body was frozen into that single moment of torture, and though she must have died immediately — it didn’t feel that way.
Yet even after she died, she could still feel the tears rolling down her cheeks.
♢
She hadn’t really believed in an afterlife before. A part of her had hoped there was a Heaven, a place where she might one day go to meet all her loved ones without fear, but it was just that: hope. Not trust, not faith.
She didn’t get an afterlife, either. She instead got a limbo. When she woke up in Gabriel Agreste’s garden, she knew instinctively that she was bound to the city: she could sense its people, the ebb and flow of their lifeblood. She knew that three thousand eight hundred and thirty-four Parisians would die in the next hour, and she knew where and for what reason. She was pulled to them as though they were attached to her with rubber bands, and she could feel her body — if that was indeed what it was at that point, the physical frame that had been built around her twisted spirit — split into three thousand, eight hundred and thirty-four copies, each flying towards the near site of a death.
For the next hour she cried, for the thousands of lives that also suffered on the worst day of her life. But as she lamented, she could also feel the mood of the city change. Not through its constituent citizens, not through any perceptible singular thoughts — but through the greater communal spirit of the city that had once said no to royals, had finally thrown off the shackles of Nazi occupation.
Now, that spirit was no longer triumphant or joyous, defiant in the face of its oppressor. It was broken with sorrow, with shock.
She hadn’t yet learned what happened after Gabriel’s wish. She only saw the faces of the people she was wailing over, and saw the simmering in their faces and the fear in their eyes. They died with their last memory being their shattered hopes for someone they thought was their saviour.
Though she didn't watch the news, she picked up all the pieces swiftly: Gabriel had presented her as both Ladybug and Monarch, as both the true villain and the fake hero she had constructed. In one strike he turned her from the city's guiding light into its worst enemy. And when her tears became a symbol of terror for the dying, she could hardly claim she was heroic.
Even so, she couldn’t stop weeping at the deathbeds of Paris. It was a compulsion stronger than anything she had known in life. She had become — well, whatever name she gave herself didn't matter, because ultimately what she wanted hadn’t mattered. But she knew the name others gave her would be ‘banshee’: the woman who cries for the dead.
It was an insufficient name, however. Because Gabriel’s lie had also made her something far worse. She was a revenant, not by nature, but by the effect she had on the people for whom her tears poured. They held the same terror for her that they would hold for a ghost come to haunt them. And yet, she was drawn to every death by a force far more powerful than herself.
Paris was now a city without hope. And she cried in Gabriel’s garden, Adrien’s garden, Émilie's garden, at the site where Gabriel murdered that hope — she cried for her parents, for her friends, for everyone who was now bereft of it. And she brushed her hair rough and split to try and untangle her regrets and emotions and remnants of self, to cast them away for good so she could stop feeling the incessant torment of her new existence.
If only she could stop feeling… maybe she wouldn't break apart every time she saw the face of someone she used to know, twist into hateful rage. Maybe she could be okay with the fear and disappointment that emanated from every dying breath. Maybe her failure, her stupidity, her inability to be a large enough target to catch all of Gabriel’s thrown spears would stop bothering her if she could only divorce herself from her feelings.
Did she hate him? No, she was certain she didn't. The pain he inflicted on her was relatively brief, and the situation she had ended up in was her own fault. He was no longer a villain to the city, he was just a normal and cruel man, obsessed with controlling his family and holding on to his position of privilege. Like that, he was a dime a dozen; Paris was filled with men like him, and women too. She couldn’t hate him without hating so many more people.
There was only one thing she hated: that Kagami had seen her, that night in the garden. Because the sight of those excited eyes… the opening mouth… the only face so far that hadn’t loathed her… she knew then that someone out there still believed her.
And it became impossible to forget her emotions.
♢♢
Her mind grew. Rather than the single sensory input of a single body to a single brain, she was a borderless spirit whose only limit was that she didn’t multiply more than she needed to reach every death. Being Multimouse so briefly had done nothing to prepare her for the pressure of impressions of being thousands of crying, distasteful bodies, always seeing the dead as they passed her by, ushering them with the threat of a violence that was never hers and that she could never inflict. Then again, she didn’t need preparation to be thousands, nor to cry, nor to be distasteful. In becoming anew, she had gained the capacity to perceive and understand her new existence. She was not omniscient, except where death was concerned, but everything she did see was burnt into her memory. A rising, towering image of ghastly masks that wanted nothing to do with her.
But she loved them. She loved the city. She loved, because it was the only thing she could conceive of doing. It was not the people’s fault that they were misled, it was Gabriel’s fault for misleading them. They were only following what they had been told, because there was no other party who could have contradicted them, no witnesses to Gabriel’s actions. Even if there were voices who could speak up for her, none had the authority that could incite doubt against him.
