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Alya wakes up with her heart in her throat and her hands tearing at her hair. She groans and rests her forehead on her knees.
If only he’d shut up .
She checks the time. It’s only three, because of course it’s unreasonable to ask for a full night’s sleep. She stays where she is for a little while longer, curled up in a ball and hugging a pillow, letting her heart rate level out and her head slow its spin. When she stops feeling like she’ll throw up if she moves, she slides out of bed and pads into the bathroom.
Alya avoids the floorboards that creak and is careful to close the door softly, but it doesn’t really matter. After a few months, her family got used to her getting up at strange hours and wandering around the house. Once she stopped screaming, it was easier for them to sleep through her nightmares.
She leaves the lights off and washes her face in the dark. She doesn’t want to have to adjust to bright lights right now. She twists her hair up into a messy bun. She’s up now. No point in going back.
Alya makes herself comfortable at her desk with her laptop. She scrolls through tumblr, drafting posts to post to the Ladyblog tumblr later. Usually she’d try to write or do something more productive, but she feels too raw and drained for anything more than mindless clicking right now.
She knows there are forums that she could go to, she’s the one that set them up. There are probably other people up reliving the worst day of their life right now. But she still hates talking about it.
It’s embarrassing. It’s embarrassing that the entire world knows that she got upset and lost control.
But it’s worse than that. It’s worse because she remembers . They all do. They don’t talk about it, not to people who haven’t been akumatized. It’s almost better to pretend that they don’t. Because they didn’t. For a little while. At first there’s nothing and then it comes back in flashes and nightmares and terrifying thoughts.
There’s nothing like having someone else take control of you. Having someone take your most negative thoughts and make them some of your only thoughts. Until you’re barely yourself. All your principals? Gone. Morals? Gone. Desires? Other than revenge, gone.
Hawk Moth makes nothing but revenge and the miraculous important.
Thinking about it makes Alya feel lightheaded.
She remembers pausing Chloé. She remembers restraining Ladybug and locking Chat Noir in the freezer. She remembers teleporting through phones, her molecules turning to pixels and back, the feeling of her consciousness and body being nothing but code.
Alya pushes away from her desk to get her phone. She sends Nino a quick text. If he’s not up now, he’ll see it in the morning, and that’s what matters.
Alya considers herself lucky. She didn’t actually do that much damage as Lady WiFi. She’s heard horror stories from the other akuma victims. She doesn’t know if she could handle anything more than what she did.
She had tried to broadcast Ladybug’s secret identity to the entire world.
She wonders if people have noticed that she doesn’t push the issue so much anymore.
Alya has too much time to think now. Far too much. Sure, weird hours of the morning like this can be great if she’s actually working on something — she’s far too tired to care about quality so she can pump out way more words than she does during daylight hours — but they aren’t good for wandering around as an empty shell. It gives her too much time to think and regret. And regret and regret and regret .
It’s given her dark circles and tired eyes. If she wants to be positive, she’s now a master at makeup. It’s one of the few things she can bring herself to do at hours like this. Google makeup tips and figure out how to make herself look more alive and less traumatized. And she’s not the only one.
She’s seen Chloé caking on concealer in the bathroom. Sabrina follows Chloé’s lead. Juleka and Rose check each other’s makeup in the morning to make sure it looks somewhat natural. Nathanael has sunk in even more on himself, letting his hair grow even longer to cover his face. Kim makes up excuses for his dark bags that get more and more dramatic by the day while Max just says he was up playing video games. Alya taught Nino how to use basic concealer once at two thirty in the morning and Ivan’s glare is a little darker. Mylené’s cheerful personality acts as a heavy cover up.
Of all their classmates, only Lila is the one who seems to have taken akumatization with grace. Snarky grace that makes Alya want to punch her in the nose and see horror in her eyes for once.
It’s awful to think, especially since Alya is trying to control her emotions a lot more now and not let them flare up, but Lila makes it impossible . Especially after long nights with hard dreams and Hawk Moth’s voice echoing in her head. To see Lila almost completely unaffected is jarring and painful. And she seems to know that she’s alone in feeling the way she does, because she rubs it in their faces with an irritating amount of glee.
Nearly the entire class has been akumatized. Alya has seen the way Chloé glares at Lila. Kim has rolled his eyes while Alix snapped pencils and a haunted look crossed Nino’s face. One of these days, Lila will get what’s coming to her.
Alya likes to think that if Marinette knew, she would shut Lila down in less than a minute. It’s not that Alya can’t, she can and she will , but there’s something nice about your friend taking someone down for you. But Marinette doesn’t know. Because Marinette is one of the two people who hasn’t been akumatized.