She sensed the city’s emotions, too, in time. That was something she could never have been ready for, so her multitudinous mind had eased her into it, let her experience the city’s heart in increments. By the time she knew what the heavy cloud in the back of her skull was, that it was the pile of brokenness that lay curled-up like a beaten child inside that heart, she was ready to deal with it. She had been the city’s hero, until that image crumbled in a single day. A simple story of good versus evil was one that gave hope, because it said that good could prevail. But a story where she had been both, where she had deceived the city for her own selfish ends — there was no room for heroes there.
Even Gabriel, the one who had defeated her, was far more of a custodian than a symbol to rally around. Paris had lost its hope, because it turned out that there was nothing to have hope against in the first place. There was only pain and betrayal, and a statue to Gabriel for his service, a statue that no one could hope to. The city’s heart was a stone that she carried on her back.
Did she hate him? No, no, she still didn’t think so. He had broken the city’s spirit with a lie, but it was better than when he pelted it with destruction. Now, people could build new lives and new memories, find new hopes and move on to the same old tomorrow. It wasn’t what she wanted, but she wanted even less to disturb this fragile calm. His injustices were not so vile that they required the present peace to be toppled, except…
… he erased her parents. She was all that remained of them, and she was a blight on the city she still adored.
Her mind was a vast and tumultuous bowl. It was too big to be wrapped up with simple, base concerns like hate or vengeance. But just like her emotions, she could not get rid of the question whether she hated him or not.
In her death, he had bound others up in his falsehoods: Adrien, Émilie, Nathalie, Félix, Amélie, Placide, Alya, Tikki, Plagg, all the kwamis and all the guardians, Tomoe.
Kagami, too. Kagami was also bound up in it. And unlike all the others, Marinette had seen Kagami’s face and known that it was hopeful, not upset. It was upset, but not from fear or anger. It was fear and anger, but not directed at her. It was anxious, anticipatory, a stab against the stony heart that threatened to break it. And while it was hard to imagine that Alya would have believed a single word of Gabriel’s story, while she couldn’t imagine Émilie waking up again without knowing what he had done to get her back, she had yet to see any of their faces. None of them had died, and thank whatever torturous god existed in the void of coldest space for that, but until she saw them she couldn’t be certain.
Even so, the certainty she had seen in Kagami was almost enough to shatter every part of her. She tried over and over again to refuse her memories, her emotionality, her life; yet every time she tried, Kagami’s face popped back, like a giant tentacle slamming against the window of a submarine. There was no escaping it, and thus there was no escaping the human she used to be. Kagami wasn’t just a grasping tentacle; she was also other underwater things, like an anchor, a wreck, a whale fall. And Marinette didn’t know whether she herself was the ocean Kagami was drowning in, or the seabed layering silt over her corpse, or the pale and distant sun that Kagami stretched her hands out towards as she sank deeper into her oblivion.
But she did know that within the city’s heart, there lingered a spark of that which should not be.
♢♢♢
When she became aware that Kagami was hunting for her, it filled her with unspeakable dread. It was one thing to be remembered as something other than a monster: it was another to know that those who remembered, risked throwing themselves away over it. It was another that if the truth came out, it would toss Paris’s heart right back into aggravated turmoil, rather than the stony calm it had been for the past few months. It was another that the turmoil would be for her sake, when her situation was all she deserved for her stupidity.
It was dangerous. It was flattering, but it was dangerous, and it was something that should not be. If there was a boat, it should not be rocked; if there was a song, it should not be sung. The safest thing would be to leave things as they had landed, because while Gabriel’s wish had caused suffering, it had also healed four people and created two more. It had stabilised the unrest he had created. If there was a pot, it should not be stirred; if there was a sun, it should be dimmed. What was, should remain.
Perhaps that wasn’t the only unspeakable thing that filled her, however. Because something even more wordless stirred in her chest. If all she wanted was for Kagami to be quiet, she should have done anything else. If she wanted the final buzz of the dying bee to fade away, she should have allowed it to.
But she didn’t. Instead, she laid a plan.
♢♢♢♢
As a plan, it was basic. Lure Kagami out with a wail that wasn’t for anybody, close enough that she’d hear it from her bedroom. Push her by saying that if she didn’t forget everything about Marinette Dupain-Cheng and move on with her life, she would die. And then… wave goodbye to her retreating back, to be separated until her dying day.
Standing atop the balcony that was once hers, between the flowers that had withered along with her memory and the rust that had bloomed in their place, Marinette already knew her motivation was wrong. As she started to cry and scream, she knew the unspeakable was lurking within her — but only insofar as she knew there was a thing she did not know the name for. But the plan was made, so it must be seen through.
How simple that plan was to lay.
Kagami appeared like a whirlwind. Her limbs seemed to carry her with a force that could have propelled someone much larger than her off balance; her voice was breathless and lashing. Without turning around, Marinette already knew that her plan had gone wrong, because she was already losing control of her thoughts without uttering a single word.
It was strange, how little she knew about herself. The endless tears that ran from her eyes seemed magical, but she didn’t know for certain. The dress she always wore had never been visible through the churning tears, and she didn’t know what it looked like — or if it was even there, because maybe the tears were all of the dress. She had a mind that spanned thousands of bodies, and yet she had been unable to tell if any of those bodies had a stomach, or a brain, or a heart of their own.
In a sense… the city's heart was hers. It was also dispassionate. A sharp-edged lumpy rock jabbed into her spine, and she felt it closer than any single Parisian ever had. She didn’t know if that meant she had a heart or not. She only knew that looking at Kagami made it feel like it trembled.
It was the unadulterated passion in Kagami. The deep energy that crackled in her eyes and sent out sparks alongside her words. The strongest outbursts of emotion she had felt for the past twelve months were those of dying people who rejected her laments, that of the stone heart's disapproval etching scars into her flesh. But Kagami on her own was stronger than all of that, speaking with horror and complaint — but also with desire and anger and an abiding demand. She was seeking to be heard above all else, and that was true for both ways of reading that phrase.
So the rising wall of Kagami’s feeling soon became impossible to scale. It was the first time someone had cried for her, the first time that a wail had been given back to her. How could she push Kagami away, when Kagami was so emphatic in her request? How could she convince Kagami to go, when Kagami looked like she might be too upset to convince of any such thing?
The answer was easy, of course. As easy as laying the plan. She needed to threaten Kagami for her sake, because the alternative was ruin.
And yet, it was the unadulterated passion. The confession of love. She could protest them, but not convince herself they were bad or wrong. The nameless and unspeakable was rising as though inflated by Kagami’s heavy exhalations.
She tried. She managed to force out her protestation despite the whirling in her head. “Who am I crying for, this very moment?”
Kagami was smart, because she was always smart. “… It's me.”
“Go back… go home. Leave me to my fate. You have to forget about me, like we were never friends. Let me be the girl who ruined Paris and broke everyone's spirits, or… or perish.”
“Then kill me.”
It was spoken so clearly. Like the screeching of car tyres as they braked for a pedestrian. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go: Kagami wasn’t about to die. She hadn’t been about to die. Every death to come was painted inside each of Marinette’s ten thousand eyelids and there had been no Kagami there an hour ago, ten minutes ago, thirty seconds ago. But now the death was there, splashed large like a careless Pollock's yellow.
This… wasn't how it was supposed to go.
This wasn't how anything was supposed to have gone.
A crack formed deep within Marinette’s soul. Nothing was how it was supposed to be. Kagami wasn’t supposed to be in bondage. The kwamis were supposed to be free, to be helping the city alongside their trusted holders. The city was supposed to have a beating, roaring heart and its citizens were meant to walk without fear.
She wasn’t supposed to be a banshee. She wasn’t supposed to be dead. Her nature wasn’t expressed in the torment of those who lay dying. This was forced on her by a man who now enjoyed every privilege of a life he was supposed to have lost. His last moments should have ran out in that pit of his own digging, in the injuries he inflicted on himself through his own idiocy, she was angry.
It was a slow realisation. But it was slow because it had been coming on for a long time. She was angrier than she had ever been happy, as angry as she had spent the past year being sad. Voluminously it filled her, a wrath that should have rent the skies above and sent down a storm of lightning, with a downpour to rival Syren's flood. Paris was hers. It was her city and its people were her people and their deaths were hers and their suffering, oh, was it ever hers. Paris had languished without hope for a year, believing in a betrayal that never took place. And the man who had caused that suffering and broken that hope, he walked free among her people. How dare he?
He had broken her streets and her buildings and slaughtered her siblings and parents. He had twisted her people’s arms and necks while he had told them he was their saviour. He lived in a house that was hers, not by law but by her being. He breathed her air. He lived her freedom. He ate her friends piece by piece with teeth that should have rotted from his skull long ago. And Kagami…
“You have warned me about my death. Now see it through. I don’t deserve to live in this world without you, and if you have any love left in your heart you will free me from this life.”
The heart.
What heart?
The city’s heart.
A stone heart.
And as Ladybug had always known, a stone heart needed to be freed.
She didn’t hate Gabriel. She was sure of that now. She couldn’t hate him because her utter fury against him burnt away all other emotion. He had stolen her Paris — he had stolen her Kagami.
It wasn’t kindness. It was a further cruelty, to remove Kagami from all chances to improve her life, to lock her into the chains of death. It was wrath and it was vengeance. And it was hers.
Gabriel would lose one of his prizes. It would be a small dent in his victory. But nonetheless… it would be a dent.
She charged forward on heavy feet and shouldered Kagami in the stomach, pushing up, levering her over the fence. It was cruel and it was vile, even if Kagami wanted it. But it was necessary, and if Kagami’s passion could rival Marinette’s grief at the moment of their deaths, perhaps they would reunite in the aftermath.
As she wailed her lament for Kagami, for the city, for herself — as Kagami crumpled wetly against the street below — as she saw the glint of lightning in the distance — she felt the heart in her chest again. And it thumped.
♡