Marinette and Adrien.
And they just make it…awkward. Because if they weren’t there, whenever the teacher is out of the room, the class would be able to talk about their experiences. But they can’t . It feels like they’re all tip-toeing around Marinette and Adrien. Like they’re children who can’t know the adults’ secrets yet. It feels almost trivializing.
But all Alya would get from them is sympathy. And she doesn’t want sympathy. She’s had enough from people who don’t think she remembers. She doesn’t want to know what sympathy would be like from people who know she remembers what she does. Who know that some very small part of her enjoyed it and relished in the power. She hates that part of herself. Almost as much as she hates lying.
Her phone starts vibrating in her hands and she answers it without even bothering to see who’s calling. “Hello?”
“ Hey ,” Nino mumbles sleepily. “ You’re up? ”
Alya pulls her knees up against her chest, spinning slowly in her desk chair. “Yeah.”
“ WiFi? ”
“Mhm.” Alya has decided that forums are good when she wants to discuss and dissect herself. She’s decided that Nino is better for early morning panic talks. She’s decided that Nino is just better in general. “You?”
He sighs. “ Freaking bubbles .”
She rests her chin in her hand. “Anything new?”
“ Not really ‘new’ ,” Nino says with a sigh. “ Just…different. ”
Alya hums in agreement. She can understand that. Sometimes the situation isn’t different, but the voice in her head is or the perspective is or the burning cold sensation in the pit of her stomach when she wakes up with a jolt. Sometimes it’s just Hawk Moth’s voice, haunting her and terrorizing her. “Are you headed back to bed?” she asks, desperate to hear Nino’s voice again. She’s already losing herself to Hawk Moth.
“ Nah, not worth it. I’ve been listening to this one song over and over again and there’s something off about it and I can’t place it. I think I’m losing it. ”
“How long have you been listening to it?”
“ Maybe two hours .”
Alya smiles softly. “Turn it off, babe.”
“ But —”
“I’ll listen to it in a few hours when you can play it for me,” she promises, “but you’re not going to find what’s wrong with it right now. What do you always tell me to do when I get stuck on an article?”
Nino sighs. “ Take a break and step away. ”
“Exactly.” Alya slows the chair’s spin. “It’s what I do with the physics homework too.”
He snorts. “ You didn’t finish it, did you? ”
“Do I ever?” she asks. “I need Adrien’s help. I’m completely lost on springs.”
“ Simple harmonic motions ,” Nino says dutifully.
“Please stop,” she groans, covering her eyes with her free hand.
“ F = -kx ,” he continues. “ This is known as Hooke’s Law. The proportionality constant, k , is called the spring constant and tells us how strong the spring is. The greater the value of k , the stiffer and stronger the spring is. The minus sign in Hooke’s Law tells us, uh, that…the force is a restoring force. ” He pauses for a long moment. “ What’s a restoring force ?”
“Done reciting our textbook to me?” Alya teases.
“ Googling… ” Nino says slowly, “‘ what’s a restoring force’… ”
She closes her eyes and listens to him hum softly ask he scrolls through the search results. If she’s being honest, she’d be perfectly fine listening to him reading their physics book for the rest of the night. Nino’s voice is soothing and calming, and she’s not afraid to admit that she’s a little bit in love with it. At least, not at this time of night.
“ The force which is responsible to restore original size and shape is called restoring force. ”
Alya laughs. “I don’t know what I was expecting.”
“ Neither did I .” She hears his textbook shut. “ You’re right. We need Adrien .”
She glances to her window, looking out to the sleeping city. “Too bad it’s three forty-five in the morning,” she murmurs.
“ Someone in our class needs to have a normal sleep schedule ,” Nino says. “ And we both know that it can’t be Marinette. ”
“Do you ever want to tell them?” she whispers after a long pause. She can’t draw her eyes away from the streetlights she can see out her window, spots of light in the darkness of night. There’s probably something poetic in the quiet of the city, but Alya feels too drained for anything like that. Too many nights where she woke up with horrors screaming in her head.
“ You know I do .”
Ivan hadn’t told anyone when he started to remember. Probably because it’s in his nature to say little. But then akuma victims had continued to stay quiet on their memories.
If Ivan had said something, everything would be different. If anyone had spoken up, if she had spoken up, everything would be different.
Alya doesn’t know if that’d be better or worse.
“ You still with me, Al? ” Nino asks when she’s been quiet for a few minutes longer than he’s used to. She’s fallen asleep on these late night calls and so has he. They tried video chatting once, but seeing someone else’s face made everything too real and raw. Most nights, all they can handle is each other’s voices.
Alya breathes slowly before she says anything else. “Yeah. Just…thinking, I guess.”
“ Anything you want to say out loud? ”
She’s had far too many thoughts that are too scary to voice. Lots that have made her shrink back and shudder. “I don’t know,” she says. “They’re just… I don’t know, they’re there. Being…weird.”
“ I feel that ,” Nino says. “ Sometimes I think stuff and I’m like whoa , slow down there brain. Chill out a little. We don’t want to be thinking that. ”
Alya smiles and rests her chin on her knees. “I thought Chloé was going to punch Lila during the last akuma attack,” she admits.
“ Is it bad that I would pay to see that? ” Nino asks. Alya snorts. “ It’s not like I hate Lila, I mean she seems pretty cool and all, but she was just getting on my nerves with this whole thing. I don’t know if she brought up getting akumatized because she doesn’t realize how screwed up this was for the rest of us or because she likes making us uncomfortable. ”
“Kind of tone deaf,” Alya murmurs. “She was nice enough during that group project, but it was really awkward.”
“ Oh right, ” Nino remembers. “ You, her, and Adrien .”
“Mhm. It was…weird.”
“ If you want weird, try me bonding with Chloé during that project. That was weird. ”
“Oh?” Alya asks in surprise. This is the first she’s heard of this.
“ Yeah she started ranting about something or another and I encouraged her because I wanted to procrastinate— ”
“Of course.”
“ Shut up, you haven’t finished your physics homework. ”
“Okay true. Continue.”
“ Anyway I was encouraging her rant and then she got on the topic of Marinette and then we started arguing because I couldn’t have that and then… I don’t know, we started talking about what we remember. And then we just kept talking. I mean the project didn’t get done at all but… Yeah it was weird. We bonded. ”
“I would’ve thought it was over Adrien,” Alya admits.
Nino sighs. “ I mean, Adrien totally came up. Several times. But like, in relation to the akuma stuff. ‘Cause Chloé was saying…that it was weird not telling him everything. And I kind of relate. ”
Alya picks at the hem of her shirt. “I know what you mean,” she mutters. She constantly finds herself stopping herself from telling Marinette. Because Marinette— Marinette tells her everything and Alya isn’t able to return the favor and it’s awful.
“ I hope they don’t get akumatized ,” Nino says suddenly. “ As rad as it would be to be able to talk to them about stuff like this, I don’t want this to happen to them. It sucks. It’s just… It’s awful and I don’t want either of them to have to go through it. ”
There’s one traitorous part of Alya that has thought about Marinette and Adrien getting akumatized before and was glad because that was two less people she had to keep this from, two people she cares about very much. And she hates that part of herself. She’s pushed it far back into the dark corner of her mind with all of her memories. Because she wouldn’t wish this on anyone . “I don’t want them to either,” she whispers. “I’d keep this from them for the rest of time if it meant they could sleep through the night.”
“ Ever consider taking sleeping pills ?” Nino asks. “ I know Chloé tried that .”
Alya shudders. “It made the nightmares worse.” More vivid, harder to break out of.
“ Okay, let’s not do that again .”
She hears him yawn and suddenly feels incredibly guilty for keeping him up again . “Babe, if you want to go to bed—”
“ I’m stopping you right there, ” Nino interrupts. “ I’m fine. Just out of it. ”
She makes a distressed noise and puts a foot down on the ground to spin her chair in a fast circle.
“ I’m kind of tired, but aren’t we all? ”
“You should sleep.” She spins herself again and again, faster and faster until she knows she’ll fall over when she stands up. If she stands up.
“ Hey, Al ,” Nino says after a few more rotations, “ is it cool if I put on some music? I promise I’ll try to sleep if you do too. ”
Her foot hits the floor to stop the spin.
“Promise?” Alya asks, voice tight.
“ Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle that I’d probably have to steal from Mari in my eye .”
Alya forces a laugh and wobbles as she stands. She holds onto the edge of her desk as the room tips and spins violently. “I’ll try to sleep,” she promises. She plugs her phone into her charger and puts it on speaker.
“ Night then ,” Nino says. Soft, gentle music from a playlist Alya almost knows by heart floats through her phone.
“Goodnight,” she whispers back. She curls up on her bed and focuses on the music, letting it carry her away. It fights off Hawk Moth as she dreams, the carefully chosen notes drowning out his wicked grin and charming voice.
It’s only for a few hours, but Alya sleeps.